— Teatro Nuovo

Missing in Action

In the 1930s there was tough competition for a German soprano at the Met. The heavier Wagner roles passed from Frida Leider to Kirsten Flagstad, and for the more lyrical ones, when Lotte Lehmann was not passing through town there was always Elisabeth Rethberg. Magic names and shining voices all, so perhaps it is not surprising that New York remembers Grete Stückgold more as an appreciated B-list singer than as a star.

Born in London in 1895 to a British mother and German father, Stückgold arrived at the Met in November of 1927 after a busy decade of work in Munich, Nuremberg, Dresden and Berlin. She first appeared as Eva Die Meistersinger, quickly followed by a much-praised Aida (also the role of her Covent Garden debut). The rest of her Met repertory was German: Elsa, Elisabeth, Sieglinde, Agathe, and in Der Rosenkavalier both Octavian and the Marschallin. What she brought to it was a kind of vocalism much cultivated in the German world at the time: a big glamorous tone developed more for sweetness than for metal, swelling easily into a top register that never sounded stressed, essentially soft-grained but fully capable of the dramatic thrust needed at the end of Sieglinde’s narrative, of which hers is one of the very best recordings.

The real reason Stückgold is so little remembered today is that what should have been her best records were never made. She began in the studios in 1921 - the same time as Leider and just a little after Rethberg, Lehmann, and Flagstad - with the old acoustical recording system still in place. Then came the microphone in 1925, capturing for the first time something like the full radiance of soprano voices like theirs - but Germany was still reeling from the hyperinflation crisis; all labels were trimming their rosters, some were late in adopting the new technology for reasons of cost, and some went under altogether.

Label of the first-ever Mahler song recording

The other four singers made the cut, and went on to produce a long series of electrical 78s that became mainstays of the catalog. But Stückgold didn’t, and the American companies (hobbled by the Great Depression not long after her arrival here) didn’t pick her up either. All of her 60-something commercial discs were made in Germany by the old process; they were obsolete within just a few years of circulation, and from her years with the Met we have nothing.

The early series has one gem after another. Her very first session included what was also the very first recording of any song by Gustav Mahler, and it remains unmatched for firm etching of the difficult florid lines:

There is also a Mignon aria full of verve, with luxuriant legato, perfect trills, expert register transitions, and an indulgence of playful virtuosity at the end that may be unique

By the time she left the Met in 1939, war loomed in Europe and Stückgold stayed in America, taking a teaching post at Bennington College, and giving well-reviewed song recitals through and beyond the war years. At this stage - around 1950, a quarter century after her last official records - we catch an improbable final glimpse of the voice. An admirer captured a live recital and arranged for studio sessions of some Wolf songs. Unfortunately, these were so inexpertly recorded that they sound worse than the primitive acoustics - the voice overloads the microphone pretty much continually, producing distortion that can be reduced a little but not removed, and the material used for the transcription discs was inferior and noisy. But they do let us hear that Stückgold’s sound was still powerful, steady, and rich - which only increases our frustration over the missing prime-time documents from 1925 to 1940 that would surely have been classics of the gramophone.

Teatro Nuovo puts great emphasis on learning from the singers who had never heard, or heard of, microphone singing - primitive recordings from more than a century ago, forming a link to the traditions of opera’s heyday and the infinite potential of the natural, unassisted human voice. Check this space regularly for samples, and click here for some pointers on how to listen.