Girls brought up on the farm in country Victoria in Australia are usually fit and healthy, learning to ride very young. Certainly Marjorie Lawrence from Dean’s Marsh had no problems in this department.
So in January 1936, when she had her chance to make her debut at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in one of operas’s most demanding roles, Brünnhilde in Wagner’s Twilight of the Gods, she thought that it might be a good idea to follow the composer’s specific instructions – to mount and ride her horse, Grane, on-stage into Siegfried’s blazing funeral pyre, the climax of the opera.
Perhaps, she thought, it would be only polite to check this out with the director and conductor in advance. Under no circumstances, they responded. It would be much too risky.
And why take the risk? It had never been done. Unthinkable. Just do what your illustrious predecessors have done – at Bayreuth and Covent Garden, in Vienna and Paris, here at the Met. Lead the horse quietly off-stage behind the bonfire.
For many of those predecessors, to do what she was proposing would be a physical impossibility – several would have been just too large and most of the rest wouldn’t have been able to ride anyway.
Of course, to the astonishment of the audience, the critics and not least the stage director and the conductor, she leapt adroitly aboard and rode Grane confidently exactly as the libretto instructs, singing all the while.
The New York newspapers reported the event in full. She had sung magnificently. And now she was a star.
The performance was recorded live and was issued on CD in 2004. Here she is singing Brünnhilde, recorded in Paris and in French:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8UmfC-6ToA
Sadly she was struck down by polio in her prime at 32. But that's another story.
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