Flageolet tones. See Harmonics, §3. Flagg, Josiah

Flagstad, Kirsten (Malfrid)

In 1941 Flagstad returned to Norway to join her second husband, who was arrested as a Nazi collaborator after World War II and died in 1946 while awaiting trial. Although she herself was acquitted of political offence by a Norwegian tribunal, her return to Nazi-occupied Norway during the war and a certain political naivety in her nature caused her afterwards to be looked at askance in America. Flagstad’s return to English musical life, on the other hand, was quite uncontroversial. She returned to Covent Garden in 1948 as Isolde, and thereafter sang for three more seasons in her other Wagnerian roles, including Kundry and Sieglinde as well as all three Brünnhildes; her farewell came in Tristan on 30 June 1951. At the age of 55 she could still sing these heavy roles with majestic effect. In 1950, at the Albert Hall, she gave the first performance of Strauss’s Vier letzte Lieder with Furtwängler as conductor. In 1951 and 1952 she sang Purcell’s Dido in the little Mermaid Theatre in Bernard Miles’s garden in St John’s Wood, London; and when the permanent Mermaid Theatre opened its doors in the City of London, she reappeared in the same role, bidding farewell to the operatic stage there on 5 July 1953.

Meanwhile, she sang Leonore in Fidelio, under Furtwängler, at the Salzburg Festival (1948–50) and her Wagner roles in many major houses. In 1957, in honour of the 50th anniversary of Grieg’s death, she sang some of his songs, in Norwegian national costume, at a Promenade Concert. During her retirement she continued to be active, as director for a few years of the newly formed Norwegian State Opera, and in the recording studio, for which she even learnt music that was new to her, such as the part of Fricka in Das Rheingold. Over a period of more than 30 years she made many superb recordings. The complete Tristan und Isolde and her Brünnhilde in the complete Ring, live from La Scala (1950), both under Furtwängler, undoubtedly offer the finest memorial to her art; especially valuable, too, are her later sets of songs by Grieg and Sibelius. The majority of her discs were reissued on CD to mark her centenary in 1995.

Although Flagstad was not a singer of naturally ardent temperament, she was always a superlative musician, with a rock-like sense of rhythm and flawless intonation. The lasting purity and beauty of her tone, unsurpassed in the Wagner repertory, probably owed much not only to natural gifts and sound training, but to the enforced repose of the war years and the fact that she undertook no heavy roles until middle life. At 40 she sang with a voice of radiant quality in the upper range, and with heroic power which responded with an effect of ease to Wagner’s utmost demands; but as Leonore, Senta, Elisabeth and Elsa she then revealed flaws in her legato. Later, her scale was perfectly consolidated. Her Isolde was a stately Nordic princess, more proud than passionate. No other Brünnhilde in her time seemed so much a Valkyrie born.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DESMOND SHAWE-TAYLOR/ALAN BLYTH