Ljuba Welitsch
She was born in Borisovo, Bulgaria, studied in Sofia and Vienna, and sang in opera houses in Austria and Germany in the late 1930s and early and mid-1940s.
[1] She learned her craft with the Graz company over the next three years, singing an unusually wide range of soprano roles, in operas by composers from Mozart to Wagner, Humperdinck, Puccini and Richard Strauss.
[5] Welitsch was not completely unknown to British audiences, having been heard, and well-received, in performances of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and Verdi's Requiem under John Barbirolli, but her reception in the opera house made headlines.
[5] At Covent Garden as Donna Anna and Salome she made a sensation, eclipsing her fellow company member Maria Cebotari, with whom she was sharing both roles.
[5] According to the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians she "dazzl[ed] London audiences with the passion, vocal purity and compelling force" of her performances.
[1] While in London, Welitsch took part in two broadcast performances of Strauss's Elektra, conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham in the presence of the composer.
[8] David Webster, the director of the Royal Opera House, recognising Welitsch's talent, secured her services for the resident company, with whom she appeared between 1948 and 1953 in Aida, La bohème, Salome, Tosca and The Queen of Spades.
[13] Also in 1949 Welitsch made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, in Salome; it was given in a double bill with Puccini's Gianni Schicchi, in which she did not appear.
[17] Welitsch's international career was mainly centred on Vienna, London and New York, although she remained loyal to Graz and made guest appearances there.
That, compounded by her unusually high number of performances, led to a swift deterioration in her singing, and she was obliged to give up the star roles for which she was most celebrated.
"[18] Welitsch was still able to sing roles such as Magda in Puccini's La rondine in Vienna in 1955, and to record the character part of Marianne, the duenna, in Herbert von Karajan's 1956 set of Der Rosenkavalier.
The Decca producer John Culshaw wrote in 1967 that she was a welcome guest at recording sessions, and "one of our regular jobs is to bring kippers to Vienna for Welitsch".
B. Steane also felt that the various recordings available by then did not flatter her: It is hard to think of a voice with a brighter shine to it, or of a singer with greater energy and more sense of joy in that sheer act of producing these glorious sounds.
[22]Steane later added that a recently unearthed live recording from a broadcast of 1944 "shows the young voice at its finest, and conveys perhaps the most vivid impression of the temperament".
"[18] After her dance of the seven veils in Salome the pin-up artist George Petty put her at the top of his list of "the world's best undressed women".
[22] In Oxford University Press's Dictionary of Opera Characters (2008), Joyce Bourne writes, "Among famous Salomes, e.g. Emmy Destinn, Maria Jeritza, Maria Cebotari, Christel Goltz, Birgit Nilsson, Josephine Barstow, Hildegard Behrens and Catherine Malfitano, probably the most famous was the Bulgarian soprano Ljuba Welitsch.
Other off-air recordings of complete operas featuring Welitsch are Elektra (BBC, 1947), Un ballo in maschera (Glyndebourne company at Edinburgh, 1949), and Aida (Metropolitan, 1949 and 1950).
[32][n 4] In June 1950 Welitsch, accompanied by the Vienna State Opera Orchestra, conducted by Rudolf Moralt, recorded for Decca eight arias by Lehár, Tchaikovsky, Verdi and Millöcker.
[n 5] Some recordings of (mostly) German songs made by Welitsch in New York, accompanied at the piano by Paul Ulanowsky, were not released at the time, but have been published on CD.
