Blanche Thebom

Blanche Thebom was born in Monessen, Pennsylvania, in September 1915, the daughter of Swedish immigrants, and worked as a stenographer in New York while studying singing privately with Margarete Matzenauer and Edyth Walker. She made her concert début in 1944 and her Metropolitan Opera début in December 1944 as Fricka in *Die Walküre* — the company in which she remained as a leading mezzo-soprano for the next twenty-three years.

Her central repertoire was the dramatic mezzo roles of the Wagner and Strauss operatic stage — Fricka, Brangäne in *Tristan und Isolde*, Waltraute in *Götterdämmerung*, Erda, Marina in *Boris Godunov*, Carmen, Amneris in *Aida*, Eboli in *Don Carlo*, Dalila in *Samson et Dalila*, Adalgisa in *Norma*, and Octavian in *Der Rosenkavalier*. She sang at Bayreuth (the first American mezzo to do so), Covent Garden, the Vienna State Opera, the San Francisco Opera, the Glyndebourne Festival and the Salzburg Festival. She was a regular partner of Bruno Walter, Erich Leinsdorf, Fritz Reiner and Pierre Monteux in studio recording, and toured extensively in concert across the post-war American circuit.

Thebom directed the Atlanta Opera in the 1960s and taught at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music in her later career. She died in San Francisco in March 2010. Music Preserved’s archive includes a range of her Wagner and Verdi work from the 1940s and 1950s.