Margarethe Arndt-Ober: What happened during World War II?

A coda on casting in the time of conflict

In Friday’s edition of Undone, I took a look at the life and career of German mezzo-soprano Margarethe Arndt-Ober. If the available recordings of Ober (who used her maiden name onstage), combined with the press she garnered following her US debut, are any indication, she may have become the Anna Netrebko or Elīna Garanča of her time. But the US involvement in World War I furloughed Ober from the Metropolitan Opera stage beginning in 1917. 

Her subsequent lawsuit against the Met didn’t engender support for her to return to the company following the end of the War. Of course, hindsight being 20/20, it’s hard to comprehend what would have happened to Ober and many of her fellow colleagues — including Melanie Kurt, Johannes Sembach, Carl Braun, and Hermann Weil — who were sidelined due to anti-German sentiment and a sentiment described at the time as “America First.”

Carl Braun joined with Ober and baritone Otto Goritz in the failed 1919 German opera company project, and never sang at the …