Queer Places:
Riverside Cemetery
Grantsburg, Burnett County, Wisconsin, USA
Olive
Fremstad (14 March 1871 – 21 April 1951) was the stage name of Anna Olivia
Rundquist, a celebrated
Swedish-American opera
diva who sang in
both the
mezzo-soprano and
soprano
ranges.[1]
She wed twice, with both marriages ending in divorce, and also lived for some time in a couple with her secretary,
Mary Watkins Cushing. Her relationship with Cushing was fictionalized in the novel Of Lena Geyer, by Marcia Davenport. Fremstad was the model for Thea Kronborg, the heroine of
Willa Cather's novel
The Song of the Lark.[4]
Born in
Stockholm, she was adopted by an American couple living in
Minnesota,
taking on their surname of Fremstad. She received her early education and
musical training in
Christiania,
Norway. When she was 12 years of age her parents moved to America,
settling in
Minneapolis. Even before leaving Christiania, her progress on the piano
had been such that she had appeared as an infant prodigy. 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. 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 City 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 interpretation
of the title role in
Bizet's Carmen, but she had sung the role opposite
Enrico Caruso in
San Francisco the night before the city was wrecked by the
1906 San Francisco earthquake and ensuing fire. (She and Caruso escaped
the disaster unharmed.)
Later in her career, Fremstad experienced difficulties with the top notes
of the dramatic soprano range. 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. 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 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. Scott, however, acknowledges her impressive qualities as an
interpretive artist.
Fremstad allegedly professed to have no interest in romantic entanglements.
However, she wed twice, with both marriages ending in divorce. She and her
secretary, Mary Watkins Cushing, also lived together for some time.[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.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olive_Fremstad