The Arthur Friedheim Library at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University has launched an exhibit and digital collection about
Rosa Ponselle featuring memorabilia from her career on the Metropolitan Opera stage and her opulent Villa Pace estate in Baltimore, where she spent her retirement years.
Around 1950 he invited
Rosa Ponselle, the great Metropolitan Opera soprano, who had retired to Stevenson, Maryland, to attend a rehearsal.
Listening to artists like
Rosa Ponselle, Franco Corelli and Kirsten Flagstad singing pieces like "I get a kick out of you" and "Shenandoah" is a thrill.
Moreover, Met On Demand offers only complete performances thus far, which robs us of the opportunity to experience Kirsten Flagstad's transcendent Met debut in 1935 in the role of Sieglinde, or other partially preserved broadcasts offering such elusive treasures as the Donna Anna and Don Ottavio of
Rosa Ponselle and Tito Schipa in Mozart's Don Giovanni, or the beloved Lucrezia Bori's farewell to the Met in Manon.
My teachers were Zita Fumagalli and
Rosa Ponselle, pillars of 19th century musical tradition.
Its stage has been graced by such legendary figures as Enrico Caruso and
Rosa Ponselle. In the 1930s, it proved that Richard Wagner's music dramas could sell out the house, and such Wagner specialists as Kirsten Flagstad and Lauritz Melchior virtually took up residence.
The mythic subjects of Lincoln's personage-based projects range from the early-twentieth-century opera prodigy
Rosa Ponselle to Madame de Pompadour, the gifted mistress of Louis XV.
In between you'll sample the imperishable gifts of such greats as Maria Callas and Magda Olivero (both in Tosca) as well as Joan Sutherland, Leontyne Price,
Rosa Ponselle (in her hilarious MGM screen test), Kirsten Flagstad, and Renata Tebaldi, who, with the help of Jussi Bjorling, feasts on Act I of La Boheme (you won't believe how Puccini transforms two unprepossessing middle-aged people into the world's most ardent young lovers).