In last Monday’s post, I mentioned thinking about Der Fliegende Holländer in the light of its small share of opera’s journey through what we loosely designate as “The Modern” and on into our present “Postmodern” condition, in the course of which the artform seems to have gotten lost. And some of my thinking was occasioned by a look back through Patrick Carnegy’s Wagner and the Art of the Theatre. This impressively researched, well-written book traces the production histories of Wagner’s operas, from the practices of the theatre world into which they were born down to those of our own, with thoughtful efforts to contextualize them artistically, politically, and socially. Any such history will tend to organize itself around emblematic statements or movements of “reform,” and for Wagnerian stagecraft one such is the short but eventful life (1927-1931) of Berlin’s Kroll Opera, where Otto Klemperer was the music director. Carnegy devotes an entire chapter to the Kroll, and within that chapter pays significant attention to the company’s production of Holländer. For any in-depth understanding of the Kroll’s place in its cultural milieu and of Klemperer’s stature over the long span of his life and career, I would refer you to Carnegy’s work and to Peter Heyworth’s splendid two-volume biography of O.K. Here, I’ll only note that the company was rebelliously modernistic and anti-Romantic, very much influenced by the revolutionary trends in the Weimar culture, with all their cross-pollinations among artforms, and that Klemperer, though steeped from childhood in the older musical and theatrical assumptions, was by this time a strong advocate of that newer spirit. He had experienced a “revulsion against anything that smacked of exaggeration or emotional indulgence” (Heyworth), and had turned away from Wagner (thenceforward, he preferred R.W.’s early operas to the later ones). He leaned now toward Bach and Mozart among the classics, and Stravinsky, Hindemith, and Krenek among his contemporaries.

At the same time that I was dipping into Carnegy and Heyworth, I re-acquainted myself with O.K.’s recording of Der Fliegende Holländer. It dates from some forty years after the Kroll production, so we cannot assume that it represents what he did with the score then. Still,  I was curious to find if I could hear in his conducting and work with the singers some musical correspondence to the modernist elements of that long-ago event, and—apart from the question of liking or disliking that aesthetic—get some sense of whether or not there was the kind of eye/ear unity that is notably lacking in so many contemporary productions. Klemperer’s standing in the postwar decades was lofty—especially in the UK, where much of his effort was concentrated—but among record-buyers and connoisseurs worldwide, as well. The revolutionary of the ’20s was now, along with Furtwängler, Walter, and Erich Kleiber (all of whom he outlasted), a grey-eminence connection back to the Wilhelmine days and all that had happened in the interim—and a complex, strong-minded personality, to boot. As a young critic assigned in the early 1960s to review the operatic portion of his growing discography, I approached the task with deep respect and, perhaps, some hesitancy to buck the unchallengeable credentials and established wisdom.