MARTHA MÖDL
Martha Mödl is the personification of "L-O-N-G-E-V-I-T-Y." She began her career in 1942 and continued to sing professionally until she was well into her 80's!

She studied music at the Nuremberg Conservatory and made her operatic debut as Humperdinck's Hänsel, a mezzo-soprano role. From 1945-49, she was engaged at the opera in Düsseldorf where she sang such mezzo-soprano roles as Mozart's Dorabella, Strauss' Octavian, Composer, and Clytemnestra, and Bizet's Carmen. It was when she joined the Hamburg Staatsoper in 1949 that she turned soprano and took on the dramatic roles of the repertory with great success: Verdi's Lady Macbeth, Beethoven's Fidelio, and Wagner's Kundry, Venus, Isolde, and Brünnhilde. Later she would add the mezzo role of Waltraute to her repertory which also included the Nurse in Strauss' Die Frau ohne Schatten.

She sang Kundry at the first postwar Bayreuth Festival in 1951 and continued to sing there regularly until 1967, making her mark as Brünnhilde and Isolde. Ms. Mödl also gave memorable performances at the great opera houses of London, Vienna, New York, Munich and Berlin. In her late career, she reverted to the mezzo repertory, adding such roles as the Housekeeper in Strauss' Die schweigsame Frau and the Countess in Tchaikovsky's Queen of Spades.

Martha Mödl has an extensive discography of lieder and opera, of which her Brünnhilde in the Ring conducted by Fürtwangler (1953) and her Isolde (Bayreuth, 1952) are considered legendary. Among others now available on CD are her recordings as Strauss' Clytemnestra and the Housekeeper.

Her famed longevity is well documented on film as well: Her 1992 performance as the Countess in the Queen of Spades (at the Vienna State Opera with Mirella Freni and Vesselina Kasarova, Seiji Ozawa conducting) was recently released on video cassette by the Bel Canto Society. She is also one of three subjects (the others are opera singers Rita Gorr and Anita Cerquetti) in a well-regarded, prize-winning film by Werner Schroeter entitled Love's Debris. The film, shot in 1996 in an abandoned French Abbey, explores the question of how singers find emotion in their voices. Matha Mödl is seen and heard - she sings and, while being interviewed by actress Isabelle Huppert, reflects on her extraordinary life in the art of the voice.