Talk:Anja Silja

Silja, Cluytens, and Wagner

I removed the following passage made in reference to Anja Silja's reaction to the death of André Cluytens: ". . .and Silja vowed never to sing the music of Richard Wagner again as she felt it impossible with any other conductor." This statement suggests that Silja performed Wagner extensively with Cluytens, and did not perform much Wagner after his death. Absent explicit documentation of Silja's views on this subject, a cursory glance at her discography casts this statement in serious doubt.

The fact is that Silja's most famous Wagner assumptions were not made consistently with Cluytens (who was not, to my knowledge, a dyed-in-the-wool Wagnerian). Moreover, many of her Wagner recordings were made after Cluytens' death: she participated in a very highly regarded cycle of Der Ring des Nibelungen conducted by Karl Böhm at Bayreuth in 1967 released commercially on the Philips label, and sang Senta in Otto Klemperer's 1968 recording of Der fliegende Holländer (recently re-released by EMI as one of its "Great Recordings of the Century.") When her ex-husband Dohnányi was given the green light to record a Ring cycle of his own with the Cleveland Orchestra in the early 1990s (a cycle that was ultimately only half-completed and has since been deleted from the catalog), Silja stepped into the contralto role of Fricka.

More generally, I wonder if the emphasis on Silja's career as a happy homewrecker is somewhat overindulged. She was critically acclaimed as a singer of uncommon prowess and versatility, and this article makes her come off like a succubus first and a singer second. It makes for sensational reading to be sure, but it's hard to take an encyclopedia seriously when it reads like a tabloid. Mdleonar 21:16, 4 March 2006 (UTC)