Det Virtuelle Musikbibliotek

“She is the sunshine of my generation,” said the pianist Vladimir Ashkenazy about Elisabeth Söderström, the world-famous Swedish soprano, when he appeared as a guest on the popular TV programme This is Your Life, which featured Elisabeth Söderström as its first subject in 1986. Many such superlatives have been used about her over the years, and today, at the age of 58, she sings with undiminished commitment and still has the whole world at her feet. She retired from the Swedish national opera in Stockholm in 1980, receiving the obligatory gold watch for thirty years of faithul service; and the word faithful is no exaggeration, as the award of the distinguished Fidelio medal also witnesses. After leaving the Stockholm opera at the age of 52 she began to tour and give recitals with more energy than ever. But then, a Swedish singer in top form doesn’t give up just because she has reached the local age limit!

“I simply said to my international agents, who had often been very annoyed with me, that they would be free to book me as often as they liked after my retirement,” she recounts, adding that when the day of retirement arrived her engagement calendar was already full for the next three years. This meant that she was able to tour Australia, where she has now appeared twice, an ambition that could not be fulfilled earlier in her career because of the distance and the periods of time involved. “Now the Japanese keep pestering me,” she laughs, “but the earliest I can go there is the autumn of 1987. My calendar is open from the spring of next year.”

A brief survey of Söderström’s career shows that she was an early starter. She studied in Stockhom with the Russian teacher Andre-jewa von Skilondz, and made her debut in 1947 at the age of 20 as Bastienne in Mozart’s Bastien et Bastienne at the Drottningholm opera. In the autumn of that year she joined the national opera school and was at once assigned minor roles at the Stockholm opera house; two years later she was awarded a temporary contract and in 1950 she was hired on a permanent basis. Quite soon – in 1955 -she was invited to Salzburg, but as she herself says: “I promised myself never to repeat the experience, it wasn’t my kind of place.” But Glyndebourne in England suited her well, with a much more agreeable atmosphere and the possibility of having a family life at the same time as rehearsing and performing. This mattered to her because she was now married, as indeed she still is, to commander Sverker Olow and the first child of their marriage had been born. Summer 1957 was the first of twelve summers over a 22-year period in which she appeared at the idyllic Glyndebourne Festival. Her debut there was as the composer in Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos. Other outstanding Glyndebourne successes have been Strauss’s Intermezzo and Beethoven’s Fidelio.

Söderström had set herself the ambition of combining family and career. This was not always easy, as she found out when she made her debut at the Metropolitan in New York as Susanna in The Marriage of Figaro. She held out at the Met from 1959 to 1964. The artistic director Bing was “a hard but just man”; he expected his Swedish star to appear on stage even when she was in the seventh month of her third pregnancy. “When I did decide to leave them they couldn’t understand, but it was the right thing to do.” Her three boys had been able to be with their mother in New York as long as they were under school age (their father was at sea at the time), but when the eldest son had to go to school Elisabeth Söderström decided to return to Sweden and make Stockholm her base of operations.

Most of Söderström’s roles at the Met were lyrical: examples are Margareta in Faust, Adina in The Elixir of Love and Sophie in Der Rosenkavalier. But she has always had wider horizons, and began already as a student to sing contemporary music. She made the acquaintance of the influential younger composers of the day, including Ingvar Lidholm and Karl-Birger Blomdahl, who later wrote the “space opera” Aniara. She performed new music by both Swedish and foreign composers, and she was perhaps the very first Swedish singer to give a complete recital of works by Benjamin Britten. She has been rewarded for her services to British music with the order of Commander of the British Empire, which is the highest honour a non-Briton can achieve. Her most recent honour comes from Paris, where she will be singing Strauss’s Vier letzte Lieder at a concert in June and will be named Commander of the French Order of Arts and Literature.

“I haven’t really had a conventional opera career,” she says, “but my work in Sweden has achieved international notice. We had a style here that apparently impressed people from outside… A great deal went on in Stockholm in Sixten Ehrling’s and Göran Gentele’s time. I shall never forget Busoni’s Dr Faust, which was staged in a phenomenally spiritual way by Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd and produced by Göran Gentele. That was the one in which I sang a duet with a laser beam. Carl Fredrik had laser beams on the brain in those days!”

Another performance which was dramatic in a different way was the time she sang the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier; Octa-vian became completely hoarse after the first act, and Söderström had to save the day by switching costume and roles between the first and second acts, so that she could sing Octavian in Act II while frantic efforts were made to find another Octavian for Act III. These efforts were successful, and she was able to switch back to the Marschallin’s role in Act III, so that the performance could be duly completed.

“She is immediately appreciated for what she is, and that is magic.” Such is the opinion of her American friend and colleague Frederica von Stade. She made a return visit to the Met a year ago, and is going there again this autumn to sing the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier – perhaps her outstanding star part. “Don’t you think it will make a fitting conclusion if I can manage it?” she asks, but assures us at the same time that she definitely intends to go on singing. “And if you are going to continue you have to do it regularly. I get rusty if I stop singing for more than a couple of weeks. It’s more difficult than some people think to keep your voice in top form.”

This spring Elisabeth Söderström is doing some interesting recitals and concerts. In the autumn of 1985 she did her classic Marschallin as a guest appearance at her old theatre, the Stockholm opera, and in February she went to New York to appear in Brahms’ Requiem and a concert performance of Intermezzo in Carnegie Hall on March 16. Following Carnegie Hall she was scheduled to sing at a Swedish week in Toronto in Canada. In April Geoffrey Parsons will accompany her in a recital in Vienna: the programme comprises a group of Scandinavian songs by Sjögren, Stenhammar and Grieg, and a group of Russian songs from a repertoire which she loves and which suits her voice admirably (she has, for example, recorded all of Rachmaninov’s songs for Decca with Vladimir Ashkenazy). She explains that she grew up with the Russian repertoire: “My mother was Russian, and my Russian teacher had studied with a pupil of Manuel Garcia in Paris. So it was a kind of Franco-Italian school she belonged to, but she made me sing Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Tchaikovsky at the tender age of fifteen.”

Söderström has fond memoires of her teacher, Madame Skilondz, whom her pupils simply referred to as “Madame,” This singer was a coloratura soprano herself, and appeared with the Stockholm opera from 1916 to 1920, after which she taught until her death in 1969. “She placed my voice very firmly:

it didn’t develop into anything big and spectacular, but it has functioned under the conditions in which I work and in the music which I want to sing.”

She has derived pleasure from different aspects of her career at different times. Initially it was being on stage that appealed to her -”you have no idea how enjoyable that is.” But as the years go by she has come to appreciate more and more the experience of sharing her interpretations of music with her public and thereby fulfilling their needs as well as her own: “Music consoles and stimulates people, and it can help them to get away for a moment from the trials and tribulations of their everyday life. I have a little bit of a missionary attitude; I like to think of myself as a fellow human being who constitutes a link between the art form and those who need it. I think this interpretative function is the one that has given me most satisfaction in the last 10-15 years. I avoid appearing in places where I can’t reach an audience that really needs my music. And I’ve been fortunate enough not to need to perform for people who will pay enormous ticket prices just to feel exclusive. There are other places I can go.”

But isn’t she an opera diva at all? She found that question very funny: “Oh, I can put on that act where necessary, but I really find it somewhat comical. And since the role of diva actually prevents one from doing the kind of thing I think is important, I try to avoid it. I don’t want to be part of a circus, thank you very much.”

Söderström published her memoirs in 1978; an English translation appeared the following year under the title In My Own Key. She emphasizes that in her opinion there are two kinds of performers: those who want to be admired for their virtuosity and who go for the big fees at the fashionable places, and those who are mainly interested in putting across a musical message. “It’s more important to me that the audience should want to hear the music I am singing than that they should want to hear me personally; but of course, I am simply delighted if I succeed well enough for people to want to hear my specific interpretation.”