Sunday Classics snapshots: Comfort ye

Tenor James Johnston's "Comfort ye" recording was an
inspiration to me, but we're still not going to hear it.

"I see the church as a field hospital after battle. It is useless to ask a seriously injured person if he has high cholesterol and about the level of his blood sugars. You have to heal the wounds. Then we can talk about everything else. Heal the wounds."

-- Pope Francis, in an August 2013 interview,
quoted in a new NYRB blogpost by Garry Wills

"Cry unto her that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned"

Recitative
Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people, saith your God. Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned. The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness: Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
Aria
Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill made low, the crooked straight, and the rough places plain.

Nicolai Gedda, tenor; Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, cond. EMI, recorded 1965

Jon Vickers, tenor; Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Sir Ernest MacMillan, cond. RCA, recorded c1953

Jon Vickers, tenor; Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Sir Thomas Beecham, cond. RCA, recorded 1959

[in German] Fritz Wunderlich, tenor; Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra, Heinz Mendes, cond. Live performance, Mar. 20, 1959

"Thou who art good and kind, rescue me from everlasting fire"

I groan as one who is accused;
guilt reddens my cheek;
Thy supplicant, Thy supplicant spare, O God.
Thou who absolved Mary,
and harkened to the thief,
and who hast given me hope,
and who hast given me hope.
My prayers are worthless,
but Thou who art good and kind,
rescue me from everlasting fire.
With Thy sheep give me a place,
and from the goats keep me separate,
placing me at Thy right hand.

Nicolai Gedda, tenor; Philharmonia Orchestra, Carlo Maria Giulini, cond. EMI, recorded 1963-64

Jon Vickers, tenor; New Philharmonia Orchestra, Sir John Barbirolli, cond. EMI, recorded April 1970

Fritz Wunderlich, tenor; South German Radio Symphony Orchestra, Helmut Müller-Kray, cond. Live performance, Nov. 2, 1960

by Ken

Last Sunday I offered a post called "Garry Wills, contemplating Pope Francis and his critics, says there are 'two forms of Christianity now on offer' -- and it's up to Catholics to choose" which began with the quote from the pope that I've placed atop this post as well, since it is rather obviously the inspiration for today's pair of musical "snapshots" -- pieces that are both intensely personal to me, and that we've dwelled upon at some length in past posts.

Fresh from the challenge, in the first of these "snapshot" posts, "Rosina I and Rosina II," of finding a singer, namely Victoria de los Angeles, to put in the lead-off slot singing both Rossini's young Rosina (in The Barber of Seville) and Mozart's only slightly older but sadly way more mature Rosina (aka Countess Almaviva in The Marriage of Figaro), I was pleased to come up with our three tenors singing the similarly improbable combo of the opening vocal number of Handel's Messiah and the heart-rending "Ingemisco" from the "Dies Irae" of Verdi's Requiem. We've actually heard all of the above performances of "Comfort ye" and "Ev'ry valley" (and once again I couldn't resist including both Vickers recordings); I just needed to add the Gedda and Vickers "Ingemisco" performances.


OF COURSE WE'RE NOT GOING TO LET IT REST THERE!

Remember that the performances we've heard so far were chosen first off for their performer "mutuality." Not surprisingly, we've got more to hear, and a bit more to say about the two pieces.


HANDEL: Messiah: Part I, Nos. 1-2, Recitative and aria (tenor), "Comfort ye, my people" . . . "Every valley shall be exalted"

I've told a couple of versions of my deep connection to the "Comfort ye" recitative, mentioning that the first time it really blew me away was while listening to my friend Richard's 78-rpm original of the first of Sir Malcolm Sargent's four Messiah recordings featuring the Belfast-born tenor James Johnnston (1903-1991). As I best I can figure, I must at some point have taken my LP dub of that recording off the shelf with the intention of making an mp3 dub and then lost track of it. I'm not even sure whether we've heard any of the "Comfort ye/Ev'ry valley" recordings except the two Vickerses and the Gedda, even though all the files we're hearing today were already made. Was I once intending a "Comfort ye" post that never got written? The last one I can track is a 2011 Christmas Eve post.

The two Boston performances give us snapshots of what passed for "stylish" Handel performance in their times; as usual, I have a strong preference for the less "authentic" earlier one. Then we have a tribute to a fine singer, the Swiss tenor Ernst Häfliger; a fine baroque conductor, Karl Richter (just recently I lavished praise on his recording with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau of Bach's solo-bass Cantata No. 82, "Ich habe genug"), and the important tradition of Handel performance in his homeland. By the time of Messiah, Handel considered himself a thoroughly English composer, but for obvious reasons his fellow Germans have never been willing to let go of him. Even his English-language oratorios have been much performed back home -- in German, of course.

Recitative
Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people, saith your God. Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned. The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness: Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.

[Isaiah 40:1-3]

Aria
Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill made low, the crooked straight, and the rough places plain.

[Isaiah 40:4]

David Lloyd, tenor; Zimbler Sinfonietta, Thompson Stone, cond. (Boston Handel and Haydn Society). BOMC Classics Record Library, recorded c1957

Bruce Fowler, tenor; Boston Baroque Orchestra, Martin Pearlman, cond. Telarc, recorded May 18-22, 1992

[in German] Ernst Häfliger, tenor; Munich Bach Orchestra, Karl Richter, cond. DG, recorded June 1964


VERDI: Requiem: ii. "Dies Irae": "Ingemisco, tamquam reus" ("I groan as one who is accused")

In the April 2011 post "Verdi's 'Ingemisco' pits morality and decency against Pope Cardinal Ratguts and his Church" we broke the "Ingemisco" down into its four component stanzas -- groups of three lines, you'll note, generally a tricky proposition for musicalizing, where "twos" and "fours" set more comfortably than threes.

Note the various ways Verdi deals with the odd-line-out third line. In the section labeled "[a]" below, he limns beautifully "normal" phrases for the first two lines, then blows us away with something completely different for "supplicant, supplicanti parce, Deus." But in [b] he simply repeats the third line to make a standard four-line set. The low-keyed [c] section is actually set more or less as a three-line unit. But then, the miraculous, ethereal [d] section begins by doubling the first two lines to form a four-line unit, then expands the third line into a single unit, and finally repeats two lines as a unit. Although this time we're hearing only straight-through performances, I thought I would retain the three-line text groupings in our texts, though I've tried to indicate how Verdi actually set them.

Again, I think we've heard all of these recordings, because I had already made files, but I can't swear to it. Jussi Bjoerling's melting and magisterial performance is a favorite recording of mine, taking generous advantage of Reiner's spacious tempo -- as does Vickers, I should say, in his recording with Barbirolli, which I really enjoyed rehearing after some time. That said, as I've pointed out before, Pavarotti seems to have taken the Verdi Requiem very personally and at all stages of his career did some of his most committed singing. But then I didn't want to leave Plácido Domingo out -- nice job!

The young Giuseppe di Stefano is faced with the opposite situation of Bjoerling and Vickers: a conductor who has no inclination to dawdle. As for Beniamino Gigli and Franco Corelli, well, it's certainly possible to quibble, but these are clearly two great voices being put to serious use.

[A quick note about the editing: The "Ingemisco," you'll notice, has no introduction, and doesn't have a full-stop conclusion. As you'll hear in most of our selections, after its quiet close, in shockingly brief order Verdi ratchets up to the next episode in the "Dies irae," the bass solo "Confutatis maledictis" ("When the damned are confounded"). Some of these tracks I've had occasion to edit myself, and my preference was to cut off at that quiet close of the "Ingemisco."]

[a]
Ingemisco tamquam reus,
culpa rubet vultus meus,
supplicanti, supplicanti parce, Deus.
I groan as one who is accused;
guilt reddens my cheek;
Thy supplicant, Thy supplicant spare, O God.
[b]
Qui Mariam absolvisti
et latronem exaudisti,
mihi quoque spem dedisti,
mihi quoque spem dedisti.
Thou who absolved Mary,
and harkened to the thief,
and who hast given me hope,
and who hast given me hope.
[c]
Preces meae non sunt dignae,
sed tu bonus fac benigne,
ne perenni cremer igne.
My prayers are worthless,
but Thou who art good and kind,
rescue me from everlasting fire.
[d]
Inter oves locum praesta
et ab hoedis me sequestra,
inter oves locum praesta
et ab hoedis me sequestra,
statuens, statuens in parte dextra.
Et ab hoedis me sequestra,
statuens in parte dextra.
With Thy sheep give me a place,
and from the goats keep me separate,
with Thy sheep give me a place,
and from the goats keep me separate,
placing me, placing me at Thy right hand.
And from the goats keep me separate,
placing me at Thy right hand.

Jussi Bjoerling, tenor; Vienna Philharmonic, Fritz Reiner, cond. RCA-Decca, recorded 1959

Luciano Pavarotti, tenor; Vienna Philharmonic, Georg Solti, cond. Decca, recorded October 1967

Plácido Domingo, tenor; Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Daniel Barenboim, cond. Erato, recorded c1994

Giuseppe di Stefano, tenor; NBC Symphony Orchestra, Arturo Toscanini, cond. RCA-BMG, recorded Jan. 27, 1951

Beniamino Gigli, tenor; Rome Opera Orchestra, Tullio Serafin, cond. EMI, recorded August 1939

Franco Corelli, tenor; Los Angeles Philharmonic, Zubin Mehta, cond. Live performance, 1967

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