Astrid Varnay, the Swedish-American soprano who made her Metropolitan Opera debut without rehearsal a day before the attack on Pearl Harbor and went on to sing for half a century, has died. She was 88.
Varnay died Monday in a Munich hospital of a pericardial infection, said Donald Arthur, a longtime friend who ghostwrote her autobiography. She had been seriously ill for some time, he said in a telephone interview with the AP.
Astrid Ibolyka Maria Varnay was born in Stockholm on April 25, 1918, to Hungarian parents both involved in opera. The family moved to the United States in 1920, where her father died at age 35 in 1924.
Varnay trained her singing voice first under her mother, Maria Javor Varnay, then New York Metropolitan Opera staff conductor and coach Hermann Weigert, whom she married in 1944.
Because an opera career in the United States was deemed unlikely, she also was taking courses in stenography and typing.
But Varnay got her break on Dec. 6, 1941, when she filled in for an indisposed Lotte Lehmann. With no rehearsal, she took over the role of Sieglinde in Wagner's "Die Walkuere" in a performance conducted by Erich Leinsdorf that was broadcast nationally on radio. Six days later, Varnay sang her second professional performance, taking over from an ill Helen Traubel as Bruennhilde, one of the toughest soprano roles in the repertoire.
Arthur worked with Varnay for five years on her autobiography, "Fifty-Five Years In Five Acts: My Life in Opera," and remembers talking with her about the Met debut for chapter 1.
"She was pushed out on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera never having sung anywhere in public, and sang the leading role in "Die Walkuere" in a broadcast at age 23," he said. "We were working on it and one of the things I wrote was that 'presumably everyone on the stage was two times my age.' She said: 'What is this presumably nonsense? We'll look it up.' We looked it up and every member of that cast was either two times her age or more."
She would sing some 200 performances with the Metropolitan Opera over her career, though left in 1956 for nearly two decades over conflicts with director Rudolf Bing.
