Galatea No Longer

For most of her operatic career, Berlin-born Soprano Anja Silja, 27, got better coverage in German tabloids and picture magazines than in the critical columns. It was easy to see why. Her breezy, bohemian style of life made good copy, especially with photos of her in miniskirt or sleek red Jaguar. Lately, Anja Silja has been making musical headlines as well, and is now hailed as Europe's fastest-rising prima donna.

Last week she rounded off a series of three appearances in a production of La Traviata created for her at the Frankfurt Opera. It was a lusty performance that emphasized the low-life origins of the heroine (who in the Dumas novel went from waif to courtesan to wreck within eight years). Silja contributed considerably to that characterization with a tense, far-ranging voice (31 octaves) and a spectacular stage presence that can flash with the music's mood from tigress to tragedienne. The ultimate tribute to the Silja Traviata was apparent immediately after each performance; at the Frankfurt Opera Restaurant young girls startled their escorts by unconsciously adopting the Silja stance and mannerisms, enraptured with the emotion of the event.

Overriding Tradition. Silja's life story would make an operatic libretto in itself. The illegitimate child of a Finnish actor and a German actress, she was raised by her grandfather, an unconventional dabbler in voice and piano coaching, fiction, painting and sculpture. He trained her himself, and launched her at twelve on a concert tour. When she was 16, he allowed her to begin her apprenticeship in opera.

She was all of 19 when she auditioned for Bayreuth's innovation-minded director, the late Wieland Wagner, grandson of the composer. Instantly, she says, "I knew he was going to become the most important person in my life." Wieland felt the same. "When I heard her I immediately knew that there was nothing I could still teach her," he said later. The following year he overrode tradition and his family's objections and starred his unknown find in The Flying Dutchman. Also, in a move that his grandfather would have understood perfectly, Wieland, then a married man of 41, moved Anja and himself into a Munich apartment.

Distracter. Under Wieland's tutelage, Silja appeared in 33 productions. Still, as long as she played Galatea to Wieland's Pygmalion, many listeners regarded her as an extension of her mentor. Now, however, she is making it handsomely on her own--but not at Bayreuth. Soon after Wieland's death in 1966, his widow fired Anja on the grounds that her miniskirts were "distracting the personnel."

Nowadays, her base of operations is the Munich Opera, where she will shortly begin rehearsals for the world premiere of Carl Orff's Prometheus. U.S. audiences, who know her so far only by reputation and a few recordings, will get to see and hear her for themselves, at the Chicago Lyric Opera this year and at the Metropolitan in 1969.

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