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About Helge Lindberg
- Helge Igor Lindberg (1887–1928) was a Finnish opera singer who was a popular concert singer in the 1920s throughout Europe.
- He was also a sculptor.
- Helge Lindberg first studied violin at the conservatory in Helsinki.
- In 1907, he studied voice in Munich and finished his studies in Florence.
- He was known for singing works by Johann Sebastian Bach, George Frideric Handel and Yrjö Kilpinen. From Musica Fennica (1965) (Timo Makinin and Seppo Nummi, authors): "Helge Igor Lindberg, [a] baritone, spent a significant part of his life in Vienna.
- He was a great individualist both as a private person and as an artist, and his legendary career was to be both strange and extraordinary.
- Immediately on leaving school he left the country to study singing abroad.
- He first travelled to Munich and from there to Florence and Stuttgart.
- In 1919 he settled in Vienna and died there suddenly in 1928 after a serious illness.
- His best years were the last years of his life.
- Helge Lindberg was a powerful man, an athlete both in his looks and in his artistic demands.
- He was famous for his breathing technique.
- He liked to sing the arias of Bach and Handel and had mastered their long phrases, developing his own technique to an almost superhuman degree.
- He was also interested in his contemporary modernists, such as Schoenberg.
- Of Finnish composers his repertoire mostly included Kilpinen's songs.
- His fame as a singer was based on a technique that had been developed to perfection and on his minutely-studied performing style." He received a medal from the King of Sweden for his singing.
- His known sculptures include a 12-inch wooden statue of himself as a satyr (1927); a sitting Buddha; a crucified Christ; and a black stone bust of his second wife (lost in Buenos Aires after her death).He died of pneumonia in 1928 and his ashes are interred on a small island off the southern coast of Finland (San Scher), which he had bought as a summer retreat.
- He was survived by his first wife Ernestine (Erna); his second wife Friederike (Fritzi), a member of the novelty group the Seven Viennese Singing Sisters (see Wikipedia link); and his sons Kim, Lars, and Dian. A biography was written on his life by Kosti Vehanen: Vehanen, Kosti: Mestarilaulaja Helge Lindberg.
- Kustannusyhtiö Kirja, Helsinki 1929. Known recordings include: "Frohsinn und Schwermut" (Händel), "Wie glänzt der helle Mond" (Wolf) and "Der Wanderer" (Schubert) and "Froh lacht die Brust" (see link to song below).
- Six recordings have been digitized and placed online by the Music Library of the National Library of Finland and can be found in Raita, a collection of digitized early Finnish sound recordings, by searching this site with "Helge Lindberg". Links to pictures are given below.
Read more at Wikipedia