You may have noticed my insertion of quotation marks around my characterization of this as a “complete” recording. It doesn’t point to musical cuts. For a moment early on, I thought I was back in the world of London ffrr’s ’50s Manon (and, if I recall rightly, one or two others in that company’s series of Paris opera recordings supervised by Max de Rieux), whereon a narrator  introduced and periodically intruded on each scene to, in effect, read the stage directions. This was not welcome for Manon, but isn’t necessarily a terrible idea for, say, a concert performance of an opéra comique or Singspiel, thus dispensing with dialogue in a situation that’s not a full performance anyway. Here, the intention is different. There are two Narrators. One is supposedly Samiel, the Black Huntsman himself. “He” takes over whenever Max is the center of attention, and according to the libretto provided is envisioned as hovering about the action in some of Max’s scenes. The other is identified as The Hermit. He narrates when the focus is on Agathe; I can’t tell whether or not he hovers. Each then steps inside the story’s frame to assume character at the places dictated by the scenario.

I know—I also placed Samiel-as-Narrator’s pronoun in quotes. That’s because, in virtuous lockstep with the #MoreRolesforWomen movement, “He” is a she. This is my second encounter within six months with the notion of making The Evil One female. In September, my wife and I drove to Niagara on the Lake, Ont., for the rare chance of seeing the Shaw Festival’s staging of Man and Superman, complete with the Don Juan in Hell sequence, and without significant cuts in compensation. It was a well-directed, well-acted production (in itself a rarity), with only one casting-to-type mistake: in Act 3, the doubled roles of the bandit chief Mendoza and The Devil had been given to an actress. The error wasn’t a question of competence. Many a professional male actor might have played it worse. It was in the timbre, rhythms, and pitching of the speeches for both characters. As was otherwise interestingly suggested by the production, Shaw was an intensely musical writer, here consciously riffing on an operatic work, Mozart’s Don Giovanni, with its array of singing voice types. And it’s not as if M & S doesn’t have several other excellent roles for women.^(I)

In this Freischütz, Samiel has quite a lot to do, being given fairly extensive narration and many of his/her lines during the casting of the bullets (though not the final “Hier bin ich!” when the Black Huntsman is revealed to Max). The assignment is undertaken by Corinna Kirchhoff, who makes an old-fashioned melodramatic meal of it. I will leave it to the luminaries of the relevant social movements to hash out whether turning male devils female is progress or regression—but I still think Samiel is a guy. Of course, he doesn’t sing. But The Hermit does, so the fact that Peter Simonischek’s very low-key recitation of that Narrator’s lines bears no resemblance to the basso of Selig raises the old problem of casting different performers to sing and act in pieces that require both. And while I appreciate that including even a redacted version of the dialogue adds a layer of difficulty, length (but there’s plenty of time left on that second CD), and expense to a production or project, and often doesn’t work very well, narration takes us out of the world of the work, puts a perspective on it that weakens our involvement.