Olive Fremstad
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Olive Fremstad (14 March 1871 - 21 April 1951) was the stage name of Anna Olivia Rundquist, a celebrated Swedish-American mezzo-soprano and soprano opera singer. She received her early education and musical training in Christiania. When she was 12 years of age her parents moved to America, settling in Minneapolis. Even before leaving Christiana her progress on the piano had been such that she had appeared as an infant prodigy.
[edit] Career
Born in Stockholm, she was adopted by an American couple living in Minnesota, taking on their surname of Fremstad. She began her vocal training in New York 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. She remained there for at least three years, before going on to Vienna, Munich, Bayreuth and London.
She appeared at the Metropolitan Opera in New York from 1903 until 1914, specializing in Wagnerian roles. By that time she was singing as a dramatic soprano. 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. American audiences never warmed much to her Carmen, but she had sung the role opposite Caruso in San Francisco the night before the city was practically leveled by the infamous earthquake and fire of 1906. [1]
After retiring from professional singing in 1920, Fremstad briefly attempted teaching, but her patience for anything less than perfection was slim. One “lesson” involved the close examination of a dissected human head preserved in a jar. She was mystified when her few students fled in horror, unwilling to study the human larynx in such a setting. She used this head as a tool for determining whether or not prospective students had the "mettle" for an opera career. For Fremstad herself 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.
Her output of recordings is meager. She made approximately 40 recordings between 1911 and 1915, only 15 of which were ever released. Music critic J. B. Steane calls Fremstad "one of the greatest of Wagnerians" ("The Grand Tradition: Seventy Years of Singing on Record" [New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1974], page 46).
Fremstad allegedly professed to have no interest in romantic entanglements, although she married twice, with both examples ending in divorce. [2] She died in Irvington, New York.
[edit] Bibliography
The Rainbow Bridge (a biography of Olive Fremstad) by Mary Watkins Cushing, New York, G.P. Putnam's Sons 1954 (Library of Congress Catalog card number 54:10494)
