Born in St. Louis on June 16, 1903 (some sources say 1899), Helen Traubel was of a musical family and at thirteen began taking vocal lessons from Vetta Karst. She left high school a short time later to devote full time to singing, and in 1925 she made her concert debut with the St. Louis Symphony. She toured midwestern and southern cities with the orchestra, sang at Lewisohn Stadium in New York City and with the New York Philharmonic in 1926, and later sang a concert series with the Philadelphia Orchestra.
Her singing was confined largely to church choirs until 1937, when Walter Damrosch invited her to create the role of Mary Rutledge in his opera The Man Without a Country, which was premiered by the Metropolitan Opera in May of that year. For the next two years she continued her training in New York while singing frequently on the radio. She made her New York concert debut at Town Hall in October 1939, and after a warmup performance in Chicago she made her debut in the Met╒s regular season as Sieglinde in Die Walkƒre in December 1939.
With the departure of Kirsten Flagstad in 1941, Traubel became the Met╒s leading Wagnerian soprano, a distinction she held for a dozen years. To a magnificent voice, controlled throughout its range and capable of fine emotional shading, she added a dignified and strong dramatic presence. She made several national and European concert tours, appeared in operatic productions in Buenos Aires, Mexico City, San Francisco, and other cities, and was a popular recording artist.
In 1949╨1950 she served as musical supervisor for Margaret Truman, the daughter of President Harry S. Truman. She also sang frequently on radio and television. In 1950 she became part owner of the St. Louis Browns baseball team, and later in the year she published privately her first book, a mystery entitled The Ptomaine Canary. Her second, The Metropolitan Opera Murders, appeared in 1951. In 1953 the Met╒s general manager, Rudolph Bing, objected strenuously to her appearances in New York nightclubs, whereupon she resigned her contract. She subsequently appeared on Broadway in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Pipe Dream, 1955, and in several motion pictures. Her autobiography, St. Louis Woman, written with R. G. Hubler, appeared in 1959. She died in Santa Monica, California, on July 28, 1972.
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