Opera Singer. A celebrated dramatic soprano of the early 20th. century, she is remembered primarily as a Wagnerian. Born Anna Olivia Rundquist, she was adopted by an American couple named Fremstad and was raised initially in Christiania, Sweden, where she showed early talent on the piano. The family moved to Minneapolis when she was 12 with Olive begining voice training in New York at 19 then traveling to Berlin for further study with famed soprano Lilli Lehmann. Her operatic debut came in the mezzo role of Azucena at an 1895 performance of Verdi's "Il Trovatore" in Cologne; after three years there she played Vienna, Bayreuth, and London before returning to America where she sang at New York's Metropolitan Opera 351 times between 1903 and 1914. Not an especially pleasant lady her professionalism was nevertheless respected and one legendary story speaks to her passion for perfection: preparing for the title role in a 1907 production of Richard Strauss' "Salome" she wanted her dance with the head of John the Baptist to be realistic. The accounts differ but in one version of the tale she rehearsed with a calf's head obtained from a slaughter house while in the other she used a human head that she somehow got from the New York City Morgue. In the operas of Richard Wagner Olive reigned supreme; Venus in "Tannhauser", Elsa in "Lohengrin", Kundry in "Parsifal", the title heroine of "Tristan und Isolde", and the Ring leads were uniquely hers. As was the case for some other spinto sopranos her rendering of Bizet's cigarette girl Carmen was not as well received though she had some success with it and indeed sang it with Caruso in San Francisco the night before the great earthquake of 1906. She retired in 1920 after Metropolitan General Manager Gatti-Casazza declined to cast her as Leonore in Verdi's "La Forza del Destino" then tried her hand at teaching but apparently wasn't very good at it, even revolting her students by making them study the larynx in a severed head. Olive claimed no interest in romance though she did have two brief failed marriages. Most of her fairly small output of recordings has been preserved on CD. Note: Her tombstone gives her year of birth as 1868 but most sources including "Grove's" list it as 1871. Olive is neither nor the last lady of the theater whose true age is unclear.