New Soprano at the Met

Putting its best hunch forward, the Metropolitan Opera signed Vienna's buxom Soprano Irmgard Seefried this season. Last week she bowed as Susanna, the maid in Mozart's Marriage of Figaro, and turned out to be the hit of the evening. She bounced around as a properly improper young peasant girl, conniving enthusiastically, clucking her disapproval of other people's peccadilloes, escaping from her own tight jams, seeming to enjoy every minute. Almost from the moment of her entrance, she had the Met audience laughing in delight.

But it was her singing that stopped the show. Her soft-textured tones are naturally appealing, and she treated Mozart's 18th century melodic affectations with unassuming ease. Best of all, she managed to throw her voice into the heart of every note, with the inevitable result that her singing stirred her listeners. When she sang her love song in Act IV, they kept clapping even after Conductor Fritz Stiedry turned and signaled for silence. "Enchanting." said the professionally tough-guy Daily News. "The shining light of this performance," said the professionally serious Times.

The U.S. Road. Susanna will be Seefried's only role at the Met this season (she will sing it five times). But in signing her, the company has taken on a soprano who has a wide repertory of lyric soprano roles, e.g., Eva in Meistersinger, Micaela in Carmen, Zerbinetta in Richard Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos. She learned more than a score of such roles in the conservatory at Augsburg, Bavaria, before she was 19, kept expanding her repertory in the opera at Aachen, where she stayed three years, and Vienna, where she has been for the past decade. She often works over her music with her husband. Vienna Violinist Wolfgang Schneiderhan.

Before she hit the Met, Irmgard Seefried completed her third tour of the U.S. hinterland. On the road, she sang lieder, folk songs, occasional operatic arias and, usually, one or two songs by contemporary composers. A gusty, warmhearted woman of 33, she quickly developed an enthusiasm for U.S. audiences and her own philosophy about singing for them.

The World Inside. "Everything here [in the U.S.] is supposed to be exciting, tremendous. So it is up to us artists to give a quiet feeling. When I come on stage, I wait until I sense the people. Sometimes they are afraid, tense; they don't know what to expect from me. When I start to sing, I try to show them by my face what the music is about. Then I can see them relax."

Any performance, to Soprano Seefried, "is like giving birth. And I know what I say; my daughter is almost four. Afterward you are empty, physically empty. Before, you have this thing, like a little world inside you, and then you give it, and you are empty. It is a terrible thing, not an easy thing." But that is the way Soprano Seefried likes it to be. "I do not make a career," she says. "I make a life."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.