Frida Leider (1888-1975) was
one of the greatest Wagnerian dramatic sopranos of all time.
Arguably, she was an even greater singer than her more famous
successor, Kirsten Flagstad. Perhaps Leider's voice did not
possess the volume and the sheer beauty of Flagstad's, but she had
a warmer voice, with greater flexibility. Leider was equally at
home in Mozart and Verdi as in Wagner; she was a great Donna Anna,
Countess in Nozze di Figaro, Aida, Amelia in Ballo in Maschera,
and Leonora in Il Trovatore. She also sang Norma during her years
in Hamburg, although the opera was soon dropped from the
repertoire. As Leider herself says, she learned the Italian bel
canto technique, which gave her the flexibility and vocal agility
that other Wagnerian sopranos lacked. In this enjoyable, but
sometimes harrowing, autobiography, Leider tells the story of her
life and career.
Leider was born in Berlin, the
daughter of a carpenter. Although she grew up fascinated by music
and the theatre, her parents could not afford voice lessons; they
did not even own a piano. Originally, she planned to be a
schoolteacher, but the death of her father forced her to take a
job in a bank to support herself and her mother. Once she had
earned enough money, Leider bought herself a piano and accompanied
her own singing. After an audition for the chorus of the Imperial
Opera of Berlin, she was told that her voice was too strong for
the chorus, and that she was actually a dramatic soprano. That was
when she decided she must have singing lessons. For a few hours a
day, after work, Leider studied with a series of voice teachers,
one of whom told her she was really a contralto; another almost
ruined her breath control. Only the last teacher with whom she
studied, a former coloratura soprano from Cologne (not named in
the book) proved satisfactory. Another strong influence in
Leider's early years, and indeed throughout her career, was Lilli
Lehmann's autobiography Mein Weg. In her book, Lehmann advised
young singers to begin their careers in the provinces, instead of
accepting contracts at the big opera houses too soon, and this was
exactly what Leider did; her operatic debut, as Venus in
Tannhäuser, took place in Halle in 1915.
The debut performance went
reasonably well; Leider's voice was praised, but the critics said
she did not know how to act. She had never had any acting lessons.
It took years for Leider to develop her acting skills. While she
was at Halle, she studied with the well-known actress Trude
Tandar, and it was these lessons, in part, which helped her
develop into the great actress she later became. In 1916, Leider
accepted an engagement at Rostock, after turning down a much more
prestigious one at Nürnberg because she felt she did not have
enough experience. It was in a guest performance at Nürnberg
that Leider sang Brünnhilde in Die Walküre for the first
time. Leider stayed in Rostock for two seasons; then, in 1918, she
went to Königsberg. The situation there, in the last days of
World War I, was horrible, and Leider tells a frightening story of
those times: one evening, as she was walking to the opera house,
shooting broke out in the streets and she was narrowly missed by a
bullet. Leider spent only one season in Königsberg, and in
1919 she accepted an engagement in Hamburg.
It was in Hamburg that Leider
really matured as an artist. There she sang some of her greatest
roles for the first, or nearly the first, time: Isolde, Leonore in
Fidelio, Kundry in Parsifal. She continued to sing Mozart, Verdi,
and Strauss as well. Leider became a great favorite with audiences
in Hamburg. Even the critics, who at first had compared her
unfavorably to her predecessor, Drill-Oridge, were won over. But
Leider's dream had always been to sing at the Staatsoper in
Berlin. (Her love for her native city comes through strongly
throughout the book.) In 1923, she finally fulfilled that dream.
According to her own account, it was during a rehearsal that she
told Egon Pollak, the musical director of the Hamburg Opera, that
she was engaged by the Berlin Staatsoper; when he heard the news,
he knocked over the piano stool, slammed the piano shut, and
walked out of the rehearsal.
The Berlin Staatsoper was
Leider's artistic home for the rest of her career, but she also
made frequent guest appearances. Beginning in 1924, she sang in
the German season at London's Covent Garden every year until 1938
and, unusually for German singers at Covent Garden, she sang roles
outside the German repertoire as well: Donna Anna and once,
memorably, Leonora in Il Trovatore with an Italian cast. It was in
London, and in Bayreuth, where she sang for the first time in
1928, that Leider's great artistic partnership with Lauritz
Melchior began. Their opposing temperaments--Leider's seriousness
and Melchior's high spirits--complemented each other very well,
and the two remained good friends. Leider tells several amusing
anecdotes about Melchior and his wife 'Kleinchen' throughout the
book.
In 1927, Leider made a guest
appearance at La Scala. For these performances, she had to relearn
all three Brünnhildes in Italian. She was offered some
Italian roles at La Scala, but she felt she had to make a choice
between Wagner and the Italian repertoire, and she chose Wagner.
She said it was a very difficult decision for her to make.
For several seasons beginning
in 1928, Leider was a leading dramatic soprano at the Chicago
Opera. After the Chicago season ended, she would tour the US with
the company, and she tells some wonderful stories of long train
journeys through the US with her colleagues, including Claudia
Muzio and Maria Olszewska. In 1931, Leider made a guest appearance
in Buenos Aires; she travelled to South America in the company of
Melchior and Kleinchen; one of the most delightful stories in the
book is her account of the 'crossing the equator' ceremony, at
which Melchior and Kleinchen, dressed as head cook and kitchen
boy, served everyone an enormous feast. But Leider hints that the
performances in Buenos Aires did not go as well as she had hoped.
In 1933, Leider made her debut
- much too late - at the Met. She had dreamed of singing at the
Met for many years, but she does not say too much about why her
debut there was delayed for so long. She says that Ziegler, the
business manager at the Met, was opposed to her singing there. But
why? Leider never says. Her debut took place on January 16, 1933,
as Isolde, with Melchior as Tristan. She received favorable
reviews, especially from Olin Downes of the New York Times.
But it was in the same year,
1933, that the Nazis came to power in Germany and, tragically, cut
short her career. Leider sang only two seasons at the Met; after
1934, the German government refused to allow her to go to America,
although she still sang, for a few more years, in London, Paris,
and other European cities. The Nazi years also meant personal
tragedy for Leider. She was married to violinist Rudolf Deman,
concertmaster of the Berlin Staatsoper orchestra. Because Deman
was Jewish, he was forced to emigrate to Switzerland, while she
stayed behind in Berlin. From her account, it sounds as though it
was a difficult decision for her, whether to leave or to stay, but
in the end her love of Berlin, and her loyalty to the Staatsoper,
won out. For several years, Leider was able to see her husband
when she gave concerts in Switzerland, but during the last year of
the war, all contact was cut off. The story of their eventual
reunion in 1946 is very moving.
During the war years, Leider's
appearances in opera became less and less frequent. She suffered
frequent bouts of depression, and the atmosphere at the Berlin
Staatsoper under the Nazis did not agree with her. Although she
does not say this directly, I have the feeling that she suffered
persecution for being married to a Jewish man. By 1940, she had
virtually retired from opera, but she gave a series of concerts,
accompanied by Michael Raucheisen. During the last years of World
War II, Leider and her mother lived in the small town of Pausin,
near Berlin. She gives a harrowing account of the end of the war:
the hunger, the air raids, and the occupation by the Russians.
Eventually, she rejoined the Berlin Staatsoper, not as a member of
the company, but as head of a studio for young singers. A few
years later, she gave up her position with the Staatsoper to teach
at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik.
In her autobiography, Leider
comes through as a warm, friendly person. She never has anything
negative to say about her colleagues, but one does not have to do
too much reading between the lines to see that she disliked Maria
Jeritza. Leider describes Jeritza's Sieglinde at Covent Garden as
'more Italian in temperament than Wagnerian' and goes on to say
that 'her portrayal was hardly psychologically penetrating. There
were, if I remember rightly, no further performances.' Later,
while describing a feud between Jeritza and Maria Olszewska,
Leider is clearly on Olszewska's side. Except for these stories
about Jeritza, however, Leider's colleagues - Melchior, Lotte
Lehmann, Elisabeth Schumann, Muzio, Ponselle, Raisa, and others -
appear only in a positive light. Actually, the book is interesting
for what is left unsaid. Leider probably did have bad experiences
with her colleagues, but she chooses not to mention them. Also,
one wonders whether she is being perfectly honest about her
reasons for remaining in Nazi Germany. As I was reading the book,
I wondered: could Leider, at some point, have joined her husband
in exile if she had wished to do so? One article I have seen said
that the real reason for her infrequent operatic performances
during the war years was a vocal decline, not her lack of sympathy
with the Nazi regime.
Even though I have the feeling
there is a lot that Leider is not telling us, I enjoyed the book
very much, especially for her account of her early years as a
singer, and for the amusing anecdotes about Melchior and others.
The English translation includes a discography, which is missing
from the German edition. For a singer who had such a significant
career, Leider made relatively few recordings: 83 sides plus a few
live recordings. I did find a few omissions in the discography:
there are a few excerpts from a London performance of
Götterdämmerung which were recorded in 1938, Leider's
last season in London; these are missing from the discography,
although the excerpts from a 1936 Götterdämmerung are
listed there. There is also a recording which is supposedly of
excerpts from a 1937 Bayreuth performance of
Götterdämmerung with Max Lorenz, but the authenticity of
these excerpts is in doubt, so it is probably rightly omitted from
the discography. I do have a complaint about the index: it lists
names only, and I wish that it had included, at least, the places
where Leider sang and her operatic roles. Although the book is out
of print now, I think it definitely deserves to be reprinted; a
performance chronology, a better index, and a discography updated
to include CD releases would be useful additions.
Leider, Frida.
Playing My
Part. Translated by Charles
Osborne, with a discography by Harold Burros. Published in London
by Calder and Boyars, and in New York by Meredith Press, 1966.
Original German edition, 1959. 217 pp, with 32 black and white
photographs, and index.
Vicki
Kondelik was born in 1970 and has
been an opera-lover since the age of eight, when she watched a Met
telecast of Tosca with Shirley Verrett. She is a graduate of
Butler University (BA, 1992) and the University of Michigan (MILS,
1994), and currently works at the Graduate Library of the
University of Michigan. She is a collector of historic vocal
recordings, and her current project is a biography of Meta
Seinemeyer. Her article on Seinemeyer will be published in an
upcoming issue of The Record Collector. Readers are invited to
visit her website on Seinemeyer at www.seinemeyer.com.
