"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross."
-- Sinclair Lewis
Sunday, October 11, 2015
Sunday Classics snapshots: Meet the composer, Richard Strauss-style
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The first part of the Prologue to Ariadne auf Naxos, with Paul Schoeffler as the Music Master and Sena Jurinac as the Composer (we're going to hear the radiant Jurinac in her glorious 1958 studio recording, which I've described as the best recorded performance I know of any operatic role, and Schoeffler in a 1944 live performance), staged by Günter Rennert and conducted by Karl Böhm, filmed at Salzburg in 1965 -- the remaining four parts are also on YouTube.
by Ken
It was along, arduous path from conception to ultimate creation, the strange entertainment concocted by Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, his librettist on two previous, wildly different operas, Elektra and Der Rosenkavalier, in collaboration with the great stage director Max Reinhardt, who had collaborated with them on Rosenkavalier.
The original idea was to provide a half-hour musical entertainment to be inserted in an adaptation (by Hofmannsthal) for Reinhardt of Molière's Le bourgeois gentilhomme, with incidental music by Strauss. Not surprisingly, the half-hour entertainment grew and grew, until it was a weird one-act opera that -- despite being scored for chamber orchestra -- would tax the vocal resources of the greatest opera houses. And it combined two seemingly uncombinable art forms: a deeply serious opera seria that is observed, commented on, and eventually intruded on by a troupe of commedia dell'arte musical comedians. And of course it was imprisoned inside the play, and constitued too much opera for playgoers and too much play for operagoers.
Long story short: Eventually Hofmannsthal and Strauss liberated Ariadne by creating a Prologue, set backstage in the room of the home of the richest man in Vienna where the evening's entertainment is shortly to be performed. And they created the character of the Composer, the creator of a deeply serious opera seria. The new Prologue not only explains how these two wildly different entertainments came to be scheduled for the same evening's entertainment (and, eventually, how they come to be combined) but creates for us the world of a theatrical backstage. (The always-practical Strauss arranged an orchestral suite from the incidental music he had written for the play, in its German guise as Der Bürger als Edelmann.)
We've already heard the very opening of the Prologue -- still scored for chamber orchestra, as the original opera-intermezzo was.
R. STRAUSS: Ariadne auf Naxos: Prologue: Orchestral introduction
Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Karl Böhm, cond. Live performance, Mar. 28, 1970
Risë Stevens sings the "Habañera" from Act I of Bizet's Carmen -- I gather from a 1951 TV performance.
by Ken
As I mentioned in Friday night's preview, since Risë Stevens was an important exponenet of a number of roles that have commanded attention here at Sunday Classics that we've already heard a fair amount of her. For the most part, then, today's musical remembrance will involve literal remembrances, with the addition of a couple of items we haven't heard before.
The plan couldn't be much simpler: We're just going to revisit each of these classic roles from Stevens's repertory, starting with what I suppose must be considered her real signature role, Carmen.
Sunday Classics chronicles: Music vs. words -- in "Capriccio," the Countess makes her choice
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Kiri Te Kanawa as the Countess sings Flamand's setting of Olivier's sonnet in the Final Scene of Richard Strauss's Capriccio in San Francisco, with Donald Runnicles conducting, in 1993.
by Ken
As I mentioned Friday night, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, the Countess of the 1960 Vienna performance of Capriccio we've been sampling, first recorded the opera's Final Scene in 1953 for an EMI LP that also included her first recording of Strauss's Four Last Songs. In 1957-58 she sang the role in EMI's premiere commercial recording of the opera, conducted by the young Wolfgang Sawallisch. Here's the 1953 recording.
R. STRAUSS: Capriccio, Op. 85: Final Scene: Countess, "Morgen Mittag um elf" ("Tomorrow morning at 11")
We'll have full texts later. This synopsis comes from Pacifica Opera Victoria's Capriccio study guide.
It is evening and the moon has risen. The Countess enters. The major-domo tells her that Olivier will meet her to discuss the ending of the opera -- the next morning at eleven, in the library. She is alarmed, realizing that Flamand will be disappointed to find Olivier in the library instead of her.
And as for me, she wonders, I’m supposed to determine the opera's ending ... Is it the words that move my heart or the music that speaks more strongly?
She sings the sonnet, interrupting herself partway through: It's fruitless to try to separate them. Words and music are fused into one ... One art redeemed by the other!
Regarding herself in a mirror, she asks herself what to do. In choosing the one, you will lose the other. Doesn't one always lose when one wins?
Again she asks the Madeleine in the mirror, Do you want to be consumed between two fires? You mirrored image of Madeleine in love -- can you advise me, can you help me find the ending, the ending for their opera? Is there one that is not trivial?
The major-domo announces that supper is served; Madeleine smiles at the mirror and walks into the dining room, humming the sonnet.
Elisabeth Schwarzkopf (s), Countess Madeleine; Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Ackermann, cond. EMI, recorded Sept. 26, 1953
REMINDER ABOUT THE STAND-
ALONE SUNDAY CLASSICS BLOG
It's still a work in progress, but the most recent month's posts can be found at:
Sunday Classics chronicles: Revisiting Richard Strauss's "Capriccio"
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R. STRAUSS: Capriccio, Op. 85: Introduction (Sextet)
Vienna State Opera Orchestra members, Karl Böhm, cond. Live performance, May 15, 1960
Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra members, Clemens Krauss, cond. Broadcast performance, 1953
Vienna Philharmonic members, Ulf Schirmer, cond. Decca, recorded December 1993
Members of the Southwest German Radio (SWR) Symphony Orchestra Stuttgart, Georges Prêtre, cond. Forlane, recorded live in Mannheim, May 29-31, 1999
by Ken
As I mentioned last week, I have begun the arduous process of importing the Sunday Classics posts into a stand-alone blog "Sunday Classics with Ken" blog (at sundayclassicswithken.blogspot.com). After a week or more or frenetic activity (well, it felt frenetic), working my way backwards from December 2012, I've already reached . . . July 2012! New (old) posts continue to be added daily, two or sometimes even four at a time. Okay, not daily exactly. More like some days.
It's indescribably grueling work, so I won't try to describe it. But it's also fun of a sort, or different sorts, walking back through Sunday Classics time. And it occurred to me that, even while Sunday Classics itself is on hiatus, issues are bound to come up which may be suitable for a subseries we might call "Sunday Classics chornicles."
Starting this week with my realization that I told an unintentional untruth. In presenting a couple of tidbits from the mammoth Berkshire Record Outlet order I placed recently, I included excerpts from a 1953 Munich broadcast performance of Richard Strauss's last opera Capriccio, conducted by the opera's librettist, Clemens Krauss. And it's true that I had been listening to some of that performance. But it suddenly occurred to me that that was "spinoff" listening, that the "new" Capriccio performance was a 1960 Vienna State Opera broadcast conducted by Karl Böhm.
The "Moonlight Interlude" from Richard Strauss's last opera, Capriccio, is played here by the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra under the composer's friend Clemens Krauss, who happened also to be the librettist of the opera. It's from a complete Munich broadcast performance of Capriccio from 1953.
by Ken
As TV savants know, this is not usually a good thing, when a program goes -- or more properly is sent -- on hiatus, a domain from which only the select few spectacles return, except perhaps for the run-off of previously unaired but already-paid-for episodes during times when nobody is expecting to be watching anyway.
Some other time maybe I'll talk about some of the thinking (for want of a better word) that has gone into this development. For now, though, my concern, is the mass of Sunday Classics material that's already floating around on servers somewhere. I haven't actually tried to count, but between previews and main posts, that's two posts a week (or actually, for the period when I usually did two previews, three) going back to early 2009, which adds up to . . . um, a heap.
So to anyone who cares, I offer a sneak peek at something I've begun putting together at the link sundayclassicswithken.blogspot.com. So far all I've done is gather posts working backward from the final post in December all the way to, um, late October. And while I can report that I've also started compiling an index to posts, aimed at eventual incorporation with the old Sunday Classics Index that covered posts through July 11, 2010, at present it doesn't yet go back as far as October 2012. (In fact I haven't even posted it yet.)
One thing I can say is that in just the bit of work (or play) I've done so far with this bewildering mass of, er, stuff, I was kind of tickled to discover that there's a huge amount of really fabulous music here, and with a decent pair of headphones plugged into just the electronics of my home and office Macs, it sounds to me pretty darned good.
For tonight I thought I would add a couple of tidbits derived from that mammoth Berkshire Record Outlet order I mentioned receiving last month. Oh, I know! We'll do one bitty tid tonight, and then a slightly more extended one on Sunday. (Friday night-Sunday morning -- force of habit.)
Sunday Classics: Remembering Rafael Kubelik, Josef Krips, and Rudolf Kempe
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BEDRICH SMETANA: The Bartered Bride:
Overture; Polka; Furiant; Dance of the Comedians
Philharmonia Orchestra, Rafael Kubelik, cond. EMI, recorded 1951
by Ken
With no particular rhyme or reason, as I explained in Friday night's preview, we're hearing snatches of treasures I found in an embarrassingly large order I just received from that indispensable repository of (mostly but by no means only) classical cut-out and overstock CDs and DVDs, the Berkshire Record Outlet. These particular snatches spotlight three "K" conductors. I'm especially fond of their solidly grounded musicianship, making music from the inside rather than imposing external "rules" or playing for crowd-grabbing "effects."
Friday night we heard orchestral excerpts by Berlioz and Hindemith from a four-CD "portrait" of the wonderful Czech conductor Rafael Kubelik (1914-1996, seen here around the time he was music director of the Chicago Symphony, 1950-53) drawing on his early recordings for EMI, Mercury, and Decca. I thought we'd start out today's wider sampling by listening to some of my favorite music, the Overture and Dances from Bedrich Smetana's comic opera The Bartered Bride (which in fact we already heard back in a November 2009 post, "It's not for nothing that Smetana was dubbed 'the father of Czech music'").
LONGTIME SUNDAY CLASSICS READERS HAVE HEARD A LOT
OF KUBELIK, AND ALSO OF JOSEF KRIPS AND RUDOLF KEMPE
Sunday Classics preview: Three "K"s -- remembering three conductors who were great artists
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The gossamer "Ballet of the Sylphs" from Berlioz's Damnation de Faust is played by the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Rafael Kubelik in this 1950 EMI recording, from a four-CD Kubelik "Portrait," one of the treasures that came out of my nearly 17-pound Berkshire Record Outlet carton this week.
by Ken
I'd been good for so long. Oh sure, I usually scanned the new classical overstock and cut-out listings on the Berkshire Record Outlet website most every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, and sure, I dumped stuff in my shopping cart. But that didn't commit me to anything, and I figured that by and large the things that interested me would interest enough other site followers that they would soon enough go out of stock -- "soon enough" in this case being "in time to protect me from actually buying them."
Every now and then, something appears that (a) I really want and (b) I know can't remain in stock very long. Which happened just recently with a CD issue -- finally! -- of the not-quite-complete series of Beethoven string quartets recorded by the Paganini Quartet for RCA Victor between 1947 and 1953. Not only have these never been on CD; I'm not aware of them ever being reissued on LP. And in fact, all the LP copies I've ever come across have been really chewed up. They may not have sold a huge number of copies, but the people who bought them apparently played the heck out of them.
What that means, when there's an item I really want, is that I have to take a look at my shopping cart, to see what might still be available. And apparently it had been long enough since my last order that, even though yes, a fair number of things I'd dumped in had indeed gone out of stock, there was a heckuva a lot of stuff still poised for purchase. I started studying the list like it was a work of scholarship, or maybe a primary source document. I tried everything in my powers (which unfortunately include only a small store of willpower) to jettison items to get the order down to manageable size. But still there remained something like 46 other items (CDs and DVDs, many of them of course multiple sets). What could I do? The flesh is weak.
I won't tell you how much the order came to in dollars, but in weight it came to nearly 17 pounds. Since it arrived earlier this week, andI've only begun to sift through the treasures. But I noticed a number of samplings from conductors of a sort I'm especially fond of.
It goes back to a point I was making just last week, contrasting performers who think they can assemble performances by tacking bunches of notes together following some rules they think they've found in some book or article with performers who understand that the only way you find you way inside a piece of music is by finding how and why it moves from the inside.
We've already heard a morsel from one of our "three 'K's," Rafael Kubelik's "Ballet of the Sylphs,' above, and we'll hear another Kubelik tantalizer in a moment, along with samples from our other conducting "K"s.
Sunday Classics: In "Elektra," a "recognition" scene in which neither party actually recognizes the other
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Elektra (Deborah Polaski) and Chrysothemis (Karita Mattila) in Strauss and Hofmannsthal's Elektra at the Met, 2002
[CHRYSOTHEMIS rushes in through the courtyard gate, howling loudly like a wounded animal.] CHYRSOTHEMIS: Orest! Orest is dead! ELEKTRA: Be quiet! CHYRSOTHEMIS: Orest is dead! I came out -- they knew it there already. They were all standing around and they all knew it already. Only we didn't. ELEKTRA: No one knows it. CHYRSOTHEMIS: They all knew it! ELEKTRA: No one can know it, for it is not true. It is not true! It is not true! I tell you, however, it is not true! CHYRSOTHEMIS: The strangers stood by the wall. The strangers who were sent here to announce it: two -- an old one and a young one. They had already told everyone. They were all standing in a circle around them and they all, all knew it already. ELEKTRA: It is not true! CHYRSOTHEMIS: No one thinks of us. Dead! Elektra, dead! Died in a foreign land! Dead! Died there in a foreign land, by his own horses killed and dragged along. [She sinks down on the doorstep beside ELEKTRA. A YOUNG SERVING MAN hurries out of the house and stumbles over the sisters.]
Alessandra Marc (s), Chrysothemis; Deborah Polaski (s), Elektra; Staatskapelle Berlin, Daniel Barenboim, cond. Teldec, recorded February 1995
Deborah Voigt (s), Chrysothemis; Alessandra Marc (s), Elektra; Vienna Philharmonic, Giuseppe Sinopoli, cond. DG, recorded September 1995
by Ken
My goodness, the things people do! To each other, I mean, though also to themselves. And no "others" are more readily in the line of fire than family.
As promised in Friday night's preview, today we're targeting the extraordinary scene in which a brother and sister are reunited, each thinking he or she was left all alone in the world to right the wrong of the murder of their father, Agamemnon, king of Myecenae, at the hands of their mother, Klytämnestra, and her lover, Aegisth (for the sake of sanity I'm going to try to stick to the German forms of the Greek names used in the libretto), following the king's return from the Trojan War.
There's so much we should be talking about here. About the creative breakthrough by which Richard Strauss, already a world-famous composer, had finally, and all at once, made his operatic breakthrough -- at age 40 -- with his previous opera, Salome. About the happy turn of fate that brought him together with the playwright Hugo von Hofmannsthal, after he had already begun shaping Hofmannsthal's adaptation of the Sophoclean version of Elektra. Very likely what Strauss wanted from him was his permission, not his collaboration, but he wound up getting both, and the start of one of the most remarkable collaborations in the annals of artistic creation. About how much the one-act Salome and Elektra have in common as well as how much they don't.
And certainly, within the drama itself, there's all sorts of stuff we should talk about. Like the specific human urgencies of each of the characters, with consideration of what first Sophocles and then Hofmannsthal and then Strauss-Hofmannsthal have chosen to include and omit with regard to the story.
But for today we'll keep it simple. The fundamental human reality is that Elektra's world has been permanently denatured by the murder of her father. In this respect she is fundamentally different from her significantly younger sister Chrysothemis, the closest thing she has at this point to another person in her life. Chrysothemis just wants to get on with a normal life. By contrast, as I like to think of it, if one were to suggest to Elektra, "Life goes on," she would be apt to reply, "Oh yeah?" or "Says who?" This is, I think, a wholly recognizable family dynamic -- capable of being explained in large part by the difference in age.
This is no ordinary family here in the House of Atreus, of course, but I think we can all readily enough appreciate familiar patterns of family dysfunction, even -- or perhaps especially? -- when they're carried to this extreme. We have two sisters who have experienced the events of their family's history, coming as they did at such different points in their lives, in very different ways. In Elektra's reality, the only hope for restoring her disordered world to any kind of order is for her brother Orest to return home from his long exile -- an exile designed to keep him safely out of the reach of his mother and her paramour -- so she can assist him in avenging their father's death.
It is, of course, that scene, the scene of Orest's return, a Recognition Scene in which, in fact, neither sibling does recognize the other, that we're looking at today. And I thought we needed to start today -- in the scene we heard up top -- with the added circumstance that makes it so much more likely that Elektra would fail to recognize her long-lost brother: She has been brought, kicking and screaming, to an understanding that he's dead.
I want to spend a little more time with this little scene before we proceed to the Recognition Scene. That will all happen in the click-through.
Sunday Classics preview: Together again, and all's right with the world -- more or less
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Father and daughter reunited:Plácido Domingo (playing baritone) as Simon Boccanegra and Maria Poplavskaya as Maria at Covent Garden, 2010
by Ken
This week and (probably) next week we're going to poke around two scenes I've had it in mind to present as long as we've been doing Sunday Classics, scenes whose power over me undoubtedly exceeds anything I'll be able to explain.
Tonight we're going to preview just the moments of recognition, and we're going to start with even more stripped-down versions.
1. Simon Boccanegra recognizes his long-lost daughter
MARIA BOCCANEGRA: Ah! Clasp to your breast Maria, who loves you! SIMON BOCCANEGRA [simultaneously]: Ah! daughter my heart calls you! [Orchestral outburst] SIMON: Daughter, daughter my heart calls you!
Leo Nucci (b), Simon Boccanegra; Kiri Te Kanawa (s), Maria Boccanegra; Orchestra of the Teatro alla Scala, Sir Georg Solti, cond. Decca, recorded December 1988
2. Elektra recognizes her long-exiled (and presumed-dead) brother
ELEKTRA: Orest! [Orchestral outburst]
Birgit Nilsson (s), Elektra; Vienna Philharmonic, Georg Solti, cond. Decca, recorded 1966-67
Zdeněk Košler conducts the Slovak Philharmonic in the first section, "In Campania," of the 22-year-old Richard Strauss's "symphonic fantasy" Aus Italien (From Italy).
by Ken
In the standard telling the 22-year-old Richard Strauss -- already Kapellmeister of the Munich Court Orchestra -- was encouraged by no less than Johannes Brahms to go to Italy, and if Brahms told you to go to Italy, you probably would too.
As with the Italian sojourn of young Felix Mendelssohn which produced his Italian Symphony (which we heard two weeks ago, followed by Tchaikovsky's string sextet Souvenir de Florencelast week), Strauss's travels filled his head with music. He visited Bologna, Rome, and -- in the Campania region south of Rome (see the map at right) -- Naples, Capri, Salerno (which includes the town of Campagna), and Sorrento. The result was the sequence of four musical impressions he called Aus Italien (From Italy). When he performed his "symphonic fantasy" (generally counted as the first of his symphonic poems, his most characteristic orchestral form) with the Court Orchestra in March 1887, the reception was bordered on the disastrous. Interestingly, Strauss's confidence in the piece wasn't shaken, which takes a pretty darned tough set of musical balls.
I can't say I've ever been wildly enthusiastic about, or given enormous attention to, the piece, but approaching it again, listening with the sounds of the composer's long subsequent career in mind, I'm startled by the extent to which it's all there. In a not especially illuminating liner note for the original issue of the Kempe-Dresden recording, Ernst Krause referred to Aus Italien as "this early evidence of what was to come." This now seems to me to be putting it mildly.
The insinuating, shifting harmonies that shimmer and the tunes and melodic fragments that soar -- it's vintage Strauss. And it all moves so inexorably. This is music that's always in movement, and the ways of its movement effectively lay out the composer in his full career.
(In Friday night's preview we listened to the chunk of Act I of Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier which includes the Italian Singer's possibly affectionate, possibly sarcastic aria. "Di rigori armato." The deep affection for Italy evinced in Aus Italien should at least answer any thought that blanket ridicule was intended.)
Sunday Classics: With the full symphony orchestra you can create a heckuva storm (aka: Musical storms, part 2)
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There are funny storms too!Alexander Prior conducts the deliciously raging thunderstorm in Act II of Rossini's Barber of Seville at the Chuvash National Opera in the Volga River port of Cheboksary, capital of Russia's Chuvash Republic, November 2009. We've got some better performances coming up in the click-through.
As music lovers know, the hint of a distant storm from a few timpani rolls can be as evocative as the crepuscular waves portrayed by Constable. The ability of music both directly to mimic the sounds of the weather and indirectly to imply its subtler moods perhaps gives this medium more scope for dramatic expression than the visual arts and literature, which unavoidably are limited to more literal interpretations.
Just for the record, the authors of the above-cited monograph hail from the Dept. of Physics, University of Oxford (Aplin), and the Dept. of Meteorology, University of Reading (Williams). If that gives you a gnawing bad feeling, trust it. When I discovered the piece, I thought at first it was a happy coincidence that such a piece had been published just as I was setting out to write about musical storms. Then I started reading the piece. And I was reminded why I rigorously avoided taking any academic classes that impinged on my love of music. If you were thinking there was bound to be some fun in such a piece, so was I. We were all wrong.
Anyway, we began listening to our storms imagined in music a couple of weeks ago, leading off with probably the most celebrated from the concert repertory, the sequence from Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony that includes his famous thunderstorm, and surely the most spectacular storm in the operatic repertory, the cataclysm that opens Verdi's Otello -- and nearly rings down the curtain on the opera when Otello's ship is nearly dragged under as it approaches the Cypriot shore. For good measure we threw in a less threatening operatic storm, the beautiful "Royal Hunt and Storm" sequence from Berlioz's epic opera The Trojans.
In Friday's preview we took a step back in time to hear what Vivaldi could do stormwise with just the modest baroque orchestras -- incorporating storm movements in three of the Four Seasons. Today we track what some composers have done with the increasingly resource-rich resources of the modern symphony orchestra.
One perhaps obvious observation is still worth observing: that there's not much point in doing a musical storm if you don't also provide a sort of musical "baseline" -- life as it was being carried on before the storm and as it continues afterward. Beethoven, for example, gave us his countryside peasants dancing merrily before the interruption of the weather event, and then the the merry-making that follows it. The storm itself is brief, but illustrates thrillingly the cleansing, purifying, and exhilarating effect a storm can have. Just to refresh our memory, why don't we listen again to the Klemperer recording with the slow "Peasants' Dance" that producer Walter Legge very likely never did get used to.
BEETHOVEN: Symphony No. 6 in F, Op. 68 (Pastoral): iii. Merry gathering of the peasants: Allegro iv. Thunderstorm: Allegro v. Shepherd's song; Happy and grateful feelings after the storm: Allegretto
Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, cond. EMI, recorded October 1957
I thought of including the "Scene in the fields" from Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique, which we listened to in June 2010), itself a clear hommage to Beethoven's thunderstorm. But the distant thunder near the end seems kind of incidental for our purposes. In that 2010 post you can hear a quite lovely performance of the movement by Paul Paray and the Detroit Symphony.
Okay, you talked me into it; here's the Paray "Scene in the fields" again. Just as a reminder: The composer's program for the movement concludes: "The sun retires . . . distant noise of thunder . . . solitude . . . silence . . ."
BERLIOZ: Symphonie fantastique, Op. 14: iii. Scène aux champs (Scene in the fields)
Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Paul Paray, cond. Mercury, recorded Nov. 28, 1959
LET'S MOVE ON TO A REAL STORM, THE CLIMAX OF FERDE GROFÉ'S GRAND CANYON SUITE
Again, we've heard the Grand Canyon Suite in its entirely, in a July 2010 Fourth of July post. At this point in the piece we've witnessed an awesome musical "Sunrise" and the spooky "Painted Desert," ridden our burros "On the Trail," and watched the "Sunset." You never know when you may be caught in a cloudburst.
GROFÉ: Grand Canyon Suite: v. Cloudburst
Eastman-Rochester Orchestra, Howard Hanson, cond. Mercury, recorded May 1958
RECORDING NOTE: I know there's a resistance among many modern listeners to "old" recordings like these. It still seems to me that the recording art has gone mostly backward, not forward, since, say, the late '60s. If anyone has heard an orchestral recording made in the last 20 years remotely comparable in sonic beauty or believability to the 1958 and 1959 Mercury recordings we've just heard, I'd sure like to know what it is.
Sunday Classics preview: In which we get in an "Otello" frame of mind
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Here I am thinking I'm offering some big scoop with the Corelli/Zylis-Gara Otello Love Duet, and I see it's all over YouTube -- even in video! Oh well. My version sounds better.
by Ken
Another change of plan: Instead of the hyperambitious program I proposed last night, by which we would have had Margaret Price and Maria Callas as Amelia in extended excerots from Verdi's A Masked Ball tonight and then Price and others as Verdi's Desdemona tomorrow, we're going to scale back and tackle just Otello tomorrow, and tonight, by way of preview, we're going to hear that recording of the Act I Love Duet that I mentioned with Franco Corelli heard briefly but tantalziingly as Otello.
When EMI was planning its recording of Verdi's Otello to be conducted by Sir John Barbirolli (off the triumph of his Madama Butterfly with Renata Scotto and Carlo Bergonzi) with the title role sung by American tenor James McCracken, who was under contract to Decca, the story goes that Terry McEwen, head of the classical division of Decca's American company, London Records, advised his people in London by all means to release McCracken for the project. McEwen, a passionate and highly knowledgeable operaphile of, shall we say, waspish personality, reminded them that for one thing the company was having trouble finding projects with which to eat up his contract (left unanswered is the question of why they ever signed him to the contract), but the clincher was that if McCracken recorded Otello for EMI, that would anger Franco Corelli, an EMI artist, enough to perhaps record the role for them.
Sunday Classics special: Remembering Margaret Price, Part 6 -- as Richard Strauss's Ariadne
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Ernest Stern's drawing for the set for the island of Naxos for the original 1912 production of Ariadne auf Naxos -- you can even click on it to enlarge it!
by Ken
We've dabbled at Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal's Ariadne auf Naxos before, usually from the vantage point of the characters they created for the Prologue they added to the original opera seria-plus-commedia dell'arte burlesque (which was originally nestled inside the playwright's adaptation of Molière's Le bourgeois gentilhomme, with incidental music by the composer), to create a stand-along opera. Today, as part of our series remembering soprano Margaret Price, we home in on Ariadne herself.
It's an important role for the evolution of Price's voice and repertory, because while it has been taken by lyric-weight sopranos like Lisa della Casa and Gundula Janowitz, it's generally associated with heavier-weight voice types, like Leonie Rysanek and Jessye Norman. As we heard in Price's earlier recordings, there were always indication of some size to the voice, and it seems to have been a natural enough evolution for the voice to fill out (and at the same time lose some of that formerly dazzling flexibility).
In this connection it would have been logical to return -- as I suggested we might -- to Price's recording of Wagner's Isolde (we heard the Liebestod in Part 1; see the listing below), the closest she came to singing this fearsome role. But I'm afraid I underestimated the logistics involved in preparing the Ariadne portion of this post. We still have a lot of unfinished business in our remembrance of Price, so we'll just have to add the return to Tristan to our "to do" list.
The commedia dell'arte players (baritone Stephen Dickson as Harlekin, tenor Anthony Laciura as Brighella, bass Artur Korn as Truffaldin, tenor Allan Glassman as Scaramuccio) and Zerbinetta (soprano Kathleen Battle -- the clip takes us through the beginning of her great showpiece aria) attempt to console Ariadne (soprano Jessye Norman), at the Met in 1988, James Levine conducting.
Sunday Classics special: Remembering Margaret Price, Part 5 -- as Weber's Agathe
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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.
[1/29/12] With the full symphony orchestra you can create a heckuva storm (continued)
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BEFORE WE CONTINUE, LET'S DISPOSE OF ONE FAMOUS MUSICAL STORM THAT REALLY ISN'T
J. STRAUSS II: Unter Donner und Blitzen (Amid Thunder and Lightning), Op. 324
This breathless little polka is understandably one of the Waltz King's best-loved works, but despite all that supposed thunder, the thing has never sounded very thundery or lightningy to me. Carlos Kleiber (sort of) conducts the Bavarian State Orchestra in Tokyo, May 1986.
WE HEARD VIVALDI CONJURE STORMS WITH A MERE BAROQUE ENSEMBLE. HERE'S . . . RICHARD STRAUSS
If there's a wizard among orchestral wizards, surely it's Richard Strauss. I imagine his basic position to have been: If it can be done with an orchestra, I can do it. Sometimes he seems to have taken on just this sort of thing as a personal challenge. A "day in the life" at home? Can do -- the Symphonia domestica. An arduous mountain ascent and descent? Sure thing -- An Alpine Symphony.
Because the Alpine Symphony in particular is so expertly written, it's grand fun for the performers to perform, perhaps more fun (it has sometimes seemed to me) than for listeners. Still, when the performers are skilled enough and engaged enough, the results can be surprisingly persuasive. Curiously, Georg Solti and Herbert von Karajan recorded the piece about a year apart, and I think the results --very different, I think you'll note -- occupy special places in these conductors' mammoth discographies. I had no idea when I grudgingly bought the Karajan that I would listen to it as often as I have.
In our Alpine adventure there is, not surprisingly, a fair amount of weather detail. Here, for example, is a wisp of a fragment that occurs late in the piece, after the climber has reached the summit. I should warn that since Strauss's symphonic "program" is continuous, fragments ripped out of context really sound it.
R. STRAUSS: An Alpine Symphony, Op. 64: Mists rise; The sun gradually dims
Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Sir Georg Solti, cond. Decca, recorded 1979
Berlin Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan, cond. DG, recorded December 1980
A coupe of minutes later we're set up for one of the great musical storms. We can trust that Strauss was familiar with all those earlier efforts, and was surely confident that he could have his own say.
R. STRAUSS: An Alpine Symphony, Op. 64: Calm before the storm; Thunderstorm, Descent; Sunset
Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Sir Georg Solti, cond. Decca, recorded 1979
Berlin Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan, cond. DG, recorded December 1980
Now we're going to hear the complete sequence, including the little in-between "Elegy" we haven't heard yet. Again, bear in mind that the Alpine Symphony is musically continuous. While the concertgoer would presumably be provided with a list of the section identifiers, there would be no artificial separations like our unwieldy track changes. Since the Telarc Alpine Symphnony indexes rather than tracks these points, in our format it comes out musically continuous, which for us effectively "takes the training wheels off" and lets us hear this sequence as the composer expected the whole Alpine Symphony to be heard.
(I might also note quickly that in our four recordings of this orchestral display piece we're hearing four of the world's preeminent Strauss orchestras. I've noted before when we've dipped into it that the extensive series of Strauss orchestral works by Rudolf Kempe and the Staatskapelle Dresden seems to me on all counts one of the most impressive projects in the history of orchestral recording -- though the CDs don't seem to me to have done it justice.)
R. STRAUSS: An Alpine Symphony, Op. 64: Mists rise; The sun gradually dims; Elegy; Calm before the storm; Thunderstorm, Descent; Sunset
Staatskapelle Dresden, Rudolf Kempe, cond. EMI, recorded December 1972
Vienna Philharmonic, André Previn, cond. Telarc, recorded Nov. 22-24, 1989
COMPOSERS FOR THE STAGE MAY HAVE TO DO STORMS FOR DRAMATIC PURPOSE -- LIKE MR. GRIEG AND MR. BRITTEN
We already heard in the earlier post two prime theatrical specimens: the violent opening scene of Verdi's Otello and the very different storm in Berlioz's Trojans which serves as the occasion for the, er, coming together of Dido and Aeneas.
Here's a storm we've heard before, in February 2010 as part of the Peer Gynt Suite No. 2. It had been composed with the large quantity of incidental music the composer provided for Ibsen's play, where it served as the prelude to Act V. (Which reminds me that one of these days we still have to do a post on Grieg's incidental music in theatrical context.)
GRIEG: Peer Gynt (incidental music): Prelude to Act V: Peer's Homeward Journey (Stormy Evening at Sea)
NARRATOR: Peer Gynt, by now a vigorous old man with hair gray as ice. Stormy crossing and homecoming.
Friedhelm Eberle, narrator; Gewandhaus Orchestra (Leipzig), Kurt Masur, cond. Philips, recorded March 1988
Berlin Philharmonic, Jeffrey Tate, cond. EMI, recorded March 1990
Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, Neeme Järvi, cond. DG, recorded June 1987
Straddling the line between "concert" and "stage" storm is the violent interlude Britten composed to bridge the two scenes of Act I of Peter Grimes, which has an important theatrical function but has taken on an active concert life as part of the understandably popular suite of Four Sea Interludes (with or without the Passacaglia) from Peter Grimes. (In the suite of interludes it's placed last, for fairly obvious reasons, I think.)
We've heard the 1973 Bernstein "Storm" Interlude before, in a November 2009 Britten post along with the other three interludes. I failed to point out then that Lenny had a history with Peter Grimes. In 1946, at age 28, he conducted the American premiere of the opera, at the Tanglewood Festival. The Sea Interludes were also on the program for his final concert, in August 1990 -- at Tanglewood. I thought we might hear that notably broader performance too. We lead off with a violently impassioned performance by an unexpected Brittenite, Carlo Maria Giulini (who was later asked by the composer to conduct his War Requiem).
BRITTEN: Peter Grimes, Op. 33: Act I: Storm Interlude: Presto con fuoco -- Molto animato -- Largamente -- Tempo I
Philharmonia Orchestra, Carlo Maria Giulini, cond. EMI, recorded c1963
New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, cond. Columbia/CBS/Sony, recorded Mar. 8, 1973
Boston Symphony Orchestra, Leonard Bernstein, cond. DG, recorded live at the Tanglewood Festival, Aug. 19, 1990
To really appreciate how Britten musicalizes this storm and how it's woven into the action of the opera, we need to back up a bit into Act I, Scene 1, as the approach of the storm is registered, and then listen a bit into Act II, as the storm batters "the Borough" -- on England's Suffolk coast -- at hurricane force. (We performed a similar exercise with the first interlude, "Dawn," which joins the Prologue and Act I, in our November 2009 Britten post.) We're only venturing about a minute into Scene 2, but that's long enough to appreciate how Britten handles the storm. As pretty much the whole of the Borough finds its way into the Boar inn, even though Auntie is trying to close for the night, each time the door opens the storm churns again in the orchestra until the storm refugees manage to get the door closed again.
BRITTEN: Peter Grimes, Op. 33, Act I Scene 1, The storm is here; Storm Interlude; Scene 2 beginning
ACT I, Scene 1has taken place in the street in the Borough in front of the Moot Hall (where, in the Prologue, a coroner's inquest into the death of the fisherman Peter Grimes's young apprentice took place), the Boar inn (run by "Auntie"), and the shop of the apothecary Ned Keene, opposite breakwaters that run to the sea. Locals wandered in and out of the scene amid growing indications of an approaching storm. At this point the retired merchant captain Balstrode has been encouraging Grimes, still held responsible for the death of the boy despite being spared indictment at the inquest, to leave the Borough. Peter, imagining marrying the kindly schoolteacher Ellen Orford, resolves instead to stay.
CAPTAIN BALSTRODE: The storm, the storm is here, o come away! PETER GRIMES: The storm is here, and I, and I shall stay! [BALSTRODE leaves PETER and goes into the Boar. PETER alone -- gazing intently into the sea and approaching storm.] What harbour shelters peace, away from tidal waves, away from storms? What harbour can embrace terrors and tragedies? With her there'll be no quarrels, with her the mood will stay a harbour evermore, where night is turned to day. [CURTAIN]
Storm Interlude
Scene 2 Inside the Boar, the same night. AUNTIE is admitting MRS. SEDLEY. The gale is now at hurricane force and they push the door shut with difficulty.
AUNTIE: Past time to close! MRS. SEDLEY: He -- he -- he said half past ten. AUNTIE: Who? MRS. SEDLEY: Mister Keene. AUNTIE: Him and his women! MRS. SEDLEY: You referring to me? AUNTIE: Not at all, not at all! What do you want? MRS. SEDLEY: Room from the storm. AUNTIE: That is the sort of weak politeness makes a publican lose her clients. Keep in the corner out of sight. [BALSTRODE and some of the fishermen enter. They struggle with the door.] CAPTAIN BALSTRODE: [Whistles] That's a bitch of a gale all right. AUNTIE: Sh-h-h! CAPTAIN BALSTRODE: Sorry, I didn't see you, Missis. You'll give the regulars a surprise. AUNTIE: She's meeting Ned. CAPTAIN BALSTRODE: Which Ned? AUNTIE: The quack! He's looking after her heart attack. CAPTAIN BALSTRODE: Bring us a pint. AUNTIE: It's closing time. CAPTAIN BALSTRODE: You fearful old female, why should you mind? AUNTIE: Th-e-e-e-e storm! [BOB BOLES and some other fishermen and women enter. The wind howls through the door.] BOB BOLES: Did you hear the tide has broken over the North Road? [The window shutters blow open.] CAPTAIN BALSTRODE: Get those shutters!
Donald Gramm (bs-b), Captain Balstrode; Jon Vickers (t), Peter Grimes; Lili Chookasian (c), Auntie; Jean Kraft (ms), Mrs. Sedley; Paul Franke (t), Bob Boles; Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, John Pritchard, cond. Live performance, Dec. 10, 1977
Anthony Michaels-Moore (b), Captain Balstrode; Glenn Winslade (t), Peter Grimes; Jill Grove (c), Auntie; Catherine Wyn-Rogers (ms), Mrs. Sedley; Christopher Gillett (t), Bob Boles; London Symphony Orchestra, Sir Colin Davis, cond. LSO Live, recorded live in concert at the Barbican (London), January 2004
LET'S WIND IT UP FOR TODAY BY GIVING A PROPER HEARING TO ROSSINI'S RIB-TICKLING TEMPEST
I'm not sure this storm serves any dramatic purpose -- I mean as a storm. As an interlude, it definitely allows the action time to percolate and set up the opera's grand climax. But as a storm specifically, well, it can provide the stage director with the opportunity to create some (usually hokey) visual effects.
I made two new files for this post, and the Naples and Bucharest ones, and then discovered that I'd already made one of the New York performance, which I don't think we actually heard -- I think that was for another post that's still to come. I really like the hammed-up Leinsdorf performance (I don't think Rossini necessarily meant this storm to be subtle), but I acknowledge that Varviso has as much fun with his straighter approach. Finally, there's a special breath-of-life quality to the Romanian Barber recording from which we hear the storm.
ROSSINI: The Barber of Seville: Act II, The Storm
Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Erich Leinsdorf, cond. RCA/BMG, recorded 1958
Orchestra Rossini of Naples, Silvio Varviso, cond. Decca, recorded c1964
Orchestra of the Romanian Opera, Bucharest, Mihai Brediceanu, cond. Electrecord/Vox, recorded 1960-61
STILL TO COME: MORE OPERATIC STORMS WOVEN INTO THE ACTION -- LIKE ANOTHER BY VERDI AND ONE BY JANÁČEK
Maybe next week. Or maybe the week after -- it's hard to say with scientific precision.
Sunday Classics "loose ends": A return visit to "Exsultate, jubilate"
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by Ken
I mentioned in last night's "loose ends" installment that tonight we would be hearing soprano Christine Schäfer singing from a CD of works for voice and orchestra by Mozart and Richard Strauss. This is a CD I knew I had but just couldn't locate when we were listening to Mozart's infectiously glorious early motet Exsultate, jubilate, inspired by the Columbia LP coupling of George Szell's Cleveland Orchestra recordings of it, with soprano Judith Raskin, and the Sinfonia concertante (with the orchestra's then-concertmaster and principal viola, Rafael Druian and Abraham Skernick).
MOZART: Exsultate, jubilate (motet), K. 165
i. Allegro, "Exsultate, jubilate" Rejoice and be glad, ye blessed spirits, singing sweet songs; the heavens join with me echoing your chant. [4:36] ii. Recitative, "Fulget amica dies" The friendly day is shining now that clouds and storms have fled; sudden calm has risen on the just. Dark night reigned all around; but now arise in gladness, ye who until now were afraid, and offer leaves and lilies with a generous hand, rejoicing in the happy dawn. [5:28] iii. Andante, "Tu virginum corona" Thou crown of virgins, give us peace; and console our minds and our heavy hearts. [11:20] iv. Allegro, "Alleluja" Alleluja! [and so on, and on]
Christine Schäfer, soprano; Berlin Philharmonic, Claudio Abbado, cond. DG, recorded September 1997
Sunday Classics: 15 (well, actually 16) ways to start an opera, courtesy of Richard Strauss
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The opening of Act I of Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier in the film made at the 1961 Salzburg Festival, with Sena Jurinac as Octavian and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf as the Marschallin, staged by Paul Czinner, with Herbert von Karajan conducting the Vienna Philharmonic -- a new DVD and Blu-Ray issue is scheduled for Nov. 16.
by Ken
We've already done this with Puccini, gathering the openings of all the mature operas in one post: "Is this any way to start an opera? (Puccini thought so)." Whether it makes complete sense to do the same with the operas of Richard Strauss isn't clear, and there's always the possibility, as I suggested already, that we may be doing it just 'cause we can.
Like Puccini, Strauss early on abandoned formal overtures or even less formal preludes. But where Puccini tended to follow a pattern of a substantial orchestral introduction setting the stage for a logically following opening scene, making it relatively neat and sensible to present all those openings first as the orchestra-only introduction and then in extended form as the introduction plus opening scen, Strauss sometimes did something like this and sometimes plunged right into the dramatic scene. Still, if nothing else, going through all 15 Strauss opera openings gives us the opportunity to sketch their range, musically and dramatically.
We started Friday night's preview with the openings of the first two (Guntram and Feuersnot) and last two (Die Liebe der Danae and Capriccio) of the 15. Then last night we took peeks at Strauss's best-loved operas, Der Rosenkavalier and Ariadne auf Naxos. They're all included again in today's "complete" survey (and in all-different performances!).
Given how much ground we have to cover just getting through our 15 openings, I early on gave up on the idea of doing, as we did with Puccini, both an introduction-only and an introduction-plus-scene format. As it happens, though, most of the remaining 11 operas are pieces I would definitely like to come back to, and we might even continue working our way through them moving forward from the start and backward from from the finish, just adding something to the opening which will give a better sense of the piece.
WE'LL BE COMING BACK TO THIS PROJECT AT UNSPECIFIED INTERVALS
* Next up would be two pairs of naturally paired one-act operas: Nos. 3 and 4, Salome and Elektra, and Nos. 12 and 13, Friedenstag and Daphne, which were originally conceived to form a double bill.
* Then we would have two operas we've already talked about a lot, Nos. 5 and 6, Der Rosenkavalier and Ariadne auf Naxos, and I have really very little to say about, Arabella and Die schweigsame Frau.
* Which would leaves us with a truly wonderful unit of Nos. 7-9: Die Frau ohne Schatten, Intermezzo, and Die ägyptische Helena (The Egyptian Helen), which I would choose as a "thematic" unit on purely artistic grounds, as Strauss's "marriage group," three operas that deal centrally with the marital bond.
Sunday Classics: Who besides Richard Strauss could have brought us inside the Dyer's Wife's reality?
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Things go from worse to even worse:At the end of Act II, thanks to the machinations of the Empress's scheming Nurse, the gentle dyer Barak tries to kill his wife, and both are swallowed up in the earth. (Georg Solti conducts at the 1992 Salzburg Festival, with Robert Hale as Barak, Eva Marton as the Dyer's Wife, Cheryl Studer as the Empress, Marjana Lipovšek as the Nurse, and Manfred Hemm, Hans Franzen, and Wilfried Gahmlich as Barak's wretched brothers.)
by Ken
Since we're only going to be dealing with bits of Acts I and III in our glimpse of the relationship between Barak the Dyer and his wife in Richard Strauss's Die Frau ohne Schatten, I wanted to give you a chance at least to glimpse what happens in between, when the gentle dyer -- under fairly considerable provocation, it should be noted -- has to be restrained from killing the wife he cherishes. I know I haven't provided either proper dramatic context or any real way of your knowing what actually is going on, and for that matter, the performance doesn't provide us with singers who can really sing this stupendously difficult music beautifully. Oh well.
At the end of the act the unhappy couple is swallowed up, and we find them at the outset of Act III in separate mysterious dungeons, well, somewhere, neither aware of the other's fate or whereabouts, and both -- fearing it's all over for them -- seeing their life together in altered perspective.
As a bonus to Friday night's Frau preview, I threw in the Symphonic Fantasy from "Die Frau ohne Schatten" that Strauss wove nearly three decades after completing the opera. Just now I'd like to call your attention to the section that begins at about 9:33 of the Mehta-Sony recording. Here it is in a performance I actually like better, somewhat crudely edited by EMI and Amazon -- yes, I shelled out the 99 cents to download this "song"):
Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, Jeffrey Tate, cond. EMI, recorded early 1990s [It pisses me off no end that Amazon and other download sources feel utterly unobliged to provide basic discographic information about the "songs" they sell you -- often including not just recording date(s) but even the actual performers]
The music the composer is "fantasizing" about here is Barak's horrified recollection of the awful deed he came so close to doing.
Act III, Barak, "Mir anvertraut, dass ich sie hege" ("Entrusted to me for me to cherish")
Entrusted to me for me to cherish, for me to bear with these hands, to attend to her and be patient with her, for the sake of her young herart.
Barak is written for essentially the kind of bass-baritone Wagner called a Heldenbariton, or heroic baritone. In practice, the role has been taken successfully by everything from unhyphenated baritones (I'm sorry I don't have Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau's 1963 Munich Barak, which I've bought it twice on LP and once on open-reel tape, on CD) to a bass with a secure upper range. We're going to hear "Mir anvertraut" sung first by a baritone, and a not-at-all-bass-ish one at that, and then by a true bass. First our baritone, Josef Metternich, already past his best (maybe from singing those Heldenbariton parts?) but still a winning Barak.
Josef Metternich (b), Barak; Bavarian State Orchestra, Rudolf Kempe, cond. Live performance, Aug. 31, 1954
The case of our bass, Ludwig Weber, is a bewilderingly complex one. I don't think I know another singer of stature who so seemingly interchangeably did wonderful and dreadful singing. His 1955 Barak seems to me to fall mostly in the wonderful category, but I also need to point out that he was 56 at the time.
Ludwig Weber, bs (Barak); Vienna State Opera Orchestra, Karl Böhm, cond. Live performance, Nov. 9, 1955
Now we're going to hear Barak's reflection again but continue on as the Dyer's Wife, again unaware of her husband's presence, voices her thoughts.
Act III, "Mir anvertraut . . . Dir angetraut, dein zu pflegen" ("Entrusted to me . . . Wedded to you, to care for you")
[translation by G. M. Holland for Decca]
BARAK: Entrusted to me, etc. DYER'S WIFE: Wedded to you, to care for you, serving, loving, to bow to you, to see you, to breathe, to live, to give you, dear husband, children! BARAK: Entrusted to me -- and she fell reeling to the ground in mortal dread of my hand! Woe is me! If I might see her once again and say to her: Don't be afraid, don't be afraid!
José van Dam (bs-b), Barak; Hildegard Behrens (s), Dyer's Wife; Vienna Philharmonic, Sir Georg Solti, cond. Decca, recorded 1989
I don't mean to beat up on poor Hildegard Behrens, who's working hard but can't overcome the fact that she really can't sing the music beautifully. I think you'll hear the difference it makes to the way we receive the character to have a Dyer's Wife who sings the music as beautifully as Christa Ludwig does here.
Walter Berry (bs-b), Barak; Christa Ludwig (ms), Dyer's Wife; Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper Berlin, Heinrich Hollreiser, cond. Eurodisc/BMG/Tessitura, recorded 1963-64
REMEMBER, THINGS DIDN'T WORK OUT SO GREAT FOR OTELLO AND DESDEMONA EITHER
Since we've already invoked the tale of Otello and Desdemona, whom we encountered in last night's digression to hear what I'm claiming to be the most beautiful curtain-lowering music I know, it occurs to me that even there we're being set up to hear the catastrophe that befalls the couple we meet still rapturously in love. Let's hear how Shakespeare, librettist Arrigo Boito, and Verdi handled Otello's downfall, listening just to a pair of key moments:
* in the Act I duet, our glimpse of his underlying insecurity, as he confides to his cherished wife his fear -- and note the repetition of the word "temo ("I fear") -- never being granted another moment of such happiness
* in Act III, with Jago's scheme to persuade Otello of Desdemona's infidelity succeeding only too well, Otello stuns the Cypriot court assembled to greet the Venetian ambassador by hurliing Desdemona to the ground, raging, "To the ground, and weep!," where she recalls the very different effect her smile once had on him and launches one of the most stunning ensembles in opera (which of course we're not going to hear)
Act I, Otello, "Venga la morte!" ("Let death come!")
Act III, Otello, "A terra, e piangi!" ("To the ground, and weep!")
James McCracken (t), Otello; Gwyneth Jones (s), Desdemona; New Philharmonia Orchestra, Sir John Barbirolli, cond. EMI, recorded Aug.-Nov. 1968
MEANWHILE BACK IN THE SOUTH PACIFIC . . .
Now let's go back to Act I of Frau ohne Schatten, to the point where the Dyer's Wife comes closest to being sympathetic, when for once she's not bellowing or deriding or shrieking, when in essence she tells Barak in as kindly a fashion as he can that their marriage has failed.
Act I, Dyer's Wife, "Dritthalb Jahr bin ich dein Weib" ("For two and a half years I've been your wife")
In order not to beat up on any one singer, let's go back to the 1955 Vienna performance and hear Ludwig Weber with a notable Strauss soprano of the era, Christl Goltz, a singer I actually admire, but one whose voice lost, very likely under the barrage of the heavyweight repertory she sang, lost its tonal freshness early on, leaving her sounding, well, like this.
[translation by G. M. Holland for Decca]
DYER'S WIFE: For two and a half years I've been your wife -- and no fruit have you won from me, and you have not made me a mother. My longing for that I've had to put out of my mind. Now it is for you to put away desires which are dear to you. BARAK: Out of a young mouth come hard words and arrogant speech, but they are blessed with the blessings of recantation. I am not angry with you, I am happy of heart, and I will tarry and await patiently the blessings which are to come. [BARAK has tied up the huge bundle of skins, lifts it to the hearth and then hoists it onto his back by bending over and grasping the end of the rope; he straightens up.] DYER'S WIFE [somberly, to herself]: None will come into this house; sooner will some go out and shake the dust off their feet. So let it be, and rather today than tomorrow. BARAK [nods good-bye without hearing her last words, then staggers to the door bowed under the heavy load of skins, singing to himself]: If I carry the goods to market myself, I spare the ass, who drags them for me!
Christl Goltz (s), Dyer's Wife; Ludwig Weber (bs), Barak; Vienna State Opera Orchestra, Karl Böhm, cond. Live performance, Nov. 9, 1955
Now here are Christa Ludwig and Walter Berry, at the Met in 1966.
Christa Ludwig (ms), Dyer's Wife; Walter Berry (bs-b), Barak; Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Karl Böhm, cond. Live performance, Dec. 17, 1966
Barak's music is written to sound beautiful, and to enable the character to grab the audience's sympathy. If the singer doesn't have the audience eating out of his hand, he's missed one of opera's most golden opportunities. Because we catch the Dyer's Wife almost entirely at her frustrated, belligerent worst, she by contrast almost always comes across as a shrew. And yet the reality of the situation is that she surely is the character who deserves, even needs our sympathy. Barak may be content with this life, but would anyone else eagerly embrace a life spent fighting against perpetual filth and stench. He reaps the emotional rewards of his unstinting generosity, but she's the one stuck with, for example, the endless horror of waiting on Barak's three appalling brothers, with whom she has the fortune to share the hovel she calls home.
It's important to take in what's obvious, and the inherent goodness of Barak is a fine example. But Strauss had a genius for taking us inside and underneath the obvious. For all the complexities of Hofmannsthal's Frau libretto, what fired Strauss as always, was the human depth, and for me this unmatched ability to penetrate literally to, if I may, the heart of the matter is what Frau is all about. I realize we've scarcely mentioned the opera's nominal "first" couple, the Emperor and Empress, but it's every bit as true of them. For the Empress, pampered child of an overweeningly powerful and stiflingly protective father, it's finding out for herself what she's made of. For the Emperor, it's learning that even for the privileged there's more to life than romantic fantasies.
And for me it always comes back to the Dyer's Wife. Christa Ludwig paid a price for all those performances of the role, which took a toll on her voice, which wasn't even a proper dramatic mezzo, let alone a dramatic soprano, but making us see and feel all that frustration and disappointment and pain was perhaps the crowning accomplishment of her distinguished career.
