I sampled (and I emphasize that word) six older performances, audio only, all live: the Met, 1937, Artur Bodanzky, cond.; Teatro Colon, 1938, Erich Kleiber; La Scala, 1950, and RAI Rome, 1953, both Wilhelm Furtwängler; the Met, 1951, Fritz Stiedry; and Bayreuth, 1955, Josef Keilberth. All these save for Bayreuth/Keilberth (in superb sound as heard on the Testament CDs) suffer to one degree or another from the restrictions of mono broadcast audio. But as it happens, the two most severely affected (Met ’37, Colon ’38) have the most to tell us about Bandsmen as Mimes. Bodanzky can rush things a bit for my taste, not quite allowing time for even rapidly passing events to fully land. This happens at points in the Act 1 Siegfried/Mime scenes, and once or twice in the final pages of the opera (less worrisome, I’m sure, in the excitement of the moment in the theatre, especially with the voices of Melchior and Flagstad to sweep one through on the “logic of feeling”). And with these prewar Wagner broadcasts—not only at the Met, but famously there—you must be prepared for sometimes shocking cuts. There’s a hefty one here, whose only conceivable virtue is to evade the reference to Grane’s awakening (now that he’s up and about, what do we do with him?) But: wherever you dip into this performance (with a few moments to adjust to the sound limitations), you will hear attack and accent, inflectional keenness, and an impetuosity that leaves the current Met band in the dust, and not just in terms of tempo. Act 3 is the most revelatory, and above all in the closing scene. When these voices take over, your focus will be on them, as is proper.(I) But listen to the opening of the scene, with Siegfried’s arrival on the Rock of the Valkyries, and most particularly to the purely orchestral passage of Brünnhilde’s awakening. Follow the long, slow buildup, mounting ever higher, with its crescendos and diminuendos and long-held fermatas, pregnant and suspenseful, and then the last diminuendo and ritenuto before the sforzando chords for Brünnhilde’s greetings to the sun, to the light, which knife straight into the viscera. These players know what they’re saying; their conductor leads them to say it.
Footnotes
| ↑I | I call to your attention Wagner’s remarks on the relationship between orchestra and singer in the Munich premiere of Tristan und Isolde. He wants his followers to “take into their hands” the complex interplay of motifs and harmonies that make up the orchestral bedding of Act 3—this, presumably, through study of the score. He certainly wants these elements to be ingested, to be part of the receptor’s awareness, not so much as achievements of compositional mastery, but as the only possible way of conveying Tristan’s emotional extremes, “from the fiercest longing for bliss to the most resolute desire for death.” Then, however, he notes that operatically, this enormous orchestral construction still stands as “accompaniment to a solo,” and calls on attendees of the Munich performances to testify to the achievement of Tristan’s “creator,” Schnorr von Carolsfeld, which was that “from the first bar to the last, all attention, all interest was centered in the actor, the singer, stayed riveted to him, and never for a moment, for one single text word, did he lose his hold upon his audience, but the orchestra was wholly effaced by the singer, or—to put it more correctly—seemed part and parcel of his utterance.” Not, please note, the other way round, with the singer part and parcel of the orchestra’s utterance. Not that, on the evening of May 2, there was any danger of this last being the case. |
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