Michael Letchford, Therese Malten: Wagner’s Devoted Kundry

When the late Adam Kurakin called me in 1975 to say that he had acquired a small collection of photographs, postcards, programmes and a scrapbook containing press cuttings from the St Petersburg newspapers of 1898, all featuring the great Wagnerian soprano Therese Malten, I was intrigued. Therese Malten had taken part in the first production of Parsifal at Bayreuth in 1882. This fact alone excited my interest and I purchased the collection, which also included single diary pages with notes in both German and English and press cuttings from Dresden newspapers. Unable to pursue the necessary research at that time, I stored the collection, much of which is unique, in a safe place. Thirty years later I was able to look more closely at the Malten collection and decided that I would research and organise the material. The result is Therese Malten: Wagner’s Devoted Kundry, which I plan to publish in 2010.