# Rarity: Helen Traubel Sings Opera On Video



## Seattleoperafan (Mar 24, 2013)

I did a two part Youtube presentation on Traubel earlier this year and there was very little of her singing classical music on live video to use for illustration. This is a really wonderful version of Hojotoho. For a very large women she really does not look fat here. Her chest was 48 inches! Her mother had the biggest chest cavity he had ever seen on a woman.


----------



## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Tremendous voice. She looks quite fierce. Interesting to compare this with Flagstad's happy valkyrie in the movie hosted by Bob Hope:






Traubel transposes it down a whole tone to avoid the high Cs.


----------



## Seattleoperafan (Mar 24, 2013)

Woodduck said:


> Tremendous voice. She looks quite fierce. Interesting to compare this with Flagstad's happy valkyrie in the movie hosted by Bob Hope:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Yes. Totally different but very valid compared to Flagstad. She had one of the great Wagner voices of all time and I would be fine with a transposed scene to hear her. I'll never forget someone on one of the forums said his voice teacher heard her in Chicago in the Ring and not only did the force of the voice hit her in her chest but bounced off the back and hit the back of her head as well!!!!! I would take a transposition for that. I liked Eva Marton in the early part of her career but her C's were for the most part always flat. She could have done with a transposition ot two. I would have gladly heard Sutherland around 60 when she transposed pieces down. Her D's were still wonders of the world.


----------



## Seattleoperafan (Mar 24, 2013)

From memory I have some interesting facts about Traubel. She was the only Wagnerian soprano headlining at the Met in her day. Flagstad had gone to Norway in exile after the war, Marjorie Lawrence came down with polio. She spent $300,000 all in her own money in the forties to have Adrian of Hollywood design her outfits for opera and recital. She was THE most successful crossover soprano in operatic history. Bing fired her for her popular music appearances on Broadway and in nightclubs. In the year after her firing she made double the money she had made at the Met purely singing popular music. She had only sung in recitals, never in opera, when she was hired at the Met in her mid thirties. Many singers resented the fact that she went from being an operatic novice to the highest paid soprano in the world overnight. She kept putting off her debut in opera because her voice wasn't perfect enough yet and because the roles weren't right. The Met had offered her several years earlier Venus in Tannhauser when she was out of work, but she turned it down because she didn't feel that a statuesque 6 foot girl like herself could be seductive onstage in the role. She was also the only operatic soprano to star in Hollywood films. Until recently there were no operatic videos of her singing, only Hollywood films. She was the only operatic soprano to have a successful nightclub act ( well, Farrell might have later in her career, but I can't remember). Finally, she was one of the few dramatic sopranos from the operatic Golden age like Flagstad, Ponselle, Milanov, Farrell and Tebaldi who could sing over two octaves without any noticeable register breaks.


----------



## BalalaikaBoy (Sep 25, 2014)

Seattleoperafan said:


> Yes. Totally different but very valid compared to Flagstad. She had one of the great Wagner voices of all time and I would be fine with a transposed scene to hear her. I'll never forget someone on one of the forums said his voice teacher heard her in Chicago in the Ring and not only did the force of the voice hit her in her chest but bounced off the back and hit the back of her head as well!!!!! I would take a transposition for that. I liked Eva Marton in the early part of her career but her C's were for the most part always flat. She could have done with a transposition ot two. I would have gladly heard Sutherland around 60 when she transposed pieces down. Her D's were still wonders of the world.


with Sutherland, most of the high notes weren't even in the score anyway, so she could have just kept to the score with plenty of Cs and C#s and not even had to transpose. I wish she'd gone that route, as her lower register was poorly developed, almost acidic sounding. Traubel had a chest voice like a volcano, so she could afford to transpose.


----------



## BalalaikaBoy (Sep 25, 2014)

Seattleoperafan said:


> Finally, she was one of the few dramatic sopranos from the operatic Golden age like Flagstad, Ponselle, Milanov, Farrell and Tebaldi who could sing over two octaves without any noticeable register breaks.


This was actually quite common in the Golden Age. Anita Cerquetti, Rosa Raisa, Dusolina Gianni and Germana di Giulio all come to mind as well. A bit later you had superb singers like Elena Souliotis, Ghena Dimitrova, Shirley Verrett and Julia Varaday capable of such powers. Even Marilyn Horne, who had a GLORIOUS dramatic soprano voice before crushing it into a fake Rossini contralto, falls into this category. A true dramatic soprano can sing quite low. They should have no problem with a low F3 and may even have down to a D3.


----------

