Dear Friends,

Shortly after ten o’clock this morning, September 4, 2006, my dear friend and beloved role model Astrid Varnay, unarguably the greatest American soprano ever to portray leading roles in Wagnerian opera and so many other roles as well, departed this earth, or, to quote Goethe’s daughter-in-law, writing of the great poet’s passing, she “ceased being mortal”. Of course, her immortality has been an extablished fact for many years now. She leaves no immediate survivors, but her friends and admirers are legion, and hundreds if not thousands will mourn her loss.

For the record, Ibolyka Astrid Maria Varnay was born on April 25, 1918, in Stockholm, Sweden, the daughter of coloratura soprano Mária Jávor and tenor-producer Alesander Várnay, two Hungarian operatic artists who were performing there at the time. They later moved to Kristiana, Norway (today’s Oslo), where Alexander Várnay co-founded that city’s Opéra Comique featuring his wife in leading soprano roles. One evening, when her mother was singing Oscar in Un ballo in maschera, she discovered the drawer in her dressing room was a little high to harbor the baby safely and so asked if the lady singing Amelia in that performance would mind having little Astrid in her dressing table drawer – it was Astrid Varnay’s first encounter with Kirsten Flagstad, one of many artists her father discovered or whose career he fostered.

Following the demise of the Comique, the family moved on to South America for a couple of seasons including the first Argentine performance of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte directed by Alexander Várnay with his wife as Queen of the Night. They then stopped off in New York on their way back to Europe to see if they could make some contacts there. It was there that Alexander Várnay was taken ill and died at the early age of 35. Unwilling to beg the price of the return journey from anyone, Mária Jávor decided to stick it out in the States, and so Astrid completed her high school education in Jersey City, following which she took a job as a secretary and studied voice with her mother. After several lessons and intensivde work on the Italian repertoire, Mme. Jávor determined that Astrid was destined for the dramatic soprano repertory, and so she asked her friend Kirsten Flagstad, who had recently arrived to begin her first contract at the Metropolitan Opera to advise her on a good teacher for the German roles. Flagstad recommended Hermann Weigert, who helped her perfect her Wagnerian characterizations. In the course of time, the professional contact became a personal contact, and Astrid became Mrs. Weigert.

In a career that involved the young artist crossing many a Rubicon, none was quite so daunting as her very first performance. Never having appeared on any stage anywhere, she was sent out on stage as the fifth cover after the other four ladies had proven unavailable for a variety of reasons, to sing Sieglinde in a Saturday matinée performance of Die Walküre beside such luminaries as Lauritz Melchior, Helen Traubel, Friedrich Schorr and Alexander Kipnis. Six days later, she crossed the next Rubicon when she took over from an indisposed Helen Traubel as Brünnhilde in the same production. A recording of her broadcast début performance confirms the professionalism of a performance that launched a career marked in professional acumen and artistic excellence on the highest level. It was a career that would bring her from New York to stages throughout the United States and Europe, including the post-war Bayreuth Festival, which she helped inaugurated when it was revived in 1951. It was her definitive delineations of the top Wagnerian heroines that provoked the composer’s grandson, Wieland Wagner, to defend his abstract, symbolic productions with the question:”Why do I need a tree on stage when I have Astrid Varnay?”

In a career that spanned well over five decades and ranged from leading soprano roles in German, Italian and – yes – American opera, to brilliant interpretations of a variety of character roles to which she lent a special brilliance, she joined forces with many of her contemporaries to redefine operatic interpretation as an all-encompassing art, propelled, as she often put it, by the musical score, but infused with the honesty of the dramatic action and a total identification with the vast array of parts she played.

During the final years of her career, she selected me to collaborate with her on her memoirs, 55 Years in Five Acts – My Life in Opera, supervising every word we wrote with the same love for detail and accuracy she brought to her operatic portrayals. It was a labor of love that occupied our attentions for well over five years, and we were proud when the prestigious magazine OPERNWELT named it “Book of the Year”. My own most striking memory of that collaboration comes from a phrase that became a mantra as we moved ahead in our collaboration: “Look it up, Donald” preferring ascertainable fact over educated guessing that might ultimately be justifiably subject to challenge.

She did not, to quote Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, “go gentle into that good night”, but as died as she lived, with an incredible zeal. At the end, when infection finally claimed her after a long, hard-fought illness, her body was devastated, her mind ravaged, but her spirit unsullied. In our last get-together, I asked her if she watched much television – she had once been an avid viewer – and she replied with candor: “I don’t like the world.” If anyone ever deserved a better one than this veil of tears, it is she. All of us who remain behind to mourn her loss have been incalculably enriched by her presence among us, and many happy memories provoke a smile to allay the tears.

She once did a radio interview for Bavarian Radio for which she asked me to be present. As I took my seat in the corner, the interviewer, a dear friend of both of us, Alexander von Schlippe, couldn’t help but wondering why she wanted me around, and she replied with that twinkle in the violet eyes that gave her her name – Ibolyka is the diminutive form of the Hungarian word for “violet” – “It does me so much good to see him in a situation where he can’t say anything.” With what I hope is her permission, I will continue to sing her praises as long as I am vouchsafed the opportunity to stick around down here.