Irene Eisinger

Irene Eisinger was an Austrian soprano who studied in Vienna with Paula Mark-Neusser and made her debut at Basel in 1926. Two years later she joined Berlin's Kroll Opera, where she sang Susanna, moving to the Städtische Oper in 1931, before leaving Germany as a Jew in 1933 to join the German Opera at Prague. Guest appearances in Vienna led to an engagement at the Salzburg Festival, where she sang under Bruno Walter from 1930 to 1933, creating Hermione in the revised Die ägyptische Helena there. England became her second home once she established herself as a favourite at Glyndebourne, singing Despina, Papagena, Blonde and Susanna, and in 1940 she sang Polly Peachum in Glyndebourne's production of The Beggar's Opera, returning with the company in Così fan tutte at Edinburgh in 1949. At Covent Garden in the winter of 1936 she sang Gretel and Adele, and at Cambridge in 1939 she sang Ilia in the then almost unknown Idomeneo. She is remembered above all as Despina in the first recording of Così fan tutte (1935).