It’s such a truism that it’s passed into cliche: there are all too few singers who can even survive the average opera by Wagner or Strauss, let alone sing those works with undiminished strength and beauty of tone. Yet Swedish soprano Siv Wennberg, who tosses off fiendishly difficult roles like Salome the way other singers approach Mimi, is virtually unheard of in this country. Despite the worldwide shortage of dramatic sopranos, she has never been invited to sing at the Met, the Lyric, or the other international opera houses of North America. She has performed at every major European opera house except La Scala, in hard-to-cast roles like Leonore in Beethoven’s Fidelio, the empress in Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten, and Brunnhilde in Siegfried. She has been acclaimed as Wagner’s Isolde, as Senta (a signature role she’s performed over 100 times), and as Elisabeth by critics from around Europe, in a stunning array of adjectival fireworks. But these days she’s doing most of her singing in Sweden. Her fans claim she’s been blackballed; at the very least her obscurity here is hard to fathom.
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Wennberg comes across in conversation as an intelligent singer, one who paces herself and does not like to take on roles before she can handle them. “Brunnhilde in Gotterdammerung [a more demanding role than in the other two Ring operas in which Brunnhilde appears] and Turandot are two roles I would very much like to sing–but not yet.” Currently she’s preparing for her first performance as Strauss’s Elektra, to be performed in Oslo early next year. “You must have time to put a big part in your head and in your heart, in your body and in your voice,” she says.
Wennberg has made only one appearance in the United States, a concert version of act one of Wagner’s Die Walkure in Detroit in 1983. She’ll make her second tonight, April 5, in a benefit concert for the Swedish American Museum, accompanied by pianist Michael Wilson. The program will consist half of Scandinavian songs by Grieg, Rangstrom, and Sibelius, and half of the lieder of Richard Strauss, whom Wennberg calls “my house god, a composer I am singing from deep in my heart.”
The most recent such project is Address Unknown, the name of both a new ensemble and the show they have put together. Directed by Laura Kohler, an actress who also leads urban and wilderness living courses for Outward Bound, Address Unknown was developed by participants in First Step, a social skills and self-esteem training program run by Christopher House, a north-side social service agency.
