55 Years in Five Acts: My Life in Opera [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

She also pays the reader the compliment of assuming that if we are interested in her and her career, we will be interested in her roles, some of her reseach on the roles and why she feels the way she does about the characters she played on stage. That is not to suggest for one minute that she gets bogged down in endless tedious details. Far from it! For all of the wonderful digging into her roles, there is also always a delightful quip to go along with it. The humor is there, the talk about colleagues, but it is a refreshing departure from the usual "And then I sang in Vienna and they loved me, and then I went to Berlin and they loved me even more" story. This is obviously the very real story of a singer whose life was the theater.

What stays with me, long after finishing the book, is the enormous amount of work and unrelenting dedication Varnay put into her honeing of both her voice and her dramatic instincts. It took constant hard work, but it was a labor of love--and that love shines through on every page here. The book is the perfect companion to the live performance CDs of Varnay in her prime that are now available. And the world is a better place for having both.

Varnay's story, told calmly but with frequent flashes of wit, begins with the tale of how her parents, both opera singers, met, married, and made their careers in Europe before coming to the U.S. and settling in New York. Young Violet Varnay, as she was dubbed by a teacher who could not cope with her Hungarian name Ibolyka (little violet), worked as a secretary, waited in the Met standing room line and quietly prepared herself for an operatic career. She prepared so well with her coach and eventual husband, Hermann Weigert, in fact, that her resume was met with astonished laughter at her eventual Met audition. The powers that be were quickly won over upon actually hearing her, and her stage career began at the Met in 1941 as a last-minute replacement for Lotte Lehmann in Die Walkure. Before retiring in the late 90s, after a career spanning more than five decades, her voice and dramatic presence would take her to Bayreuth and all of the great opera houses of the world.

It is of course difficult to say how much of the structure of the book stems from the singer herself, and how much from her co-author, Donald Arthur; but one of the attractions of this memoir is the skillful mix of narrative, anecdote and self-analysis of Varnay's numerous roles. She draws portraits of her husband, family and colleagues that leap vividly from the page, without ever descending to mere bitchiness, though she does allow herself some jabs at Herbert von Karajan and Rudolf Bing. The ultimate impression is of a strong, self-aware but not overweeningly arrogant personality--someone one would like to meet and talk to in person. One is touched by her inexhaustible eagerness to perform, and her capacity for discovering insights into roles usually dismissed as worthy only of comprimaria singers. She is also not above laughing at herself, and includes some amusingly informal photographs. Highly recommended.