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The Wagner Society is a Registered Charity which was founded in 1953 by
Captain Harry Edmonds. Its aim is the promotion of knowledge, understanding and
appreciation of the life and works of Richard Wagner. The current Chairman of
the Society is Malcolm Rivers Esq.
The core of the Society's activities is found in regular
meetings, talks, study days, concerts and master classes held in Central London, for
which a modest charge is made.
The Society sponsors the Dame Eva Turner Memorial Lecture given
by a speaker of eminence in the world of Music Theatre or Wagner Studies.
The Sir Reginald Goodall Memorial Award, the most prestigious
given by the Wagner Society, is presented to individuals or Theatre Groups which, in the
opinion of the Society's committee have been of outstanding service to Wagner and his
music. Recent people to received the award include Sir John Tomlinson CBE, Sir Bernard Haitink
Graham Clark, Wolfgang Wagner,
Plácido Domingo and David Syrus.
The Society encourages young artists, and in particular since 1983, has awarded an annual
bursary to enable one or two young professional musicians to visit the Bayreuth Festival
in order to benefit their careers. The society also provides funds to enable young singers
to receive coaching to further their careers.
The Society is affiliated to the International Wagner Society and this enables members to
take advantage of any special booking arrangements for the Bayreuth Festival. Members are
entitled to participate in the ballot held each year for the society's allocation of
Bayreuth Festival tickets.
The Society publishes the following publication:-
WAGNER NEWS - ISSN 0263 3248 (Editor
Raymond Browne Esq)
Wagner News contains articles, interviews, news of forthcoming Society events and Wagner productions. It also carries reviews of
books and recordings as well as listings of newly published CDs and videos.
e-mail: editorwagnernews(at)wagnersociety.org
Sample article from Wagner News
Publications are sent post paid to all members.
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The Wagner Journal
Please also visit: http://www.thewagnerjournal.co.uk/ for information about Richard Wagner and his works.
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HONORARY MEMBERS OF THE SOCIETY
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In Remembrance of Astrid Varnay
Shortly after ten o’clock on the 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 established 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 harbour 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 intensive 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 labour 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 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.
Donald Arthur
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A tribute to Miss Birgit Nilsson a former honorary member of the society who passed away recently, by Miss Astrid Varnay:
Even with our helmets on, we never locked horns.
There were simply too many bonds that linked us inseparably: born in the same country – Sweden – under the same sign - Taurus - in the spring of the same year –1918. I got here first, on April 25th as the daughter of visiting Hungarian singers in Stockholm and she showed up on May 17th down the road a piece on her parents’ farm in Västra Karup in Skåne. She never stopped ribbing me about the fact that I arrived a couple of weeks before she did.
Once, after I had moved from Elektra to Klytämnestra, while she continued in the title role, I was on my way to a rehearsal, when behind me on the sidewalk I heard an abrasively cranky child whining incessantly “Mommy, mommy...” When I finally decided I could ignore this no more and turned around in exasperation to beg the parent to pay a little attention to the yammering kid, I realised that the “brat” was my friend Birgit. I did get her back, though. Years later on one of our many phone calls I feigned one of those very formal secretarial voices and inquired if I might speak to Madame Nilsson – when she took the bait and said: “This is she speaking,” I switched to my own voice and said “It’s your mother!” It became an identifying mark for our many conversations over the years.
We were colleagues, not rivals. There was never any jealousy, although perhaps occasional, and I hope pardonably small surges of envy emerged on both sides. I coveted those effortless clarion high C’s, and she confessed that she would have enjoyed having some of my dramatic skills, although hers could be fairly incendiary. Actually we didn’t share that many roles. Apart from three or four pillars of both careers: Brünnhilde, Isolde, Fidelio and the aforementioned Elektra, our repertoires pretty much went their own ways. She never sang Ortrud, and I wouldn’t have touched Turandot with a Yang-Tse barge pole. And we loved singing together: Those performances and the joy of our collaboration forged a friendship that will remain affixed in my heart forever.
A talent like Birgit’s comes along – if you’re lucky – perhaps once in a lifetime. How fortunate we are that it happened in our lifetime. A friend and colleague like that is even rarer, and it was a blessing for me to have worked with her.
I’ll miss her greatly.
Astrid Varnay
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The Wagner Society is a registered charity (Number - 266383)