'Wir welken und sterben dahinnen': Carrie Pringle and the solo Flowermaidens of 1882

Musical Times, Spring 2005 by Cormack, David

Wahnfried was en fete for the civil marriage of Blandine and Count Gravina; the religious ceremony, Gravina being a Catholic, took place the next day. Liszt, who had returned from Weimar for the wedding, had been greatly upset on the 241)1 by Wagner's irreverent treatment of an order conferred on him some years earlier by no less a potentate and authority in the world of art than the Bey of Tunis. Wagner, who was feeling well that evening, was in one of his mischievous schoolboy moods; and it was perhaps with the idea of poking fun at Liszt, whose reverence for orders was notorious, that he paced majestically up and down before the company with the silver star on his coat, and then pinned it to the corsage of Fräulein Horson, one of his Flower Maidens. Conduct of this kind was next door to lèse-majesté in Liszt's eyes.10

Pauline Horson subsequently sang many of Mozart's lyrical and coloratura operatic soprano parts, as well as in concert and oratorio. The date of her death is uncertain.

There are a couple of mysterious others.

Frau Bart? 'Frau Bart eventuell allein singen.' This line appears in '"Blumenvater": Heinrich Porges' notes on the Flowermaidens' rehearsals'." Frau Bart is not further identified.

Mathilde Keil? As well as her Flowermaiden role, in 1882 Galfy took the part of First Squire, with Mathilde Keil (1853-1929) as second Squire. Keil also sang in the Flowermaiden chorus. She had made her début at the Munich Court Opera as Pamina in 1875 and remained at Munich until 1886, appearing also under the name Mathilde Keverkeil. She later became Professor at the Innsbruck Conservatory. Albert Lavignac lists the six solo 'Fille-Fleurs' in 1882 as Horson, Meta, Keil, Andre [sic], Belce and Galfy.12 Keil seems to appear here in place of the playbill's Pringle. And with that sixth solo Flowermaiden, Carrie Pringle, fact and conjecture start to vie.

THE first British singer to appear at Bayreuth is normally said to be Marie Brema.13 Henry Wood, for example, says: 'Although Liverpool born, she was certainly German in style. She gave a magnificent performance of Gluck's Orpheus at Covent Garden in 1892 and was the first English singer to be engaged for a Bayreuth Festival.'14 Wood had evidently never heard of Carrie Pringle, but famously we have Cosima Wagner's diary entry for what must have been the composer's first meeting with the singer: 'In the evening a singer - Carrie Pringle - who sings Agathe's aria very tolerably (R. observed recently that some people one could only refer to approvingly as "tolerable", "bearable").'15 And Wagner himself explains why she was there: 'In the course of this winter' (admittedly the winter of 1878/79 rather than in 1881)

'talented singers' of the kind I have just described - generally highly praised in the newspapers - have announced themselves here, presumably on the assumption that I would immediately engage them for 'Parsifal', for example: I generally asked them to sing 'Agathe's' aria from the 'Freischiitz', and had to show them, bar by bar, that they simply had no idea of what they were singing, let alone how they should sing it.16