📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Tuesday 1 September
A girl from a village near Popovo ran away to school in Shumen against her father's wishes, and ended up being coached in her greatest role by the man who wrote it. Ljuba Welitsch died on this day in 1996, and the voice that made her famous was first noticed here.
What happened on this day
She was born Lyuba Velichkova in 1913 in Borisovo, now Slavyanovo, out in the Popovo countryside, and worked the family land as a child. Her father wanted her schooling stopped. Her mother did not, and with that backing she left in secret for the gymnasium in Shumen, a city the Bulgarian record describes as having great musical traditions and an active musical life, where concerts happened in the better houses as well as the halls. Her voice was noticed almost at once. She took extra lessons, picked up violin, guitar and mandolin, and hunted down sheet music to teach herself arias. In 1931 the young singer and teacher Georgi Zlatev-Cherkin, freshly graduated from the Vienna Conservatory, came through the city, heard her, and told her to go to Sofia and study opera. He then taught her for free, three times a week. From Sofia she went to Vienna, to Professor Theo Lierhammer, and learned her trade properly with the company at Graz.
Hamburg, Munich and Berlin followed. In Berlin she sang the young Composer in Richard Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos, and Strauss, who was in the audience, was impressed enough to arrange for her to sing the title role in a new production of his Salome at the Vienna Volksoper in 1944, for his eightieth birthday. He prepared the part with her over six weeks and came to rehearsals every day. It became the role she was known for ever afterwards. When the Vienna company came to Covent Garden in 1947 she made a sensation as Donna Anna and Salome, and the Grove Dictionary records that she dazzled London audiences with the passion and vocal purity of what she did. David Webster signed her to the resident company, where between 1948 and 1953 she sang Aida, La boheme, Salome, Tosca and The Queen of Spades, in English, because that was how London did it then. The Times reckoned that as Musetta she more often than not sang whoever was playing Mimi off the stage, and the Mimis included Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. Vocal trouble ended the starring years by the mid-fifties. She moved to character parts and acting, and died in Vienna at eighty-three.
Today's name days
Today is Simeon's, after Simeon the Stylite, a saint of the fourth and fifth centuries who joined a monastery at eighteen, went to live alone in a mountain cave, and then had a stone pillar built to his own design, forty cubits high, and lived on top of it. That is where the name Stylite comes from. He is said to have reached a hundred and three. Bulgarians also know him as Simeon the ploughman.
Nine names are out today: Симеон, Симеона, Симон, Симона, Симо, Сима, Симана, Мона and Моню. Our Bulgarian name-days guide covers the rest of the year, and the etiquette is the usual inversion: the celebrant feeds you, nobody waits to be asked, and you do not arrive with empty hands.
Why this matters for British expats
For once the traffic runs the other way. Welitsch spent five seasons at the Royal Opera House singing in English to English audiences, and the reviews that made her name internationally were written in London papers. She is a Bulgarian who conquered a British institution before most of her own country had heard her sing. The other half is local, and unusually direct for this series: if you live in Shumen, you live in the city that found her. She arrived here as a runaway schoolgirl and left with a career.
Sources and further reading
The account of her childhood, the flight to school in Shumen and the teacher who spotted her comes from her entry on Bulgarian Wikipedia. The English entry is the fuller one on Strauss, Covent Garden and the London reviews, and the details of Simeon the Stylite come from his own Bulgarian article, with today's names from the Bulgarian name-day calendar.