"An American Singer" by Peter G. Davis, in The Yale Review (Oct. 1997), Yale Univ., P.O. Box 208243, New Haven, Conn. 06520-8243.

Her career was cut short when she was in her prime, and the 15 recordings she made were disappointing artistically as well as technically, but Olive Fremstad (1871–1951) has never been entirely forgotten by opera aficionados. The first homegrown American opera singer of "true incandescence," she had "a vocal and physical presence of such charismatic witchery as to drive audiences wild," writes Davis, author of The American Opera Singer (forthcoming).

The daughter of a Norwegian physician and preacher and his Swedish wife, the singer was born in Stockholm and emigrated with her family to Minnesota about a decade later. A proficient pianist by the age of 12, she served as her father’s musical assistant as he traveled up and down the state in a horse-drawn wagon with a portable organ to conduct prairie revival meetings. Decades later, notes Davis, some of the Scandinavian settlers who had attended those services still "recalled the vivid effect of Fremstad’s voice" when she sang hymns. Venturing to New York when she was 19, Fremstad studied and saved enough money for the essential trip to study in Europe. She made her debut at the Cologne Opera in 1895, and at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 1903.

Fremstad was the Met’s first Salome (in Richard Strauss’s opera of that name), and "her graphic portrayal of the biblical teenager’s sensual lust scandalized more than one Met patron," writes Davis. The opera was withdrawn after the first performance. Fremstad’s commitment to realistic detail was so great that she visited a morgue to use an actual human head to rehearse the scene in which Salome holds aloft the head of John the Baptist. Novelist Willa Cather called her "a great tragic actress."

Alas, the highly paid singer was every bit the prima donna, refusing, for example, to rehearse the day before or after a performance. In 1914, Met director Giulio Gatti-Casazza finally ousted her. She was 43 and "at the height of her powers," notes Davis, but nothing was the same after that. In 1920, she begged to return to the Met, but Gatti refused. Olive Fremstad never sang in public again.