Birgit Nilsson:Was there ever a more truly Wagnerian singer than Birgit Nilsson, who has died aged 87? It seems unlikely that her Isolde and Brunnhilde will ever be equalled, let alone surpassed.
She brought to these roles all the qualities their composer could possibly have wished: a voice of heroic proportions, a remarkable musicality, an interpretative imagination as incandescent as the music itself and a technique as solid as the rock on which the latter heroine slept for 20 years.
There was nothing heroic, however, about her early life, while her operatic debut in 1946 was a near disaster.
She was born and grew up on a farm in Vastra Karups, southern Sweden, an often lonely only child who expressed herself most happily by singing - apparently with perfect pitch - and by playing her one-octave toy piano.
Her musical talents were recognised by family and friends, but not by her first teacher at the Stockholm academy, Joseph Hislop, who told her it was not for farmers' daughters to become singers.
Subsequently Leo Blech, who conducted her debut performance - as Agathe in Der Freischutz, at the Stockholm Royal Opera after only three days' preparation - declared that she was not musical. She was more fortunate with Fritz Busch, who rescued her from a year's exclusion from the stage to sing Lady Macbeth.
Her success here was so sensational that Blech was obliged to eat his words and even to arrange for Nilsson's appearance in Berlin (her first engagement abroad), where she sang Sieglinde in a concert performance of the first act of Die Walkure. Wisely, she then returned to Stockholm to build up her repertoire and develop her voice. She married Bertil Nicklasson in 1948.
It was in the mid-1950s that she began her world conquest, with Elsa at Bayreuth in 1954 and the complete Brunnhilde at the 1955 Munich Festival, where she also displayed her ability to ride over the vast orchestral forces of Strauss's Salome without losing beauty of tone.
Not only did she prove to have a voice of unique power; she was also an apparently tireless singer who always sounded as fresh at the end of the most challenging roles as she had been at the beginning.
This vocal stamina caused great wonder when she first appeared at La Scala, Milan, as Turandot (not a long role, but an uncommonly taxing one) in 1958, and again at her Metropolitan, New York, debut as Isolde the following year.
At Glyndebourne in 1951, she had failed to set the genteel lily pond on fire, as Elettra in Idomeneo, and British audiences had to wait another six years to thrill to her Brunnhilde at Covent Garden.
In the latter part of her career, Nilsson concentrated on two Richard Strauss roles - Elektra, of which she became probably the best interpreter ever, and the put-upon Dyer's wife in Die Frau ohne Schatten.
It is clear from the roles she made so much her own that she was born to wear a Valkyrie's helmet and breastplate, to guard Elektra's axe, to pack a pistol as Leonore in Fidelio; not for her the tears and mute suffering of a Butterfly or a Mimi.
She was thus cut off from many of the most sympathetic heroine roles, though she regretted only one, complaining that managements never asked her to sing the Marschallin, even though she had appeared in Der Rosenkavalier in her Stockholm days, and undertook Tosca intermittently.
There was a corresponding toughness in her personal character, which was reflected in her refusal to be dominated by directors or conductors.
During a piano rehearsal, when her necklace broke, the conductor von Karajan sarcastically asked her if they were real pearls bought with her phenomenal fees at the Metropolitan. "Oh no," came the tart reply, "they're only imitation ones that I bought out of your low fees in Vienna."
She rarely, if ever, gave a performance which fell below her standards and at the age of 65 she could still dominate the 1983 Metropolitan Opera Gala featuring the cream of the world's singers. She retired in 1984, her Wagner supremacy recognised by all her colleagues, who regarded her with affection and respect, while audiences simply worshipped her as though she had come down to them from Valhalla.
Marta Birgit Nilsson, soprano, born May 17th, 1918; died January 1st, 2006