Kirsten Flagstad - Later Career

Later Career

Flagstad eventually returned to the Metropolitan Opera, invited by its new general manager, Rudolf Bing, who was furiously criticized for this choice: "The greatest soprano of this century must sing in the world's greatest opera house", he replied. She also returned to Covent Garden following its reopening in 1947 (a rare exception - the Opera House, in lean financial straits following the war-time closure, was attempting to build up a house company of English nationals, principally singing in English, in preference to expensive guest stars). In four consecutive seasons from 1948 to 1952, she sang in all her regular Wagnerian roles, including Kundry and Sieglinde. She toured South America in 1948 and returned to San Francisco in 1949, and finally returned to the Met. In the 1950-1951 season, although she was aged well into her 50s, Flagstad showed herself still in remarkable form as Isolde, Brünnhilde and Leonore.

Despite the great fanfare surrounding her return to the Met in early 1951, and her success in resuming her roles there, Flagstad decided that it would be her final year singing Wagner on the stage. She had gained quite a bit of weight since her pre-war years at the Met when she sang those long and physically demanding roles night after night. In 1950, when she accepted Bing's invitation, she felt she did not have the stamina she had had as a younger woman. She had also developed an arthritic hip in mid-1951 (and had to consult doctors in New York); this further made the operatic stage difficult for her, especially when singing Wagner. She gave her farewell operatic performance at the Met on 1 April 1952, not as Brunnhilde or Isolde but in the title role of Gluck's Alceste, a role she had learnt in the war years in Norway. In London she appeared as Dido (another recently learnt role) in Purcell's Dido and Aeneas at the Mermaid Theatre (in the 1951 Festival of Britain season): the portrayal was recorded (in studio), and issued by EMI in January 1953 (see: Recordings). Her last operatic appearance was as Dido in Oslo on June 5, 1953.

During the post-war years, Flagstad was also responsible for the world premiere of Richard Strauss's Four Last Songs. Strauss had written the pieces during his exile in Switzerland following after the war (like Flagstad, he had been vilified as a collaborator with the Nazis). He intended them to be premiered by Flagstad, though not because he had her voice in mind. (The songs are better suited to the lyic soprano voice he idealised throughout his life, as exemplified by Elisabeth Schumann and ultimately his wife Pauline de Ahna. Strauss, moreover, had heard praise for Flagstad over the years, but had not heard her sing in person since casting her as the soprano soloist in the 1933 Bayreuth Festival performance of the Beethoven Choral Symphony.) It was, rather, out of sympathy for her difficulties. He sent Flagstad a letter, accompanied by a collection of his own works which he desired her to consider adding to her repertoire, and requested that she give the premiere - together with "a first-class conductor and ensemble" - of these four new orchestral lieder, at that point still in the publication process.

Flagstad accepted the commission, although Strauss did not live to see the premiere. As a conductor, she chose not McArthur (who, though an excellent piano accompanist, was not considered a ‘first-class’ orchestral conductor) but Wilhelm Furtwängler (also experiencing the repercussions of suspect wartime conduct), and the pair chose Walter Legge's Philharmonia Orchestra, with which they both worked well, to provide the accompaniment. By the time of the premiere, 22 May 1950, Flagstad was almost 55 years old. Her voice by this point was darker, heavier, and more inflexible than when she had sung for Strauss at Bayreuth, and she was becoming reluctant to venture above the stave, as would be notoriously demonstrated in the recording of Tristan two years later; the Strauss songs, particularly the Heine settings, were thus not ideally suited to her resources, and she found herself tested to her limits. "Fruhling" indeed, gave such trouble that Legge, in promoting the concert, was two days before the event advertising the Strauss as “three songs with orchestra”. In the event, Flagstad rose to the occasion and included "Fruhling" (with, however, several downward transpositions), and the close of "Im Abendrot" was followed by a respectful silence in memory of Strauss. The concert, which aside from the Strauss songs consisted of Wagner (including Isolde's Liebestod and Brunnhilde's Immolation), received favorable reviews; recordings of Flagstad's contributions were made from the radio broadcast, and are today commercially available. Flagstad added "September", "Beim Schlafengehen", and "Im Abendrot" to her repertoire, and recordings (technologically superior to those taken at the premiere) exist of these performed in concert; she did not, however, sing "Fruhling" again.

After her retirement from the stage, she continued to give concert performances and record – first for EMI (setting down her definitive account of Isolde in the first commercially released account of Tristan, and then for Decca Records. She even made some stereophonic recordings, including excerpts from Wagner's operas with Hans Knappertsbusch and Sir Georg Solti conducting the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. In 1958, she sang the part of Fricka in Wagner's Das Rheingold, the first instalment in Solti's complete stereophonic set of the Ring Cycle, released by Decca on LP and reel-to-reel tape. She also spent time mentoring young singers in her native country, including contralto Eva Gustavson.

From around 1952 when she gave her Met farewell until she died 10 years later, Flagstad's health steadily deteriorated. She was in and out of hospitals on an increasing basis both in the number and the length of her stays for a variety of ailments. She even joked with an interviewer in 1958 that Oslo hospital had become her home away from home. From 1958 to 1960, Flagstad was the first Director of the Norwegian National Opera. In her last years she gave many benefit concerts throughout Norway. She was diagnosed with bone marrow cancer in 1960 and died of the disease on 7 December 1962. At her own request she was buried in an unmarked grave in Vestre Gravlund Cemetery in the Frogner borough of Oslo. The largest floral arrangement at her funeral was sent by Lauritz Melchior.