Returning to the Met as Isolde in 1951 after a ten-year-absence, Kirsten Flagstad received 19 curtain calls after act 1.
If she didn’t know how to sing Isolde, who did?
Yet when Flagstad sang Isolde as a guest in France just around the same time, Regine Crespin recounts in her superb memoirs that fifty-five-year-old Flagstad told the very young Crespin that if she could just be able to sing Isolde five more years, she would really know how to do it.