100Singers's video: 100 Singers - ELFRIDE TR TSCHEL

Elfride Trötschel, Soprano (1913-1958) Dvorak: RUSALKA "Mesícku na nebi hlubokém" - Song to the Moon (sung in German) Conducted by Joseph Keilberth (1948) My personal opinion: A short life in hard times ... This could be the subtitle of a biography about the German soprano Elfride Trötschel. An orphan already as a child, she was given to the care of several foster families. She had to survive two wars and later submit to the GDR regime. Her musical career never got the chance to unfold completely. When death came, she was only forty-four, five years older than her idol Maria Cebotari, who died at the age of thirty-nine of the same damn disease ... Still today we hear the recordings of Elfride Trötschel with emotion: In her singing was a specific peculiarity, which Germans call "Träne in der Stimme" - she sang with a tear in her voice, and it almost seems, as if her singing reflected her suffered strokes of fate. Maybe it is no coincidence, that Elfride Trötschel became known (and in a sense also legendary) with an aria that expresses the yearning for a better time like no other: The mermaid's song to the moon "Mesícku na nebi hlubokém" from Antonin Dvorak's fairy tale opera RUSALKA. Known to me are two recordings: One conducted by Robert Heger (1952) and the version as a part of the complete opera led by Joseph Keilberth, produced in 1948 under unimaginable conditions during a cold October in the war-destroyed Dresden. The recording was made in an undamaged wing of a museum, in which Radio Dresden had constructed an unheated studio. All singers (among them Gottlob Frick) were clothed in thick winter coats. In these hard times, the broadcast of the heart-warming RUSALKA gave people courage, and Elfride Trötschel became popular to many listeners, who were grateful for every kind of distraction from sorrows. The preserved tape of this RUSALKA survived many years in archives. Only in 2007 it was restored and published. The memory of Elfride Trötschel came to life again ... Her voice was an instrument that projected tonal fragility and innocence, seemingly made for opera's young girls. First trained as a choral singer, Elfride Trötschel received singing lessons by Sophie Kuhnau-Bernhard in 1928 and Paul Schöffler (the famous Bayreuth Hans Sachs during the war years) in 1933. The baritone arranged an audition for Karl Böhm, and already one year later, Trötschel made her soloist debut at the Semperoper as the 1st boy in DIE ZAUBERFLÖTE, followed by the shepherd in TANNHÄUSER. Finally, on November 13, 1934, Elfride Trötschel sang her first major role: Ännchen in Weber's DER FREISCHÜTZ. At the Semperoper, she had the chance to mature slowly and to grow from supporting to major roles by and by. Since her voice was known by radio appearances, she also became familiar beyond Dresden. In 1949, after guest performances in Florence, Naples, Lisbon and Glyndebourne (primary in Mozart roles such as Susanna or Despina), the strict Otto Klemperer praised: "No soprano makes the WUNDERHORN text so intimate, simple and maidenly as the Trötschel." It was the soulful elegiac coloring of her voice that enchanted people, making her a suitable interpreter especially of Slavic opera girls like Marenka in THE BARTERED BRIDE, Tatyana in EUGENE ONEGIN (Trötschel's 1952 recording of the long letter scene is a paradigm of concise word articulation) and, of course, Dvorák's sad RUSALKA, one of her parade roles at the Semperoper. Some musicologists even claim, Trötschel and Keilberth have brought the opera out from the sinking and made it popular again (nevertheless it seems to me, RUSALKA is a work with interminable lenghts and only one appealing aria). Inevitably, Elfride Trötschel also attempted to handle more demanding roles. A testimony of this is the 1950 Rudolf Kempe recording of DER FREISCHÜTZ, in which Trötschel as Agathe is a wrong choice - also as MADAME BUTTERFLY in a Radio Frankfurt broadcast under Kurt Schröder (with Karl Friedrich) one year before. In both roles, her tender voice is under high pressure and almost stretched to the breaking point, even if her portrait of Cio-Cio-San is in lyrical moments heart-breaking (albeit a little doll-like). After the war, Elfride Trötschel sang with great success at the State Opera and the Komische Oper under the aegis of Walter Felsenstein in Berlin, where she died after a long illness in 1958.