Born to a household steeped in music, with a father serving as conductor and a mother working as pianist and vocal coach, Kirsten Flagstad began her training at a young age and gave her first performance as a student, taking the part of Nuri in d'Albert’s Tiefland in 1913. Over the next eighteen years her engagements remained limited to Scandinavia, where she appeared in Der Freischütz and Die Fledermaus, the role she sang more frequently than any other throughout her career. Her initial Isolde came in 1932 during a guest engagement in Berlin; that performance prompted an audition at Bayreuth, where she performed Sieglinde and Gutrune in 1934. Worldwide attention arrived abruptly after her Metropolitan Opera debut as Sieglinde on 2 February 1935 and her Isolde four days afterward. By 17 April of the same year she had added Brunnhilde in both Die Walküre and Götterdämmerung, Elsa in Lohengrin, Elisabeth in Tannhäuser, and Kundry in Parsifal. From then on many observers considered her the foremost Wagnerian soprano, although Frieda Leider, Marjorie Lawrence, and Helen Traubel remained active rivals. In 1936 and 1937 she sang Isolde, Brunnhilde, and Senta in London to widespread praise, while also appearing in San Francisco, Chicago, and Buenos Aires.
Flagstad returned to Norway in 1941 to join her husband, prompting unsubstantiated claims of Nazi sympathies; her sole engagements outside Norway during that period took place in Switzerland. She resumed major performances with Isolde and Brunnhilde in London, completed four seasons at the Royal Opera, Covent Garden, and took part in a celebrated Mermaid Theater staging of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. Reappearing at the Metropolitan Opera in 1950, she sang Brunnhilde, Isolde, Fidelio, and the title role in Gluck’s Alceste during her final seasons there, the latter serving as her farewell. Her only Salzburg appearances occurred in Fidelio in 1949 and 1950. In 1950 she gave the world premiere of Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs in London under Wilhelm Furtwängler. Her concert programs encompassed Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, Rossini’s Stabat Mater, and lieder by Schubert, Brahms, and Mahler. Following retirement she continued to record, notably delivering a widely praised Fricka in the first complete recording of Wagner’s Das Rheingold, and in 1958 she became general manager of the newly founded Norwegian National Opera.
Flagstad possessed a full dramatic soprano voice of notable warmth. Where Birgit Nilsson’s tone projected with laser-like intensity, hers surrounded listeners in a cushion of sound. She conveyed character chiefly through vocal nuance; the pronounced theatricality that later became common was absent from her approach and from that of her contemporaries. Her numerous joint appearances with Lauritz Melchior at the Metropolitan Opera and elsewhere during the 1930s established the Wagner music dramas as the central element of those companies’ repertory.
