Met Star Bidding a Long Goodby : Opera Diva Leonie Rysanek Makes a Stop in L.A. on Her Final Tour Ending in 1996

Drawing herself upright, her blue eyes sparkling, Metropolitan Opera star Leonie Rysanek delivers a weighty opinion about the murderous, guilt-ridden queen Klytamnestra in Richard Strauss’ “Elektra.” For one who exploits the drama in every part, Klytamnestra provides the full range of emotions--from power-wielding craziness to pitiful neediness.

“Of course, she’s horrid,” says Rysanek, who will sing the role for Los Angeles Music Center Opera, beginning Saturday. “Who isn’t horrible in this opera, (except) the boring Chrysothemis? That’s a horrible story . . . television today is nothing! ‘Terminator’ is nothing!”

Klytamnestra was forced to marry Agamemnon, she continues. “He took their first child, Iphigenia, from her and said, ‘I have to sacrifice her so I can win the (Trojan) war.’ She didn’t know Iphigenia was saved by the gods. . . . This is a torn woman. I absolutely feel sympathy for her. Absolutely. There is the woman also--not the queen, the woman.”

Rysanek, 67, was speaking in a recent interview in Placido Domingo’s Bunker Hill condo, where the tenor, now absent, invited her to stay during her current engagement. The celebrated if controversial Austrian singer is saying goodby to Los Angeles as one in a circuit of appearances that will culminate in her career farewell at the Met, where she will sing the Countess in Tchaikovsky’s “Pikovaya Dama” in January, 1996.

During her long career, Rysanek has been lionized--or criticized--almost as much for her histrionic intensity as for her opulent voice with its gleaming top extension. She invented, for example, Sieglinde’s much imitated coital scream when Siegmund pulls the sword from the tree in the first act of “Die Walkure.”

Her passionate acting was, she says, “not for everybody. I was always singing from my (solar plexus). But that’s me. Leave it or take it. I can’t change. I can’t change now.”

Los Angeles unfortunately missed most of her career. She sang Kabanicha in Janacek’s “Kat’a Kabonova” here in 1988, but before that was heard only when the San Francisco Opera visited the Shrine Auditorium in the late ‘50s. “You (Los Angeles) didn’t have the tradition of opera, unfortunately,” she says. “I never understood it.”

Rysanek made her Metropolitan Opera debut in 1959 as Lady Macbeth, replacing Maria Callas, whom Met manager Rudolf Bing had fired four months earlier. Some Callas fans resented her for this. But she would go on to sing some 20 roles at the Met, including Elisabeth, the Marschallin, Tosca, Salome, Aida, Elsa and Desdemona.

“When I sang Tosca, it was fine,” she recalls. “But when I was engaged to do Desdemona, I got death threats. For months, it was going on. ‘We will shoot her, we will kill her, she never is allowed to sing Desdemona. She’s a German voice, not an Italian voice.’

“So I went to Mr. Bing and I said, ‘Mr. Bing, thank you for the honor. I will not sing Desdemona.’ And he says to me, ‘Are you crazy? You cannot do this.’ He closed the standing room--this was the old Met--and had police stationed there. And I was like this (shaking her arms in fright). But it was a drama, so I couldn’t care less.”

Despite her success, she underwent a severe vocal crisis in the 1960s, at about the time her marriage to her first husband, Rudolf Grossmann, was breaking up. “I don’t want to talk about this,” she says. “It was private. Of course, it didn’t help my singing.” She married her second husband, Ernst Ludwig Gausmann, or Elu for short, in 1968, and her vocal revival dates from that happy period.

About 10 years ago, however, she began shifting from stratospheric roles to dramatic mezzo-soprano parts such as Strauss’ Herodias and Janacek’s Kabanicha and Kostelnicka.

“I only took on parts which I think were good for the voice, good acting parts,” she says. “That’s always very important to me. My success now in these three or four parts I’m singing is because I can do both, low and high notes. The top was always there, but the bottom came with age.”

She is probably the only singer in history to have sung all three leading female roles in “Elektra,” although she sang just the title role in a 1981 film conducted by Karl Bohm and directed by Gotz Friedrich. The “boring” Chrysothemis, on the other hand, she sang for decades.

Looking back, she says there are only two roles she regrets not singing--Isolde and Brunnhilde in “Gotterdammerung.”

“But this is the reason that I’m still alive, believe me, because I never oversang,” she says. “I usually undersang.”

Rysanek does not leave a huge recorded legacy. “I was never happy making recordings,” she says. “At the microphone, they would say, ‘Miss Rysanek, you move too much. Please stay still. Don’t do this, don’t do that.’ So it made me (tense).”

Her future plans include no recitals. “No, no. I sang so long. God bless me . . . Come on, I had a wonderful, tremendous life, tremendous career, a wonderful marriage. What more can I ask?”

Teaching, too, is out. “They asked me to do master classes. I said, ‘I don’t believe in master classes.’ What can you do really in one or two hours? Nothing. This is not honest. I’m sorry. It’s a showcase for the once-famous singer. I believe in teaching, but I can’t do it. I’m not patient enough. It bores me to death.”

Unlike other opera singers, however, Rysanek does not feel the golden age is past. “Oh yes, there are a lot of great voices today, especially from America,” she says. “You have three or four great voices--I’m talking about sopranos--I don’t know the men so well. Sharon Sweet. Ealynn Voss--she’s singing Chrysothemis. Deborah Voigt. Cheryl Studer. Their voices are so beautiful. Jessye Norman, too, but not so much opera. There are great voices.”

Still, she hedges. “Well, what I am a little bit missing now is, when you used to hear someone, just three notes and immediately you knew, ‘Ah, that’s Rysanek. That’s Domingo, Pavarotti.’ These others sing very good technically, better than I ever did. But there are very few that really throw themselves into a role. Maybe because of their huge figures, it’s so difficult to project your feelings. I was once a little heavier than I am now, but not that fat. It has nothing to do with the size of a voice. It’s not true. It’s an excuse.”

* Los Angeles Music Center Opera will present Strauss’ “Elektra” Saturday-Sept. 23 at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave. $21-$115. (213) 365-3500 (Ticketmaster).