Renate Holm

Renate Holm (born 10 August 1931) is a German-Austrian film actress and operatic soprano.

Holm was born as Renate Franke in Berlin. She says she decided to become an opera singer when she was twelve after being inspired by a film version of Madama Butterfly with Maria Cebotari in the lead role. Her mother had taken her to the cinema as a treat in celebration of an excellent school report. In 1943 her parents separated. That same year women with children were evacuated from the bombed out centre of Berlin, and the Frankes were sent to the Spreewald region roughly 90 km (50 miles) to the east of the city. Appreciative of her new surroundings, she lived out the rest of her childhood in and around the village of Ragow  where her mother at one stage served as local mayor and registrar. Renate's first taste of musical performance came in Lübben as a member of the school and church choir. She was a pupil at the Paul-Gerhardt-Gymnasium, a six kilometer (four mile) cycle journey from her home at Ragow. In Berlin she had attended a single-sex school, and the Paul-Gerhardt-Gymnasium provided her first experience of mixed gender schooling: fifty years later she would still be in touch with two friends – a tenor and a bass – with whom she had formed a school singing trio.

The region had ended up administered as part of the Soviet occupation zone, which in October 1949 was relaunched as the Soviet sponsored German Democratic Republic (East Germany). In 1950 her mother arranged for a meeting with Waltraud Waldeck, a local singer and singing teacher who declared that Renate had a natural singing voice and should take singing lessons. She had already been encouraged with her singing at school, and now Waltraud Waldeck became Renate Franke's first "private" singing teacher. Franke trained and then worked as a dentists' assistant in order to finance the singing lessons and satisfy her mother's insistence that she should have a "proper trade". (Had the singing career not blossomed, she might have qualified a dentist.) Later she worked in the local theatre, walking up and down the 150 steps in the auditorium with a large tray full of cigarettes and chocolates for sale pressed against her stomach. Meanwhile she studied privately with the internationally known Coloratura soprano, Maria Ivogün in Berlin and later, after moving to Vienna, with Maria Hittorf.