Martha Mödl 1912–2001

One of the most admired and dramatic of the postwar generation of German opera singers, Martha Mödl, who has died aged 89, enjoyed an extraordinarily long career, beginning in 1942 and continuing for almost fifty years. She will be best remembered for her Wagnerian roles at Bayreuth in the 1950s, where her intense portrayals of Brünnhilde, Isolde, and above all Kundry epitomised Wieland Wagner’s New Bayreuth style. Like her rival, Astrid Varnay, she made audiences forget the strain sometimes evident in her singing, by virtue of her riveting interpretations. For although she valued musical accuracy, it was the dramatic potential of a role which interested her most of all.

Mödl was born in Nuremberg where she worked as a bookkeeper and secretary until the age of 28. She gave that up to study at the Nuremberg Conservatory, and began her career at Remscheid in 1942 as Hänsel and Azucena. She soon graduated to Cherubino, Mignon, Dorabella, Octavian and the Composer in Ariadne auf Naxos, followed by Eboli, Carmen, Clytemnestra and Marie for the Düsseldorf Opera, with which she was a member from 1945 to 1949. By the time she joined Hamburg Opera in 1949 she had edged into the dramatic soprano repertoire, fully confirmed by her Lady Macbeth in Berlin in 1950.

The Wagner roles quickly followed, in the US as well as Europe: Venus at Hamburg, and Kundry at La Scala under Furtwängler in 1950 and a year later under Knappertsbusch at the Bayreuth Festival’s legendary reopening season, directed by Wieland Wagner, one of her staunchest supporters. There during the 1950s she was also to be heard as Brünnhilde and Isolde, a role she sang in London during Stuttgart Opera’s visit there in 1955. The same year she triumphed as Leonore at the reopening of the Vienna Sate Opera.

Strauss was another natural for Mödl, especially as a mezzo: for the reopening of the National Theatre in Munich in 1963 she undertook the Nurse in Die Frau ohne Schatten, a year later Clytemnestra in Karajan’s Salzburg Festival Elektra. Londoners had the privilege of seeing her as the Housekeeper in Die schweigsame Frau during a visit to Covent Garden by Bavarian State Opera in 1972.

Latterly, drawing on a lifetime’s experience, she sang character parts such as Grandmother Burya in Jenufa, and the Old Countess in The queen of spades. Although she had intended to make her farewell in the latter role with the Vienna State Opera in 1992, she was still singing it seven years later, at the age of eighty-seven, in Mannheim, with her chronic shortsightedness miraculously cured, thanks to a belated operation.

More remarkable still, perhaps, was her continuing commitment to challenging contemporary works, already evident in her typically characterful assumptions in Wolfgang Fortner’s Elisabeth Tudor (1972), Gottfried von Einem’s Kabale und Liebe (1976), Friedrich Cerha’s Baal (1981), and as the Mummy in Aribert Reimann’s Gespenstersonate, a role she reprised as recently as 2000. In the space of less than a month in 1999 she sang the nurse Anfissa in the German premiere of Peter Eötvös’s Drei Schwestern at the Deutschen Oper am Rhein in Düsseldorf and a part in the musical Anatevka.

Mödl is immortalised on recordings of her major roles at Bayreuth, most notably Kundry with Knappertsbusch (1951) and Isolde with Karajan (1952), and, as Brünnhilde, on Furtwängler’s Ring cycle for EMI. Gilbert and Sullivan enthusiasts may be familiar with her rendition of Ruth in a Bavarian television production of Die Piraten (The pirates of Penzance) from 1968, recently issued on CD.

A book of conversations, Martha Mödl: So war mein Weg’ empfohlen, was published in German. Five years ago, she was one of three divas featured in Love’s debris, an unusual exploration of opera from the gay avant-garde director Werner Schroeter. The film had no pre-planned action, no script, no continuity, but invited each singer to reflect on their bygone glory days and to examine how singers find emotion in their voices. In it Mödl addressed the mystery of her art with disarming simplicity: ‘I don’t know myself how I sing.’

Martha Mödl: born 22 March 1912; died 16 December 2001.