The great Swedish dramatic soprano is celebrated for her heroic Wagner roles, a voice of laser-beam power and precision, her exceptional stamina and wicked sense of humour.
Birgit Nilsson at Metropolitan Opera Photo: Louis Mélançon, Metropolitan Opera Archive
Birgit Nilsson's operatic debut in 1946 did not go well.
She was asked to sing Agathe in Der Freischutz at three days' notice. Apparently she knew the arias but not the rest of the opera and inevitably made a couple of mistakes.
Birgit Nilsson statue in Båstad, Sweden Photo: By Hesekiel [CC BY-SA 3.0] from Wikimedia Commons
The reviews were good but she was badly treated by conductor Leo Blech. After three performances she was labelled "unmusical and untalented” and not asked to sing at Royal Opera in Stockholm again.
She later confided to Alan Blyth that she contemplated suicide, “I thought I was finished”.
But the following year she was engaged to sing Lady Macbeth in Verdi's opera and it was the turning point in her life.
Her career took off and she was quickly adding new roles to her repertoire, first in Swedish and then in the original languages. By the 1950s she was singing on stage at Bayreuth, then Vienna, Munich, Buenos Aires, San Francisco, London, Milan and New York.
Here, Roger Flury and Des Wilson tell numerous stories of her relationships with colleagues, directors and conductors. It's said she objected to the gloomy lighting in Herbert von Karajan's Ring Cycle at the Met by making her entrance wearing a miner’s helmet with a lamp!
Nilsson said that the secret to her legendary stamina was a comfortable pair of shoes and a glass of Guinness.
In 2018, the year of the centenary of her birth, the Birgit Nilsson Foundation has made one of its substantial awards to a Swedish Wagnerian of the next generation: Nina Stemme.
Birgit Nilsson and Nina Stemme 1996 Photo: Birgit Nilsson Foundation
