Singers Remembered is Operapost’s series devoted to the most representative clips of artists whose memory is alive for today’s operaphiles. Kathleen Ferrier’s death from cancer truncated the career of one of the most beloved and admired singers of the 20th century. International fame came to this British contralto in 1946 when she participated in the premiere performances of Benjamin Britten’s opera The Rape of Lucretia. A favorite of star conductors Bruno Walter and John Barbirolli, her concert tours brought her to America and Europe beginning in 1948. Her sole roles in opera were Britten’s L ..read more

The Metropolitan has mounted four productions of La Forza del destino and has presented the opera more than two hundred times, about as often as Fledermaus and Manon Lescaut. Late in entering the company’s repertoire, its 1918 premiere was notable for its stellar cast of Enrico Caruso, Giuseppe De Luca, José Mardones, and the debut, on any opera stage, of Rosa Ponselle. Rudolf Bing counted Forza among the notable Verdi revivals of his regime; opening night 1953 had Zinka Milanov, Richard Tucker, Leonard Warren, and Cesare Siepi. The remarkable décor designed by Eugene Berman was seen in fourte ..read more

The international career of Toronto-born Lois Marshall (1924-1997) began in the early 1950s, subsequent to frequent radio and television appearances in Canada. Viewers of the CBC saw Marshall in the demanding roles of Donna Anna (Don Giovanni) and Leonora (Fideliio). Winner of the prestigious Naumberg Award, she was soon contracted as leading soprano by Arturo Toscanini for a radio concert of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, and by Sir Thomas Beecham for recordings of Mozart’s Die Entführing aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio) and Handel’s Solomon. The beauty of her timbre, her excelle ..read more

 The vast repertoire of Renata Scotto encompassed 19th century vocal music, from the Classical Cherubini to the Grand Opera of Meyerbeer, through the great bel canto composers, Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti. Although she often played Verdi’s Violetta, Gilda, Lady Macbeth, Luisa Miller, and Desdemona, Scotto was perhaps most renowned for her Puccini roles. On the concert or the operatic stage, and most often on both, she left her mark on nearly all his works, from Le Villi (Anna) to Turandot (Liù). From the mid-1960s through the early 1980s Scotto was one of most widely recorded operatic ..read more

With Cavalleria rusticana (1890), his first opera and the liminal title of Italian verismo, Pietro Mascagni (1863-1945) was assured a place of privilege in operatic history. In a single act, the composer distilled the unbridled passion—and jealousy—of a woman betrayed. Revenge followed, and with it the offstage duel fatal to her guilty lover. So goes life in a Sicilian village in the late 19th century as depicted in the libretto based on the Giovanni Verga novella (1883). That more than one reviewer credited the success of the piece to its high drama rankled the composer. In response, Mascagni ..read more

Kurt Moll (1938-2017) was the preeminent German bass in the world’s most prestigious opera houses from the 1970s to the 1990s. A favorite of conductors, among them Herbert von Karajan, Leonard Bernstein, Georg Solti, and Carlos Kleiber, Moll was sought, again and again, for Gurnemanz (Parsifal), Sarastro (Die Zauberflöte), Rocco (Fidelio), the Commendatore (Don Giovanni)—for the stage, of course, as well as for recordings and DVDs of Strauss, Wagner, and Mozart produced in this period. His is a magisterial voice, deep, wide-ranging, and exceptionally sweet. The clip, “La vendetta (Vengeance ..read more

Russian bass Yevgeny Nesterenko (1938-2021) was one of the phenomenal singers the U.S. discovered in 1975 during the first New York visit of the Bolshoi Opera. His Boris Godunov was a highlight of a several-week visit that introduced a generation of Soviet stars, among them Elena Obraztsova, Yuri Mazurok, and Vladimir Atlantov, many of whom went on to international careers. Soon after winning a first-place prize in the 1970 Tchaikovsky competition, Nesterenko joined the Bolshoi as its leading bass. The Moscow company remained his home for three decades. At the Vienna State Opera and at La Scal ..read more

When Helen Traubel (1899-1972) debuted at the Met in 1937, the company had the extraordinary luxury of alternating the stellar Brünnhildes of Kirsten Flagstad and Marjorie Lawrence. Traubel’s operatic stage debut, at nearly forty years of age, was in the Met premiere of a short-lived English-language opera by Walter Damrosch, The Man Without a Country; two years went by before she was assigned a Wagner lead, Sieglinde in Die Walküre. And it was not until 1941, when Flagstad returned to her native Norway for the duration of the war and Lawrence was felled by polio that Traubel became the compan ..read more

Charles Affron, one of the bloggers of OperaPost, has recently published Just Off Grand. This opera-themed novel is available on Amazon and best searched under the name of the author. Modeled on Honoré de Balzac's Old Goriot (Le Père Goriot), Just Off Grand takes place in and around New York City between the final days of World War II and the end of 1945. Our hero is an ambitious young cantor aspiring to a career in opera. Tracking his progress from a “Borscht Belt” hotel to a dramatic Yom Kippur Eve service in a prosperous West Side synagogue, the novel also stages a riotous dress rehearsal a ..read more

 Recovering the Forgotten Singer is OperaPost’s series devoted to those artists once much admired and now rarely recalled. Some were stars in their time; others left their mark all too fleetingly. Their recorded legacy calls on us to remember them here. Hilde Gueden (1917-1988), Viennese born, was a charter member of the fabled post-War Vienna State Opera Mozart ensemble. The soprano went on to a versatile career on international stages and recording studios. She made her mark in Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’amore and Don Pasquale, in Verdi’s Rigoletto, Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier and Arabella ..read more