DID I MISS SOMETHING?

“She had an overwhelming personality, and there was a wild quality in her voice that electrified me,” so mezzo-soprano Gladys Swarthout (prominent during the 1930s and ‘40s, in the opera-house, radio-studio, and Hollywood-soundstage way), wrote about Australian soprano Marjorie Lawrence. February, 2009 marked Lawrence’s centennial, although I’ve also read reports that Lawrence, who died in 1979, was actually two years older.
I was disappointed that neither the Met nor Opera News nor any other publication that I’ve come across has seen fit to honor the anniversary of one of 20th-century opera’s most remarkable stars. In its October, 2005 issue, however, Opera News published an interesting article by Robert Tuggle, the Met’s director of archives, that riffed on the fact that 1935 was annus mirabilis for the Met’s Wagnerian wing, given that both Lawrence and Kirsten Flagstad made their Met debuts. (Mr. Tuggle is writing a biography of Flagstad.)
In June 1941, Lawrence’s career was dealt a body blow when she contracted poliomyelitis while singing in Mexico City–a terrible tragedy as well as irony, given that Lawrence was raised on a farm and was a active sportswoman. Indeed, it had fallen to Lawrence in 1936 to fulfill at the Met Wagner’s stipulation that Brünnhilde actually ride her steed offstage after the Immolation Scene in Götterdämerung. (And supposedly, opera singers only learned to act ca. yesterday!!)
Lawrence returned to the Met, and singing from a sitting position, made acclaimed debuts as Venus and as Isolde, two roles in which stage action could be adjusted to her infirmity. Later her doctor husband built a special platform that allowed her to stand if not walk. On Youtube I’ve seen a minute of yes, electrifying footage of the Elektra she performed in concert this way in 1947. Hollywood filmed her autobiography, Interrupted Melody, in 1955, starring Eleanor Parker.
Lawrence did little commercial recording, but fortunately, air checks of many of her performances at the Met as well as the Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires, survive. Detailed and insightful analysis of Lawrence’s Met broadcasts is given by Paul Jackson in Saturday Afternoons at the Old Met, the first book in his invaluable three-volume study of Met broadcasts from their inception in the early-1930s until 1976.
I’ll be listening again to my large collection of Lawrence on CD and weighing in on her from time to time.