Soprano Acclaimed for Wagner Roles

Hildegard Behrens, 72, a German-born soprano who became one of the most acclaimed performers of Wagner's epic operas, died Aug. 18 in a Tokyo hospital after suffering an apparent aneurysm. A former Washington area resident, she was in Japan to give a recital and master classes.

Ms. Behrens performed in the best opera houses in the world alongside superstars such as Placido Domingo and under conductors including Leonard Bernstein, Herbert von Karajan and Georg Solti.

A latecomer to opera, Ms. Behrens was almost 40 when she first performed with the Metropolitan Opera. She spent more than three decades singing roles such as Wagner's Brunnhilde and Strauss's Salome -- some of the most demanding in all of opera. Practically from her debut, she was known as an artist consumed by her characters, one who fully inhabited their lives.

As Newsweek music critic Hubert Saal wrote in 1978, two years after Ms. Behrens's first performance with the Met: "Many operatic sopranos, even some great ones, deliberately choose the roles that tax them least. Then there are likes of a Callas, a Sills, a Sutherland and a Nilsson -- those superdivas who have sung to save their souls not their voices. A new sister has now joined their ranks -- a young German soprano, Hildegard Behrens."

Ms. Behrens lacked the hulking vocal power of traditional Wagnerian sopranos, but she made up for the deficit with the intensity of her acting. Some opera stars -- including the late Luciano Pavarotti, his critics said -- are content to stand on the stage, barely acting, and let the audience bask in their voices; not Ms. Behrens.

"She was the consummate opera singer," said Anthony DelDonna, who teaches musicology at Georgetown University. "She had a great stage presence -- much truer to the ways her roles were envisioned" by their composers.

Ms. Behrens's signature role was Brunnhilde in Wagner's "Ring" cycle, which she sang most powerfully in the 1980s and '90s, and which she performed in a well-received televised staging by the Metropolitan Opera.

Today simulcasts are commonplace -- the Met and other opera companies broadcast their performances in cinemas across the world; Washington National Opera offers simulcasts at Nationals Park -- but at the time, Ms. Behrens was taking something of a risk.

Televised broadcasts had the potential to increase opera's audience, DelDonna said, but a bad performance also posed the threat of increasing its pool of critics by turning a vast public audience off to opera. With her performance in the televised "Ring" cycle, Ms. Behrens helped put a face with her voice -- and with Brunnhilde's character -- which many opera lovers had, until then, heard only on the radio.

Hildegard Behrens was born Feb. 9, 1937, in Varel, a small town in northern Germany, the youngest of six children of two doctors. As a girl she took piano and violin lessons, then went to the University of Freiburg to study law. Yet she gravitated to the school of music -- her boyfriend was studying the violin -- and joined the school chorus.

Ms. Behrens was 26 when she decided to pursue music as a career, much older than most professional musicians. She began studying at the Freiburg Conservatory with Ines Leuwen, who reportedly said that Ms. Behrens had "a beautiful voice but no talent." That judgment had the effect of liberating Ms. Behrens, giving her permission to sing her own way.

Ms. Behrens's four years at the conservatory accounted for the only formal training that she received, a rarity in the opera world.

The untrained approach worked to Ms. Behrens's favor, giving her voice a raw, visceral intensity. She made her debut with the Dusseldorf opera studio in 1971, when she was not quite 35, as the countess in Wolfgang Mozart's "The Marriage of Figaro." She'd been hired as an apprentice, but someone in the company evidently saw her potential.

Not long after, the powerful Austrian conductor von Karajan heard her sing in Alban Berg's opera "Wozzeck" and quickly booked her for "Salome," to be performed five years later, in 1977, in Salzburg. With von Karajan's endorsement, Ms. Behrens launched her international career at London's Covent Garden and at the Met, among other top opera stages.

Although she was best known for her roles in German operas, she also sang a powerful Tosca in Puccini's Italian opera of the same name. In 1985, she and Domingo sang in Franco Zeffirelli's production before a packed Metropolitan Opera house.

What Ms. Behrens called the "most traumatic experience" in her career happened during a performance of Wagner's "Gotterdammerung" at the Met in 1990, when a beam fell on her head. The accident caused serious damage, both physical and emotional, and Ms. Behrens later told the magazine Opera News that it cost her three years of her life and career.

Survivors include two children, Philip Behrens and Sara Behrens Schneidman; and two grandchildren.