The new year brought news of some great losses to the musical world. Swedish soprano Birgit Nilsson, one of the towering Wagnerian sopranos of the 20th century, who appeared in Boston on Metropolitan Opera tours and in Celebrity Series recitals, died at the age of 87 on Christmas Day. Her huge, stunning voice, with its effortlessly ringing, long-held, laser-high notes, her intelligence, and her dramatic conviction made the great soprano an unforgettable Brünnhilde, Isolde, Salome, Elektra, and Turandot (a fiendish role she resurrected — and called her “holiday” piece). She had a hearty laugh and a devilish sense of humor. There’s a famous story about tenor Franco Corelli, her co-star in Turandot and perhaps more a diva than Nilsson. When he allegedly bit her in the neck when she held a high note longer than he did, she announced that she had to get a rabies shot. Like most sopranos, she was too old and too big for the demented teenager Salome. Yet her understated, slow-motion “Dance of the Seven Veils” was both sinister and sexy. And that voice — no recording captured its full impact in the theater — no one who heard it could ever forget it.
Ten years Nilsson’s senior, conductor and BSO horn player (from 1944 to 1966) Osbourne McConathy died December 29. He led some of Sarah Caldwell’s landmark productions for the Opera Company of Boston: American premieres of Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron and Rameau’s Hippolyte et Aricie (with Beverly Sills — before anyone knew she was a coloratura — and an unknown but astonishing young tenor named Placido Domingo); the East Coast premiere of Berg’s Lulu (years before the Met did it); Verdi’s Otello, with Renata Tebaldi; and Gustave Charpentier’s Louise, in a spectacular production that turned the Cyclorama into turn-of-the-century Montmartre. Later, Caldwell began to conduct her own productions, but McConathy’s presence in the pit freed her imagination. Few of Caldwell’s later conceptions were as revelatory as what she was able to do when she trusted the music to McConathy.
Also on December 29 (not a good day), 54-year-old Elizabeth (“Besty”) Parcells, a Boston favorite whose major career was in Europe, died of colorectal cancer — a disease she devoted her last years to stamping out. In 1993, when she sang Donizetti’s Linda de Chamounix with the Boston Academy of Music, I wrote that she was “the perfect Linda,” with “an exquisite light, supple coloratura warble — silvery high E flats gleam through the loudest chorus and thickest orchestration. She’s also an affecting, utterly endearing presence. (Who ever heard of a soprano who actually turned her back to the audience when someone else was singing?) Above all, she’s got the style — with its dazzling ‘improvised’ appoggiaturas — down cold.”
