ELISABETH SöDERSTRöM:ELISABETH SÖDERSTRÖM, who has died aged 82, was a soprano who was greatly admired for her sensitive operatic roles and for her refined, delicately shaded voice.
During a career of more than 50 years, Söderström was renowned for the subtlety of her performances and was considered one of the foremost actors on the operatic stage. Her dramatic skill made her particularly effective in portraying such complex characters as Leonore in Beethoven’s Fidelio, Tatyana in Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin and Marie in Alban Berg’s Wozzeck.
She had a versatile lyric soprano voice and a wideranging repertoire that included more than 50 roles in 10 languages. Highly regarded for her interpretations of dramatic works by Tchaikovsky, Leos Janacek and Richard Strauss, she also had a superb sense of comedy that allowed her to excel in lighter fare, such as Rosalinde in Die Fledermaus by Johann Strauss II.
“All my life, I have striven to show that it is not in the slightest unnatural to express yourself in song,” she wrote in her 1978 autobiography, I min tonart (In My Own Key). Her goal was “to find a balance between music, words and gestures [to achieve] the work of art”.
Söderström was born in Stockholm, Sweden, to a Russian mother, who had fled her homeland during the 1917 revolution, and a father who was a music-loving Swedish businessman. She began to study singing in earnest at 14 and also showed early interest in acting. After being rejected for admission to the Stockholm Academy of Dramatic Arts, she concentrated on singing.
Söderström gained international acclaim in the 1950s, after making operatic debuts in Salzburg, Austria, and at England’s Glyndebourne festival. When she gave her first performance at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 1959, as Susanna in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, a New York Herald Tribune critic called her “simply a darling, with a bright, delectable, and accurate soprano that carried the treble like a crystal flute”.
From 1959 to 1963, she often appeared at the Met, portraying Marguerite in Charles Gounod’s Faust, Adina in Gaetano Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore and Musetta in Giacomo Puccini’s La Bohème. She also performed three separate roles in Richard Strauss’s 1911 comic opera Der Rosenkavalier.
She then concentrated on bringing up her three young sons in Sweden, maintaining her singing career there and elsewhere in northern Europe. She also had a television show about classical music in Sweden.
“In my own country I try to spread opera wherever I can – in factories, prisons, hospitals, mental institutions,” she later said. “I’m preaching, I admit it.”
She was not known for being temperamental, except when she thought directors did not respect the integrity of a musical score. In a production of Janacek’s The Makropulous Case in Marseilles, the stage director wanted her to perform her final scene behind a screen, concealed from the audience.
“I screamed at him that he was unworthy of staging this opera,” she said in 1989. “His response was, ‘We break for lunch,’ and I collapsed in a chair, crying violently . . . After lunch, the screen was gone.”
Söderström continued performing well into her 60s and often gave recitals of songs by Sergei Rachmaninoff and Jean Sibelius with pianist Vladimir Ashkenazy. American composer Dominick Argento wrote an opera for her, The Aspern Papers, which she premiered in Dallas in 1988.
At 71 in 1999, she came out of semi-retirement to appear as the Countess in Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades at the Metropolitan Opera.
She is survived by her husband of 59 years, Swedish naval officer Sverker Olow, and her three sons.
Elisabeth Söderström: born May 7th, 1927; died November 20th, 2009