Irene Salemka
Soprano with a wide repertoire and talent for delicate phrasing
IRENE SALEMKA, who has died aged 85, was a soprano from small-town Canada who made it big on the European opera stage; she sang Helena in the London premiere of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream under Georg Solti at Covent Garden in 1961 and was leading soprano at Frankfurt State Opera from 1956 to 1964.
She had a large repertoire, performing works ranging from Mozart to Richard Strauss. On one occasion she sang Donna Elvira in a recording of Don Giovanni with Dietrich Fischerdieskau. She sang Mimi in La Bohème at Sadler’s Wells in 1956, returning there the following year to sing Pamina in The Magic Flute, after which one critic wrote that “there was very much to admire in the smooth and creamy quality of her tone … and also to enjoy in her pleasing appearance and stage personality”.
Irene Salemka was born near Steinbach, southeast of Winnipeg, Manitoba, on October 3 1931, the daughter of August Paul Salemka, a Lutheran pastor of Czech origin. The family moved 350 miles west to Weyburn, Saskatchewan, when she was 11. She began performing in a neighbour’s garage, charging local children two cents each to hear works such as Somewhere over the Rainbow.
By the age of 13 her heart was set on becoming an opera singer, even though she had never seen a staging and her only exposure to opera had been through radio broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera, New York. “There was nothing else I wanted to do,” she recalled. “I was driven and I was able to succeed.”
At 19 she moved to Regina, where she worked as a stenographer by day and studied music by night. Two years later she won Opportunity Knocks,a national talent competition on CBC, and in 1952 auditioned for the chorus in Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette at the Montreal Festival. The director was so impressed that he cast her as Juliet.
Soon Irene Salemka was attracting national attention, making her Canadian Opera Company debut as Cio-cio San in Madama Butterfly, and international attention when she beat 200 rival singers in a contest run by the Experimental Opera Theatre of America at Carnegie Hall, New York, to sing in La traviata with the New Orleans Opera Company.
Europe beckoned in the form of Florence, Basel and London, where one critic complemented the “delicacy of her phrasing”, adding that she was also “charming to look at – it is always pleasant to meet a Mimi who has not already one foot in the grave”. She joined Frankfurt Opera in 1956 where Solti, the musical director, took her under his wing. He later invited her to sing Sophie in Der Rosenkavalier in Chicago.
She recalled being overwhelmed by the enthusiasm of her audiences. “Sometimes, I was just amazed thinking here I am with all these sophisticated Europeans who consider opera a part of their life,” she said. She appeared in several television operas in Britain and Germany, while in Austria she made her debut in Vienna with Herbert von Karajan on New Year’s Eve 1963.
Irene Salemka was 11 when she first met James Mcgillivray. He was later her physics tutor at college, but lacked the courage to invite her on a date. It was not until 1973, when he read that she was performing in The Merry Widow in Toronto and made a two-hour drive to see her, that they were reunited.
They married in 1977 and soon afterwards she retired from the stage, thereafter making only occasional appearances. Mcgillivray, who nursed Irene Salemka through dementia, survives her.
Irene Salemka, born October 3 1931, died August 27 2017