Word: helene
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...fourth night-after a warmup of Delibes, Mozart and Puccini -will the curtains part on the serious business of a Wagnerian music drama. That night in Siegfried, the fans will get the season's first eye-&-earful of the reigning queen of the Met, heroic-voiced, heroic-sized Helen Traubel...
Home-Grown Wagnerian. At first by default, and increasingly by merit, Helen Traubel has become the greatest Wagnerian soprano singing in the world today. She is the first great soprano at the Met to sing Wagner and nothing but (Flagstad sang Beethoven's Fidelia). She is also the first American-born Brünnhilde and Isolde who didn't study at the Wagnerian shrine at Bayreuth. Until 1940, when she sang in Canada, Helen Traubel had never been out of the U.S. She has never crossed the Atlantic...
...Helen Traubel at 43 is a prima donna in technique but not in temperament. A hearty, buxom woman with auburn hair and green eyes, she is as relaxed as a double-jointed shortstop. According to her husband, she is so chronically good-natured that "no one is ever quite sure whether she is stupid or lethargic." She was born above her father's drugstore in the old German section of South St. Louis, and brought up in so deeply Germanic an environment that she still punctuates her conversations with...
Take Me Out to the Ball Game. Father was a soft touch. Every day Helen lined up her schoolmates at his soda fountain. Helen was rationed to two sodas a day, but usually managed to borrow against the future. Father read Andersen's and Grimm's fairy tales to his kids; if there was a vaudeville show he took them, and never mind about classes. Summers he and Helen fished in Wisconsin; winters it was duck hunting in the Illinois River, and Helen had a small shotgun made specially for her. During baseball season, Helen got up from...
Nobody-least of all her teachers-could understand how that Traubel girl managed to get any education at all. Even the teachers assumed that Helen would be a singer; sometimes they'd ask for a song. Helen would sing Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland; if any boy groaned, "I'd bounce him on the head as I went by." When she got too far behind in her studies Father Otto hired a tutor, told her to "kindly stuff this little goose." Says Helen Traubel today: "I may be a numskull scholastically, but what I remember of my family...