Inge Borkh
Fiery soprano who became one of the leading interpreters of the operas of Richard Strauss
INGE BORKH, the dramatic soprano, who has died probably aged 101, was a fiery-voiced Straussian of the 1950s and 1960s; her calling card was Salome, in which she sang the title role on numerous occasions.
She was one of Georg Solti’s favourite Strauss sopranos, appearing in the role for him in Chicago. She also sang under him at Covent Garden in 1967 as Barak’s wife in Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten with Regina Resnik as the nurse, although both singers had to be taken to hospital during rehearsals after tripping over scenery in the dark.
Inge Borkh’s only appearance as Salome in London was in 1959 conducted by Rudolf Kempe, the first time for many years that the work had been heard in its original German at Covent Garden. Although her strong and effortless sound impressed some critics, others felt that her performance and attire (described as being “like Tony Curtis in Some Like it Hot”) were too comical.
Her piercing voice and statuesque figure may not have been those of the fragile 16-yearold princess envisaged by Strauss and Oscar Wilde. But writing in Musical America after her Metropolitan Opera debut in the role under Dimitri Mitropoulos in 1958, the critic Ronald Eyer noted approvingly: “She has developed a characterisation in which every detail is calculated.”
Inge Borkh was no less passionate in Strauss’s other operas, including the title role in Elektra which, according to the New York Times, she sang in a concert performance at Carnegie Hall “with unremitting authority”.
She was born Inge Simon at Mannheim, Germany, on May 26 1917 (though some sources say 1921); her Jewish father was a diplomat and her mother was from a family of actors and singers. In 1933 they left Germany for Vienna, where young Inge studied acting and dancing at the Max Reinhardt Seminary, attached to the Burgtheater.
She appeared on stage at the Landestheater in Linz in 1937, but after the Anschluss of March 1938 the family moved to Geneva, where she adopted the stage name Inge Borkh. It was around this time that her natural singing voice was discovered and she was dispatched to Milan for voice lessons. Her professional debut was as the gypsy woman Czipra in Johann Strauss II’S operetta The Gypsy Baron at Lucerne in 1940.
Her first appearance as Salome was at Bern in 1943 and by the end of the war she had cemented her reputation as one of the leading interpreters of Strauss’s roles. One critic in Chicago in 1956 wrote of her dramatic flair: “You never saw such an active Salome. Blonde and hearty she skips around the stage, embraces Herod repeatedly [and] does a Dance of the Seven Veils with a touch of the danse du ventre and some rolling on the floor.”
Other composers were not neglected, and in 1951 she came to international prominence singing the role of Magda Sorel in the German-language premiere of Gian Carlo Menotti’s The Consul at Basel. The following year she appeared twice at Bayreuth, as Sieglinde in Die Walküre and as Freia in Das Rheingold, and joined the Bavarian State Opera in Munich.
Inge Borkh made her US debut at San Francisco in 1953 in Elektra (with Solti, who was also making his US debut), and three years later she took part in the American premiere of Benjamin Britten’s Gloriana in Cincinnati. It was not until the end of that decade that she was first seen at the Met and Covent Garden. She continued to appear on the opera stage throughout the 1960s, broadening her repertoire to include Tosca, Turandot and Fidelio.
Her final appearances were as Elektra in Palermo, Italy, in 1973, but she continued to take part in concerts and created her own cabaret show, Inge Borkh Sings Her Memoirs. By 1977 she had returned to straight acting. Her autobiography, Ich Komm von Theater Nicht Los (“I can’t shake the theatre”) appeared in 1996.
In her long retirement Inge Borkh was often a juror on singing competitions. She remained an opera fan, travelling great distances to catch a production that had caught her interest or to see a favourite singer, such as the German baritone Christian Gerhaher.
Her first marriage, in 1947, was to a lawyer from Basel. Her second was to the bass-baritone Alexander Welitsch, who died in 1991.
Inge Borkh, born May 26 1917, died August 26 2018