ONE AUDIO PIECE Today's New York Times reports the death of soprano Hildegard Behrens, age 72. She died yesterday in Tokyo, preparing to give master classes in Japan, of an apparent aneurysm. If you grew up in opera in New York in the 1980s, as I did, then you saw and heard a lot of Behrens. She sang Brunnhilde in the Ring cycle at the Met with James Levine; she starred in the Met telecasts of the Ring, all available today on CD and DVD; she sang Isolde at the Met and recorded it in Munich with Bernstein, she was Tosca in Franco Zeffirelli's huge, splendid production in New York with Placido Domingo, in a staging he had originated for Callas in London in 1964. Behren's's Salome and Elektra were out of this world, both of them terrifying and sexy. Behrens was an attorney who came late to singing. Interviews in the '70s and '80s loved to talk about an "unorthodox life style", two children with nary a husband in sight, leather boots, and a punky look long before it was fashionable. Behrens was a "downtown" personality who made her career very much uptown. If you wanted a splendid, warm, rich voice in your opera then Hildegaard Behrens was not for you. Her voice was wiry and on the slim side, piercing rather than refulgent. A wobble came in as she aged and the top-and eventually the middle-of her voice became chancy as time went by. She made her last appearances in New York in 1999. There's one Behrens performance I'll never forget. I saw it from upstairs standing room ($2), way, way up high in the universe, where you could touch the Met's dusty ceiling. The opera was Beethoven's Fidelio. Behrens was not announced for this performance. She was eight months pregnant at the time and had begun maternity leave. But she appeared anyway, in the character of a woman disguised as a man. Leonore (Fidelio) infiltrates a prison where her husband is being held. The look on Behrens's face, pregnant as she was-and she was HUGE-playing a woman disguised as a boy-looking, searching for Florestan is something imprinted in my memory. Her singing was cheered to the walls that night, too. Hildegard Behrens was a serious and committed artist who was never dull. What she lacked in pure sound she easily made up for in passion. If the critics got snippy, full houses adored her for years. Here she is as Brunnhilde in Wagner's Gotterdammerung, setting the world alight. She's probably storming heaven, too. James Levine conducts the Metropolitan Opera. I've deliberately included the long orchestral postlude, the very end of the Ring cycle, as a tribute to Hildegard Behrens. [audio:behrens]
Christopher Purdy is Classical 101's early morning host, 7-10 a.m. weekdays. He is host and producer of Front Row Center – Classical 101’s weekly celebration of Opera and more – as well as Music in Mid-Ohio, Concerts at Ohio State, and the Columbus Symphony broadcast series. He is the regular pre-concert speaker for Columbus Symphony performances in the Ohio Theater.