Birgit Nilsson Dies: End of an Era

She died on Christmas Day 2005, aged 87, in the village in southern Sweden where she was born in 1918. And it appears that the Swedes had her memorialized and put into the earth before the rest of the world knew what had happened.

Birgit Nilsson was the biggest star singer in the bright star-studded age of singers: the years after World War II when the world had Flagstad, Callas, and Nilsson all singing at once. And that was just the dramatic sopranos.

She wasn’t a very good actress, and she wasn’t a particularly expressive singer, but she had a huge golden voice, a really big golden voice. Writes Jay Nordlinger:

A few years ago I was talking to a famous opera singer about Nilsson, and this lady was waxing rhapsodic about that incredible sound. “It was so loud, it blew your hair back! It rattled your bones!”

One of today’s major sopranos is Seattle’s Jane Eaglen. She writes:

When I went to the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, England, to study singing, my background was as a pianist, so my knowledge of opera was limited. My teacher, Joseph Ward, told me he thought I would sing Wagner’s Brünnhilde one day, which meant nothing to me, so he told me to go to the library and listen to "The Ring" conducted by Georg Solti and with Nilsson singing Brünnhilde. It would be safe to say that within five minutes I was hooked and my life changed forever. To think, as an 18-year-old, that one day I would sing this amazing music that the most incredible human voice I had ever heard was singing didn’t seem possible.

To memorialize Nilsson in Seattle, opera director Speight Jenkins had Eaglen sing the Liebestod (love death) from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde—right in the middle of a performance of Die Fledermaus.

You can get The New York Times obituary here, and The Daily Telegraph obit here.

We young punks never got to hear her in the flesh. But we have the recordings, of which the centerpiece is the Solti Ring in which Nilsson sings Brünnhilde. I used to have it on vinyl. Now I have it on CD.

It should be on your iPod.