Kerstin Meyer
Swedish mezzo who charmed audiences at Covent Garden and Glyndebourne in the 1960s and ’70s
KERSTIN MEYER, who has died aged 92, was a Swedish mezzo-soprano who enjoyed a successful career in Europe and America, including in Britain, where she made her debut at the Royal Opera in June 1960 as Dido in Berlioz’s The Trojans alongside Jon Vickers and Josephine Veasey.
The reviews were ecstatic. “Swedish singer’s triumph,” read the headline on one, adding: “Dignified in bearing, having a well-produced mezzo-soprano voice of fine quality, one of those natural actresses who do not assume but become the character they are representing, Miss Meyer built up the Queen of Carthage with stroke upon stroke of vocal and histrionic effect and so made a brilliant debut in our Royal Opera House.”
The following summer Kerstin Meyer appeared with her compatriot Elisabeth Söderström in the first English-language performances of Henze’s Elegy for Young Lovers at Glyndebourne, declaring that the reason she enjoyed the Sussex opera house so much was because “in the evenings I come from a performance to my car and a voice near me simply says ‘Baa’.”
She was of similar height and physique to Elisabeth Söderström, who was 11 months her senior. They also benefited from similar vocal training, which meant that their voices matched and on stage they could present as sisters, such as in Mozart’s Così fan tutte. At one time they sang so many oratorios together in their native Sweden that they became known as the “holy sisters”, and in the mid-1970s they made an album together that included the notorious Cats’ Duet attributed to Rossini.
Kerstin Margareta Meyer was born in Stockholm on April 3 1928, an only child; her grandfather had emigrated from Poland to Sweden and all his seven children played musical instruments. Her father was an orchestral trumpet player but gave up performing to run a music shop, where he was assisted by her mother; both were killed in a traffic accident in 1961.
Kerstin was a dreamy child who would sit for hours at the piano, an instrument that suited her long fingers. Despite spending all her free time and pocket money at the cinema, she wanted to become a singer and studied at the Royal Academy of Music in Stockholm. “I just wanted to sing,” she told Opera magazine in 1973. “I used to look forward to my first performances in concerts as if I was going out for a date.”
Her first professional role was as Azucena in Verdi’s Il trovatore for the Stockholm Opera. She was 24, and the 58-year-old Set Svanholm was cast as Manrico, her son. Her next role was as Delilah with Svanholm as Samson. Then came Carmen, in which she was seen by Wieland Wagner, who engaged her for his 1959 Hamburg production and set her on course for an international career that included almost 200 roles.
During the late 1950s she gave several concert performances in Britain, including Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde with the Hallé Orchestra, the composer’s Eighth Symphony with the London Symphony
Orchestra, and a selection of works at the 1959 Proms, where one critic observed: “She commands immediate attention with the rich and noble beauty of her tone, which flows with the smoothest and shapeliest of lines.” She also visited that year’s Edinburgh Festival with the Swedish Opera.
Kerstin Meyer returned regularly in the 1960s and 1970s to both the Royal Opera and Glyndebourne, creating the title role in Gottfried von Einem’s The Visit of the Old Lady in 1974 at the latter. Meanwhile, in 1960 she gave her first performance at the
Met, in the title role of Carmen, with Jon Vickers as her Don José. “She is slim, sexy looking and occasionally hisses like a cat,” declared the The New York Times critic.
Although she found the pressure of living in New York for two months at a time too much, she returned to the city in 1967 with Hamburg Opera’s touring production of Gunther Schuller’s The Visitation. Before one performance she received an unusual telephone call. “They wanted me to tone down the sexy scenes,” she recalled. “The opera had been optioned by San Francisco, and the ladies from the Guild were coming and they had heard about all the immoral activity going on onstage.”
By the early 1980s Kerstin Meyer had retired from the active roster of the Royal Opera in Stockholm and settled 50 miles to the north, in Uppsala. However, she still appeared on stage whenever there was a role that interested her or an invitation to a place that she had not previously visited: in 1981 she revived her Carmen in Tashkent.
From 1984 to 1994 she was rector of University College of Opera, Stockholm, while her final stage appearance was in 2013 in Sondheim’s A Little Night Music with Malmö Opera.
Kerstin Meyer, a handsome woman with a lively sense of humour, was appointed honorary CBE in 1995. In 1974 she married Björn Bexelius, a Swedish ballet critic and arts administrator. He died in 1997.