Anna Russell, 94; operatic wit was revered by music lovers
NEW YORK -- Anna Russell, revered by music lovers for her 22-minute sendup of Richard Wagner's epic, four-opera ``Ring" cycle at New York's Town Hall and other venues, died yesterday in Batemans Bay, Australia. She was 94.
Born in London in 1911, Ms. Russell studied at the Royal College of Music and began a disastrous, short-lived career as an opera singer. A performance of ``Cavalleria Rusticana" came to a premature halt when Ms. Russell twisted her ankle on stage, slipped, fell, and sent the set crashing. The orchestra collapsed in fits of laughter, the curtain came down and Ms. Russell was fired.
Lovely singing was not her strong suit.
``If you go in there with a tin voice," she said of the Royal College, ``you'll come out with a loud tin voice."
Ms. Russell's mother was Canadian, and the family returned in 1939 to Toronto, where she began to appear on local radio stations as an entertainer. Her first break came when Sir Ernest MacMillan, director of the Toronto Symphony, invited her to appear as a soloist with his orchestra. She had the house in stitches.
The recording of Ms. Russell's 1953 Town Hall recital, available on
In ``Das Rheingold," she explains, Wotan is confronted by ``my friend Erda," a green torso. ``She tells him, `Weiche, Wotan! Weiche!' Which means, `Be careful, Wotan, be careful!' She then bears him eight daughters."
As Ms. Russell pondered the complex family relations of the doomed and addled Siegfried and followed him from the rock of Brunnhilde to the palace of Gutrune, she paused to note that Gutrune is ``the only woman that Siegfried's ever come across who wasn't his aunt. I'm not making this up, you know!"
The last line became Ms. Russell's catchphrase, and the title of her 1985 autobiography. She toured the world's concert halls and music festivals with her performances, for which she wrote her own music and lyrics. Her success lay in her unique combination of biting humor, self-parody and in-depth knowledge of the music she clearly loved.
She took occasional operatic roles, including the witch in New York City Opera's 1953 ``Hansel and Gretel" and the Duchess of Crackenthorp in the Canadian Opera Company's 1977 ``Daughter of the Regiment."
She gave a farewell concert at Carnegie Hall in 1984, retired in 1986, and eventually moved from Unionville, Ontario, to Batemans Bay in Australia's New South Wales, where she lived with her adopted daughter Diedre Prussak.
