Voice that set opera on fire
QUESTION Is it true that a Wagnerian soprano once sang so loudly that the fire brigade was called?
THIS apocryphal tale is associated with the powerfully voiced Austrian soprano Gertrude Grob-Prandl.
She was born in Vienna on November 11, 1917, within six months of two other great sopranos, Astrid Varnay and Birgit Nilsson. However, she outshone her contemporaries with the range of her voice, which critics described as enormous, prodigious and heroic.
She made her name taking on opera’s big roles and her mastery of Puccini’s Turandot endeared her to Italian audiences, who adored her fiery top notes.
On seeing her Turandot, the soprano Irmgard Seefried famously claimed ‘the walls shook’. This led to various legends, including the one about the fire brigade.
Sadly, a 1951 recording of GrobPrandl performing at La Scala suffers from its terrible recording. One reviewer said it ‘appears to have been recorded through a heavy sock’.
However, the same reviewer said Grob-Prandl’s voice was ‘enormous, but clear, brightly focused, and free of the horrid wobble that affects the singing of many of her rivals and successors’.
Charles Briggs, by email.
QUESTION Did libertarianism spread to Ireland in the 18th century or was the country too cloaked by the church?
LIBERTARIANISM spread through Europe as well as America and while it flourished briefly in Ireland, it was extinguished by the 1798 Rising.
During the latter parts of the 18th century, many new ideas spread about the rights of people. Until then, countries were usually ruled by kings or emperors who brooked little dissent and even less encouragement for the rights of ordinary people.
In 1775, settlers in America went to war with Britain in order to set up a republic. In France, between 1787 and 1799, there was a very violent revolution in which the monarchy was overthrown.
These new ideas came to Ireland, although the two main competing churches, Catholic and Anglican, both had very strong control over their adherents. The Anglican church – Church of Ireland – was then very powerful; when the Irish parliament was in session for much of the 18th century, the members of that parliament had to be Church of Ireland.
The Catholic church, even though it represented the majority of people in Ireland, still operated largely as an underground organisation. But gradually, concessions were made to Catholics; in 1782, they were allowed to buy land, while a decade later, in 1792, they could work as lawyers.
Ireland did produce one political thinker who had a great international influence. Edmund Burke was born in Dublin in 1729 and supported the revolution in America, but not the one in France. But here in Ireland, much of the impetus for change to greater freedoms for the people came from Protestants, rather than Catholics.
Theobald Wolfe Tone was a Protestant lawyer who founded the Society of United Irishmen, with the aim of turning Ireland into an independent republic with religious freedom for everyone. A new radicalism had already taken shape in different parts of Ireland – notably Dublin and Belfast – in the mid-1780s. The Whig party was set up in 1789 as an alliance of radicals, reformist parliamentarians and dissidents from the ruling classes. However, within two years, this alliance started to break up.
But the Society of United Irishmen soon gathered strength, identifying the problem in Ireland as the lack of a national government. Irish people were governed by the English, whose instrument, it was said, was corruption. When the United Irishmen started in Belfast, all the people at the first meeting were Protestant. Branches of the society sprung up in towns and cities across Ireland as the ideas of the United Irishmen gained ground.
Progress was speedy for the next few years, but the authorities in Dublin Castle, representing British rule in Ireland, soon responded with suppressive measures. In 1794, William Drennan became the first leader of the United Irishmen to be tried for sedition.
At the beginning of 1798 the United Irish movement had 280,000 members – but by March that year, most of its leadership had been arrested. Before long, open rebellion broke out. But with the massacre of many Protestants, sentiment began to turn against the United Irishmen, especially in the North where many supporters abandoned the movement.
A complete split between Catholics and Protestants developed, especially in the North, helped by the foundation of the Orange Order in 1795. The 1798 Rising prompted the British government of the time to create the Act of Union in 1800, to create the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The 1803 collapse of Robert Emmet’s rebellion was effectively the end of the United Irishmen.
International libertarianism had its effects in Ireland, but these new ideas about the rights of people only had a comparatively brief impact here. Then the movement was broken up by rebellion and repressive martial law.
Siobhan Molony, Dublin 12.
QUESTION Why did French entomologist Antoine Magnan argue a bumblebee’s flight is aerodynamically impossible?
FURTHER to the earlier answer, the quote ‘according to the laws of aerodynamics, the bumblebee cannot fly, but nobody has told it so it continues to fly anyway’ was used in the post-war period to comment on the shortcomings of scientific theory.
Any attempt in the Thirties to model the flight of a bumblebee on the aerodynamics of a fixedwing aeroplane was doomed to failure since the bumblebee is capable of hovering flight when its forward speed is zero.
However, it is closer to the helicopter than the aircraft.
The high-speed back and forth beating of its wings, approximating the rotation of helicopter blades, generates sufficient lift for its flight.
Any analysis of bumblebee flight would really need to know the speed of the wing, not the speed of the bee. Mike Tate, by email.
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