Dubious Past Connections
Born 2/1/1890 Paris, France
Died 10/27/1979 Paris, France
Shortly after the Liberation of Paris in 1944, the highly-acclaimed Wagnerian soprano Germaine Lubin was arrested and imprisoned on charges of collaboration with the Nazis. Here is her story.
Lubin trained at the Paris Conservatory from 1908 to 1912, made her debut at the Opéra-Comique as Antonia in Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann (1912), sang at the Paris Opera in D’Indy’s Le Chant de la Cloche (1915), and continued performing at that theater for the next 29 years. In 1921 she began singing the Wagnerian roles for which she became most famous: first, Sieglinde in Die Walküre,
followed by Elsa in Lohengrin.
Her repertoire also included Eva (Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg), Brünnhilde (Die Walküre, Götterdämmerung)and Kundry (Parsifal). In 1930, she sang her first Isolde (Tristan und Isolde), in French, at the Paris Opera, and then in 1938 her first Isolde in German, under Wilhelm Furtwängler. In 1939, Lubin became the first French soprano to sing the role of Isolde at the Bayreuth Festival.
A year later, as the Germans occupied Paris, she sang Isolde with the visiting Staatsoper Berlin under the baton of Herbert von Karajan. Three years later, she was arrested, accused of collaboration with the Nazis.
In 1950 Lubin returned to Paris. For the rest of her life, she taught singing from her home in Paris, where she died in 1979. One of her most famous students was Régine Crespin.