Norwegian Successor To Kirsten Flagstad

Press, Volume XCVII, Issue 28542, 22 March 1958, Page 2

Norwegian Successor To Kirsten Flagstad

[By JORUNN JOHNSEN in the "Christian Science Monitor.”]

OSLO. A fair Norwegain, successor to the Metropolitan Wagnerian opera star Kirsten Flagstad, has been attached to that world-famous opera for five months of special performances lasting from January to May, 1959.

She is Aase Nordmo Lovberg, aged 34, blond and blue-eyed, married and mother of a 10-year-old daughter. Rudolf Bing, director and artistic guide of the Metropolitan, went to Vienna to hear her Tannhauser performance

during the last summer’s festival and a few weeks ago all was settled for her American visit* Not only will Miss Lovberg be attached to the Metropolitan Opera during her sojourn there: she is also going to participate in the opera’s annual tour to cities like Boston. Chicago, Cleveland, Atlantic City, and New Orleans.

First American Trip She is now in the United States on her first American trip, having. been engaged by Eugene Ormandy to sing with the Philadelphia Orchestra in four preChristmas concerts, three in Philadelphia and one in New York.

Miss Lovberg’s family home is a farm just below the Arctic Circle, and in the gloomy days of soring, 1940. when Norway was fighting against the German invasion and the . Norwegian Army was driven up to the northern mountains, the genera] staff. 16 men strong, took lodging on her family’s farm. Aase was at that time a 17-year-old girl who milked the cows and did ordinary farm work. The generals were overworked and overtired. They slept hard and no-one dared to awaken them in the morning. But Aase’s mother got an idea. She- asked her daughter to sing them awake. The girl sat down at the piano and, sang an old Norwegian hymn. Five minutes later the generals came rushing down, anxious to learn who was singing. They felt sure that someone had put on a radio.

They asked her parents to send her to town to study. A year later she went down to Oslo and got a three-year scholarship, but each summer she went, north to the midnight-sun farm. There she sang while she milked her father’s cows just as she had in the days

when her parents and the parishioners all knew that she could sing but when nobody dreamed of her being the opera star the is today. Her goal is to be one of the leading international Wagnerian singers and she is working hard to reach it She is gifted enough to understand, intelligent enough to learn, still young enough to develop her rich gift of song. As there is no opera house in Norway she has been with the Stockholm opera, where she has had an enormous success. Between her Swedish engagements she has sung in Vienna, in Paris, in Brussels, and in the Albert Hall, London. “The Times'* wrote, after her last performance in the Albert Hall, in July, that she was one of eight opera stars who would be world famous and that she was born to be the successor of "the lioness of the Wagner Opera, Miss Flagstad, and of the two soprano queens, who have for the last 10 years dominated European and American opera: Maria Meneghini-Callas and Renata Tebaldi.” Typical Sieglinde Miss Lovberg is a typical Sieglinde of Wagner’s “Die Walkure” with her vigorous and expressive voice and her fair northern appearance. She is modest, simple, and has much natural poise. She is as wholesome and strong as the nature of her home parish and her musical tradition is that of the old Norwegian folk songs. She is laden with energy, and she never gives up anything. “Whenever I meet something I don’t master I am obliged to learn it,” she says, “I can do nothing less!” Daughter Needs Her A 10-year-old girl needs her mother, she says, and it is going to be worse and worse to leave her the older she grows. “Knowing that I can’t adequately fulfill my job as a mother and a singer, I do hope my daughter will understand me when she grows up. But I do look forward to the day when I can retire and be just a wife and mother,” she says. The only really sad part of singing, she says, is that you have to leave your home, your child, your husband, that they are really the ones who have to make a sacrifice for this career business. Still another hardship is all the travelling. "Nevertheless, I would say that if there is anything heavenly on earth it is to stand before a listening audience in a packed concert hall, with a first-class conductor, feeling how the orchestra’s wealth• of tones supports your voice, how song is going up, lifting the audience with music. In such a moment you feel bumble, you feel little, like an instrument somebody is playing on. And as long as you can in this way bring beauty and pleasure to anybody you are happy!”