Helena Forti

Helena Forti (born November 17, 1884 in Berlin , † May 11, 1942 in Vienna ) was a German opera singer (soprano).

Helena Forti as Kundry

Life

Forti was the daughter of the artist couple Anton Forti (singer and painter) and the operetta singer Minna Forti-Hansel . At the age of five she already appeared in children's roles in the Residenz Theater in Dresden, at the age of ten she began studying music, but then initially became an actress. As such, she made her debut in 1900 in Dessau in Goethe's  " The brothers and sisters ." Then she decided to pursue a career as a singer and from 1903 studied with Karl Scheidemantel in Dresden and with Theodor Emmerich in Berlin.

Her debut as an opera singer took place in 1906 at the Dessau court theater as Valentine in Giacomo Meyerbeer's » Huguenots « . In 1907 she was a guest at the Stuttgart Court Opera, sang at the Brno Theater from 1908–09 and at the Deutsches Theater in Prague from 1910–11 under the direction of Angelo Neumann . Guest performances took her in 1909 (as Elisabeth in " Tannhäuser "), 1910 and 1913 to the Vienna Court Opera, 1910 to the Munich Court Opera, 1908 to the Berlin Court Opera (as Valentine in Meyerbeer's "Huguenots"), to the German Theater in Prague, to the Munich Wagner Festival (1911), to the City Theater of Bremen and to the Court Theater of Braunschweig.

In 1911 Forti came to the Dresden Court Opera as a soprano and remained a member of the house until 1924. The first part was Elisabeth in "Tannhauser". She remained a member of the house until 1924, where she sang Adriano in Wagner's »Rienzi« as a farewell role in 1924. On March 5, 1916, Forti sang the role of Myrtocle in the world premiere of Eugen d'Albert's opera " Die toten Augen ". In 1923 she was the marina in " Boris Godunow " in Dresden for the premiere of this opera there, which meant the decisive breakthrough in German-speaking theater for them. She repeated this role at the Opera House (city theater) in Zurich. She successfully made guest appearances in Berlin and Vienna, in Cologne, Amsterdam and Bucharest. Other stage roles: Pamina in "The Magic Flute ", Leonore in Beethoven's " Fidelio ", Senta in " The Flying Dutchman ", Venus in "Tannhäuser", Eva in " Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg ", Fricka in " Rheingold ", Brünnhilde in the ring des Nibelungen , Ariadne auf Naxos by Richard Strauss , Minneleide in " Die Rose vom Liebesgarten " by Hans Pfitzner , Leonore in " Der Troubadour ", Aida , Amelia in Verdi's " A Masked Ball " and Carmen .

In 1914 she sang at the Bayreuth Festival Sieglinde in Richard Wagner's  " The Valkyrie " and Kundry in " Parsifal ". Forti's work in Bayreuth made the couple known to Siegfried and Winifred Wagner .

In 1917 Forti married the actor and later director and theater manager Walter Bruno Iltz .

After her retirement from the opera stage in 1924, which she performed for her husband's sake, Forty trained the actors in the art of gestures at her husband's theaters in Gera and Düsseldorf. After completing her career, she worked as a singing teacher in Vienna.

Forti died in 1942 after a long, severe nervous ailment that had been triggered by her husband's clashes with the Nazi press and the NSDAP in Düsseldorf, and which had "inconceivably and painfully" burdened her and her husband's existence for many years, 55 -yearly in Vienna.

Web links

• Helena Forti in the Bavarian Musicians' Lexicon Online (BMLO)
• Helena Forti at Operissimo  on the basis of the Great Singer Lexicon