Background
Both her parents were Hungarian and born in small towns in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but she was born in Stockholm, Sweden, where her parents were living during part of World War I. They named her "Astrid" in honor of the teenaged Princess Astrid of Sweden, a popular figure in that country. Astrid's mother Maria Junghans (who changed her name to Javor when she took to the stage as a singer), born October 15, 1889, was a noted coloratura soprano with acoustic recordings to her credit, and her father Alexander Varnay (born September 11, 1889) was a spinto tenor. Opera was the family business, and Varnay grew up backstage at the world's opera houses. Her father founded, and both parents ran, the Opera Comique Theater in Kristiania (later Oslo), Norway (1918-1921). During one performance, Astrid was swaddled in the lower drawer of the dressing room chest of drawers of the young Kirsten Flagstad.
The family moved to Argentina, then New York, where her father died at age 35 in 1924. Two years later her mother married tenor Fortunato de Angelis. Varnay had been studying to be a pianist but decided at age eighteen to become a singer and had intensive vocal lessons with her mother.
Read more about this topic: Astrid Varnay
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