Olive Fremstad

She began her vocal training in New York City with Frederick Bristol in 1890 after singing in church choirs, then studied in Berlin with Lilli Lehmann before making her operatic debut as a mezzo-soprano as Azucena in Verdi's Il trovatore at the Cologne Opera in 1895.

Fremstad appeared before the public 351 times as a member of the Met's stellar roster, most frequently as Venus in Tannhäuser, Kundry in Parsifal, Sieglinde, Isolde and Elsa in Lohengrin.

She retired from professional singing in 1920 and briefly attempted teaching, but her patience for anything less than perfection in her pupils proved to be slim.

For Fremstad, this wasn't anything special; when studying for the role of Salome in the Metropolitan's premier production, she had gone to the morgue in New York to find out just how much she should stagger under the weight of the head of John the Baptist.

Music critic J.B. Steane has called Fremstad "one of the greatest of Wagnerians";[2] but in his The Record of Singing, Volume 1, the opera historian Michael Scott describes her as always being more of a mezzo-soprano than a genuine soprano.

[3] She died in Irvington, New York,[1] but was buried alongside her parents in a family plot in the village cemetery in Grantsburg, Wisconsin.