BD:    Let us move on to another Wagner role

BD:    Let me ask about Elsa.  The role seems so sustained.

RB:    It is.  It’s a wonderful role.  In the third act she has to ride to certain heights.  I had a wonderful experience in this opera in Buenos Aires.  I had a wonderful director who had worked in the straight theater, and he had been a fine actor and was a great stage director.  He also prepared our Daphne there which was marvelous.  His ideas of Lohengrin were marvelous and he worked with me.  When he got through, I told him I didn’t think I could do all that he had shown me.  It was all a mind-boggling idea, but he told me that if I did one third of what he had told me it would be a fine performance.  He gave me so much to think about, and made her into a real person.  I think there is a danger because she is so pure in every way.  You have to be strong as Elsa to compete with the character of Ortrud. 

     [Photo at left shows Bampton as Elisabeth in Tannhäuser.]

BD:    Are operatic characters real?

RB:    We try to make them real.  We try to put ourselves into those mental conditions that we feel we are real people, reacting to the way they would.

BD:    When you performed, did you become the character, or were you Rose Bampton portraying the character?

RB:    It was very hard for me to learn that I wasn’t Rose Bampton any more.  It was Lehmann who helped me with that.  She caught me a few times and I made some answer that what I did in my private life was my business.  She said that was a great mistake.  Every experience you have in life you put into the character that you’re portraying.  You’re not any longer Rose Bampton, but you’re Elsa or Sieglinde, or whoever the character was.  That is what she taught me, and it was very helpful.

BD:    Tell about Eva.  How mischievous is she?

RB:    Oh that is a wonderful part.  It’s one of the rare parts where you have the opportunity to be young and girlish.  Most of the parts we do

BD:    You also sang Rosenkavalier [shown in photo at right]?

RB:    Yes.  The Marschallin is a great role, one of my favorites.  I had the good fortune to have worked it with Lehmann, and to have seen her in it.  The first time I saw her was in Salzburg.  That was in Fidelio, but I also saw her in Rosenkavalier.  That was a rare treat.  There was something very special about her in that opera.

BD:    What was it about her performance that made it so special?

RB:    I suppose it was her womanliness, and her understanding of life.  There was that feeling for the words, but she had that in everything she did.

BD:  You’re stressing the importance of the words, and that leads me to one of my favorite questions.  Does opera work in translation?

RB:    I haven’t heard very many operas in translation.  I did a Trovatore once in English with just a week’s notice.  Someone was taken ill and I was asked to do it.  I tried to memorize it and I thought I had, and I got through the first act in English, and then went back and sang the rest of it in Italian.

BD:    With the effort you put on the text and the emphasis you learned from Lehmann, doesn’t it hinder an audience who can’t understand it?

RB:    I don’t think so.  Not really.  You can be very convincing in a language that the audience doesn’t understand.  One of the great performances I’ve seen at the Met was Dialogues des Carmelites.  Everyone in the audience was so moved even though it was done in French.

BD:    Was that because of the drama or because of the music?

RB:    It was the drama of it as well as the music.  The music was part of it, but it was also the drama of it, and the acting was fantastic.

BD:    Is opera

Rose Bampton, Versatile Met Singer, Dies at 99 By ALLAN KOZINN, The New York Times  AUG. 23, 2007  [Text Only; photos from other sources] Rose Bampton, an American opera singer who switched from mezzo-soprano to soprano and sang leading roles in both ranges at the Metropolitan Opera, died on Tuesday in Bryn Mawr, Pa. She was 99. Her death was announced by Peter Clark, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Opera. When Ms. Bampton made her Metropolitan Opera debut as Laura in “La Gioconda,” in November 1932, she had been singing professionally for only three years. But she had a considerable artistic arsenal that included a strong, finely polished voice and a trim, statuesque figure. During her years with the company — she retired in 1950 — her sound was generally regarded as attractive rather than thrilling, but she used it with an intelligence and interpretive flair that made her one of the most distinctive singers of her time. Ms. Bampton was born in Lakewood, Ohio, on Nov. 28, 1907, although during her career she sometimes gave her year of birth as 1908 or 1909. She spent her childhood in Buffalo and began her studies at Drake University, in Des Moines. Originally a soprano, she was pushed toward the mezzo-soprano repertory by her teachers after a bout with laryngitis, and when she made her debut at the Chautauqua Opera in 1929 it was in a mezzo-soprano role, Siébel, in Gounod’s “Faust.” In 1930 Ms. Bampton moved to Philadelphia, where she sang mezzo roles with the Philadelphia Grand Opera and enrolled at the Curtis Institute. One of Ms. Bampton’s fellow students at Curtis was the composer Samuel Barber, who enlisted her to sing in the New York premiere of his vocal chamber work “Dover Beach” in 1933. In Philadelphia Ms. Bampton also sang several times with Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra. A recording of one of those — the United States premiere of Schoenberg’s “Gurrelieder,” in which she sang the Wood-Dove — brought her to the attention of the Met. Ms. Bampton’s roles during her first season included Amneris in Verdi’s “Aida” and small roles in “Parsifal,” “Die Walküre,” “Das Rheingold” and “Hansel und Gretel.” Other roles were added over the next few seasons. By the time she married Wilfrid Pelletier, a conductor at the Met, in 1937 (he died in 1982), she was feeling underemployed at the house, and decided to return to the soprano repertory. Ms. Bampton’s first appearance at the Met as a soprano was as Leonora in Verdi’s “Trovatore” on May 7, 1937. Her repertory expanded quickly over the next few years, to include Donna Anna in Mozart’s “Don Giovanni,” the title role in Gluck’s “Alceste,” and several Wagner roles: Sieglinde in “Die Walküre,” Elisabeth in “Tannhäuser,” Elsa in “Lohengrin” and Kundry in “Parsifal.” She also added the title role of “Aida” to her repertory, and in January 1940 she appeared at the Met as “Aida” one Saturday and as Amneris a week later. In addition to singing at the Met, Ms. Bampton sang with companies in San Francisco and Chicago, as well as in Buenos Aires, where she sang several Strauss roles that she never performed in North America. She was also a recitalist and appeared regularly with the New York Philharmonic and other orchestras. Among her recordings that remain in print is a broadcast performance of “Fidelio,” in which she sang Leonore, with Arturo Toscanini conducting the NBC Symphony Orchestra. There are no immediate survivors.

© 1987 Bruce Duffie

This conversation was recorded on the telephone on May 6, 1985.  Portions were broadcast on WNIB in 1993 and 1997.  This transcription was made and published in Wagner News in April of 1986.  It was slightly re-edited in 2016, the obituary and photos links were added, and it was posted on this website at that time.

To see a full list (with links) of interviews which have been transcribed and posted on this website, click here.

Award - winning broadcaster Bruce Duffie was with WNIB, Classical 97 in Chicago from 1975 until its final moment as a classical station in February of 2001.  His interviews have also appeared in various magazines and journals since 1980, and he now continues his broadcast series on WNUR-FM, as well as on Contemporary Classical Internet Radio.