Sunday Classics special: Remembering Margaret Price, Part 5 -- as Weber's Agathe

We've already seen and heard the glorious Overture to Weber's Oberon, in a terrific performance by the Berlin Philharmonic under Mariss Jansons, in my "comfort music" post, "Just like there's comfort food, there's comfort music." There are a surprising number of video clips of the Freischütz Overture, but I haven't found anything anywhere near the quality of Jansons' Oberon. This performance by the Spanish Radio-Television Symphony Orchestra under Michal Newterowicz isn't bad, but I'm afraid we're going to have to supplement it in the click-through.

by Ken

Sor far in our remembrance of soprano Margaret Price we've focused on her Mozart roles, which for reasons I've tried to explain seemed only natural to me. Now we move beyond. (Programming note: The original plan was to encompass Weber's Der Freischütz and Richard Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos tonight. Once again, by the time I had all the parts laid out, it seemed to me just too much. So we'll do Freischütz and Ariadne tomorrow.)

It wasn't much of a stretch from her Mozart roles when Margaret Price joined conductor Wolfgang Sawallisch in Rome in January 1973 for a broadcast performance of Carl Maria von Weber's Der Freischütz. Although hardly comic in subject matter or tone, Freischütz grows straight out of the world of the Singspiel as represented by Mozart's Abduction from the Seraglio and Magic Flute -- a stage piece in which musical numbers of operatic musical stature are bridged by spoken dialogue, the form still used by Beethoven for Fidelio, and even as Weber was boosting his requirements in terms of tonal format and vocal size (we are well on the way to the Wagnerian soprano), he couldn't let go of the use of florid writing not at all easy for the kind of voice he now seemed to be imagining. In this sort of vocal impracticality too, Weber's big operas, Euryanthe, Freischütz and Oberon, recall the compositional impracticality of Mozart's Abduction, in being just too much for all but the most exceptional singer.

But for a role that, like Agathe, calls for a soprano voice of size and beauty capable of considerable vocal acrobatics, the 31-year-old Price was all but ideally cast. As the voice continued to fill out, inevitably Price was drawn to Richard Strauss's Ariadne, and we're going to hear her in that role from one of her late recordings.


FOR TONIGHT'S SAMPLING OF PRICE
AS WEBER'S AGATHE, CLICK HERE

REMEMBERING MARGARET PRICE: the series so far

Career beginnings (plus the Act I Love Duet from Verdi's Otello)

Part 1: From Handel's Messiah to Wagner's Tristan, emerging in Mozart

Part 2: The Countess in Mozart's Marriage of Figaro (plus "Or sai chi l'onore" from Don Giovanni)

Part 3: Fiordiligi in Mozart's Così fan tutte
[Plus postscript: more of "Soave sia il vento" in the later post Sunday, Bloody Sunday and the depths of Mozart's humanity]

Part 4: Pamina in Mozart's Magic Flute

Part 5 (today): Agathe in Weber's Der Freischütz

Part 6 (tomorrow): Richard Strauss's Ariadne -- and, who knows, maybe a little more Isolde?

#