Elisabeth Höngen (7 December 1906 – 7 August 1997) was a German operatic mezzo-soprano and singing-actress. She was particularly associated with Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss roles, and with Verdi's Lady Macbeth. From 1947 onward she was one of the Vienna State Opera's most prominent artists for nearly 30 years.
Peter Paul Kreuder (18 August 1905 – 28 June 1981) was a German-Austrian pianist, composer and conductor.
Camilla Martha Horn (25 April 1903 – 14 August 1996) was a German dancer and a film star of the silent and sound era. She starred in several Hollywood films of the late 1920s and in a few British and Italian productions.
Michael Heltau (born 5 July 1933) is a German actor and singer. He was born in Ingolstadt, Germany, and now lives in Austria.
Jerome A. Hines (November 8, 1921 – February 4, 2003) was an American operatic bass who performed at the Metropolitan Opera from 1946 to 1987. Standing 6'6", his stage presence and stentorian voice made him ideal for such roles as Sarastro in The Magic Flute, Mephistopheles in Faust, Ramfis in Aida, the Grand Inquisitor in Don Carlos, the title role of Boris Godunov and King Mark in Tristan und Isolde.
Thomas Stewart (August 29, 1928 – September 24, 2006) was an American bass-baritone who sang an unusually wide range of roles, earning global acclaim particularly for his performances in Wagner's operas.
Thomas James Stewart was born in San Saba, Texas. He graduated from Baylor University in 1953 and then went to the Juilliard School, where he studied with Mack Harrell. An imposing six-footer, Stewart made his debut in 1954 as La Roche in the American premiere of Richard Strauss's Capriccio, going on to sing with the New York City Opera and Lyric Opera of Chicago.
He married soprano Evelyn Lear in 1955, and the following year the couple participated in a studio recording of Kurt Weill's Johnny Johnson, first produced in 1936. In May 1957 he created the role of Dioneo in the world premiere of Carlos Chávez's The Visitors. Later that year he and his wife traveled to Berlin on Fulbright Scholarships. In 1958 he made his major-role debut as Escamillo in Bizet's Carmen with the Städtische Opera, now the Deutsche Oper Berlin. He created the role of Jupiter in Giselher Klebe's 1961 opera Alkmene and remained on the Berlin company's roster until 1964. He debuted at the Royal Opera House in 1960, again as Escamillo, and sang frequently at Covent Garden until 1978, with roles including Golaud in Pelléas et Mélisande, Gunther in Götterdämmerung, and the title roles in Don Giovanni and The Flying Dutchman.
A regular at the Bayreuth Festival for 13 years (1960–72), Stewart sang most of Wagner's heroic baritone roles, including Wotan/Wanderer and Gunther in the Ring Cycle, the Dutchman, Wolfram in Tannhäuser, and Amfortas in Parsifal. He sang the latter role for 13 consecutive Bayreuth seasons.
In 1967 Herbert von Karajan launched the Salzburg Easter Festival with a new staging of the Ring Cycle, casting Stewart as Wotan/Wanderer and Gunther during the festival’s first four seasons, and again as Wotan in a later revival of Das Rheingold. Karajan recorded all four operas from the cycle with the Texas baritone, and Time Magazine acclaimed him "the Wotan of his generation."
Stewart made his Metropolitan Opera debut as Ford in Verdi's Falstaff in 1966. Over the next decade he figured in many stage and broadcast performances as the Met's leading Wagner baritone (Wotan/Wanderer, Hans Sachs in Die Meistersinger, Kurwenal in Tristan und Isolde, Amfortas, Wolfram, the Dutchman, Gunther). He also sang a variety of other roles: Golaud, Jochanaan in Salome, Orest in Elektra, Iago in Verdi's Otello, Balstrode in Peter Grimes, the four villains in Contes d'Hoffmann, as well as Mozart's Almaviva and Don Giovanni. He returned to that house annually until 1976, then less regularly but still frequently thereafter; the Met database lists his last season with the house as 1993–94.
With the San Francisco Opera he sang the title role in the American premiere of Aribert Reimann's Lear (1981). At the same house he also sang several French and Italian roles (Golaud, Valentin in Faust, Posa in Don Carlos, both Ford and the title role in Falstaff), as well as major Wagnerian roles (Wotan/Wanderer, Gunther, Wolfram, Kurwenal, Amfortas). He received a medal from that company in 1985 for his 25 years of distinguished performance.
In his prime years Stewart also returned to Lyric Opera of Chicago to sing the Dutchman and Hans Sachs, as well as Orest, Ford, and Mozart's Almaviva. At other houses worldwide, his better-known roles also included Scarpia in Tosca, Renato in Un ballo in maschera, di Luna in Il trovatore, Amonasro in Aida, and the title roles in Rigoletto and Eugene Onegin.
In later years, he and his wife ran the Evelyn Lear and Thomas Stewart Emerging Singers Program of the Wagner Society of Washington, D.C.
Thomas Stewart died of a heart attack while playing golf near his home in Rockville, Maryland, aged 78. He was survived by his two children and his wife, who died in 2012.
Ernest Blanc (November 1, 1923 – December 22, 2010) was a French opera singer, one of the leading baritones of his era in France.
Born in Sanary-sur-Mer, Ernest Blanc studied at the Music Conservatory of Toulon with Sabran, from 1946 to 1949. He made his debut in Marseille, as Tonio, in 1950. He then sang throughout France in the French and Italian repertories.
In 1954, he made his debut at the Palais Garnier in Paris, as Rigoletto, he sang there as first baritone for 25 years in a wide repertoire (Rameau, Mozart, Gounod, Bizet, Massenet, Verdi, Puccini, etc.). He also appeared often at the Opéra-Comique, and was a regular guest at the Aix-en-Provence Festival.
His career took an international turn in 1958, with debut at the Bayreuth Festival, followed by debuts at La Scala in Milan, the Royal Opera House in London, the Glyndebourne Festival, the Vienna State Opera, the Salzburg Festival, La Monnaie in Brussels, the Grand Théâtre de Genève, the Monte Carlo Opera, the Teatro Nacional Sao Carlos in Lisbon, the Liceo in Barcelona, the Berlin State Opera, etc.
He also enjoyed considerable success in America, at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, the San Francisco Opera, the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, etc.
Notable roles included; Don Giovanni, Valentin, Zurga, Escamillo, Golaud, Germont, Renato, Amonasro, Scarpia, Riccardo in I puritani, opposite Joan Sutherland, Alfonso in La favorite, Wolfram, Telramund, etc.
A stylish singer and a fine musician, he possessed a beautiful voice with a brilliant upper register and impeccable diction, one of the few post war French singers to have enjoyed a truly international career. After his retirement he taught in Paris.
Linda Finnie (born 9 May 1952) is a Scottish mezzo-soprano. She made her debut in 1976 with Scottish Opera, and has since made appearances all over Europe, including at Bayreuth (in 1988).
Joachim Ringelnatz is the pen name of the German author and painter Hans Bötticher
(7 August 1883, Wurzen, Saxony – 17 November 1934, Berlin). His pen name Ringelnatz is usually explained as a dialect expression for an animal, possibly a variant of Ringelnatter, German for grass snake or more probably the seahorse for winding ("ringeln") its tail around objects. The seahorse is called Ringelnass (nass = wet) by mariners, an occupation to which he felt kinship. He was a sailor in his youth and spent the First World War in the Navy on a minesweeper.
In the 1920s and 1930s, he worked as a Kabarettist, i.e., a kind of satirical stand-up comedian.
He is best known for his wry poems using word play and sometimes bordering on nonsense poetry. Some of them are similar to Christian Morgenstern's, but more satirical in tone and occasionally subversive. His most popular character is the anarchic sailor Kuddel Daddeldu with his drunken antics and disdain for authority.
In his final thirteen years Ringelnatz was also a dedicated and prolific visual artist. The bulk of his art went missing during World War II, but over 200 paintings and drawings survived. In the 1920s some of his work was exhibited at the Akademie der Künste along with that of his contemporaries Otto Dix and George Grosz. Ringelnatz illustrated his own novel called "...liner Roma..." (1923), the title of which is a doubly truncated "Berliner Roman" (Berlin novel), for "Berlin novels usually have no decent beginning and no proper ending." ("Berliner Romane haben meist keinen ordentlichen Anfang und kein rechtes Ende.")
In 1933, he was banned by the Nazi government as a "degenerate artist".
Ringelnatz's widow Leonharda Pieper married Julius Gescher after Ringelnatz's death, and their son Norbert managed Ringelnatz's legacy and assembled a collection. Norbert donated the collection to the Joachim Ringelnatz Museum in Cuxhaven in 2019.
Erika Köth (15 September 1925 in Darmstadt – 20 February 1989 in Speyer) was a German operatic coloratura soprano, particularly associated with the roles of Zerbinetta and Zerlina.
Köth began a musical studies in Darmstadt with Elsa Blank in 1942, and after an interruption resumed them in 1945. She made her stage debut in Kaiserslautern as Philine in Mignon, in 1948, and then sang in Karlsruhe (1950–53). She made her debut at the Munich State Opera and the Vienna State Opera in 1953, and at the Berlin State Opera in 1961. She appeared regularly at the Salzburg Festival (1955–64), as the Queen of the Night and Konstanze and Sophie, and in Bayreuth (1965–68), as the Woodbird. She also made guest appearances in Milan, Paris, London, etc.
Her repertory included: Susanna, Zerlina, Sophie, Despina, Queen of the Night, Lucia, Gilda, Stravinsky's Le Rossignol, and The Rake's Progress.
She had a small but piercing voice of great agility with a range extending remarkably high.
She can be seen on black-and-white video in the role of Rosina in a complete German performance of The Barber of Seville with Fritz Wunderlich, Hermann Prey, and Hans Hotter, and in a German performance of Don Giovanni, with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Donald Grobe, Walter Berry, and Josef Greindl. Her discography also includes many operetta and lieder recordings.