I have had an unusually full reader response to my two-part essay on Der Fliegende Holländer, which began with a consideration of some of the ideas incorporated into the François Girard production that had just begun its Metropolitan Opera run when the pandemic descended upon us; continued with a discussion of this opera’s plunge into modernity at Otto Klemperer’s Kroll Oper, and of that conductor’s later recorded interpretation of it; and concluded with attentions paid to a sampling of the pre- and post-WW2 interpreters of its major roles. Some of the respondents were answering my invitation to corrections, since I’d released the second of these posts without the usual proofreading and cross-checking. And indeed there were several corrections needed—mostly misattributions or inconsistent references to dates and venues, but including one genuine gaffe, the designation of the highest note in Erik’s Act 3 Cavatina as a B-natural, when it’s actually a B-flat. That’s embarrassing, especially inasmuch as I had the score before me as I wrote. Late-night drear or not, one wonders how such things can happen.

All these factual face-plants have now been set straight, with my thanks to the readers who alerted me to them. But since I had in any case intended to add a footnote clarifying my reference to the tenor aria in Verdi’s Ernani and expanding the discussion of Wagner’s concern over the very phrase that contains that same high note, and since three of the responses have dealt with substantive matters of interpretation, I’ve decided to post a brief addendum on them here, rather than trying to squeeze them into a future post on unrelated subjects.

F. P. Walter has written to point to what he sees as a “sharp disconnect” between my partial description of the Dutchman’s character (as heard in the music) and my evaluation of the suitability of certain singers for the role. He finds my observations about the “monstrous” aspects of the Dutchman’s psyche “insightful” and “original” (thank you, F. P.—I rather liked this passage, too, and haven’t seen that connection made elsewhere), but then finds it odd that I should cite Friedrich Schorr, with his “smooth, round, benevolent sound” that suggests “a kindly man with a streak of melancholy,” more suited to Wolfram or Sachs than to a figure of  demonic configuration. He has some of the same reservations concerning my admiration for Joel Berglund and Herbert Janssen in this music, and wonders if I may not be under the lingering influence (as we all can be) of my first loves among Wagner baritones.

As to this last, I have to concede that one can never eliminate that possibility, and that to pretend to do so would be to assert a power of objective judgment on a question that is inherently subjective. I’d say that I can only trust my ears, evaluative skills, and listening experience, and hope they’re enough to add up to plausible preferences. I’d also concede that all of us who are voice professionals (singers, teachers) are apt to be more concerned with what we might call purely vocal attributes than are many other listeners. If a voice seems truly “right” for the music, and the singing meets the standards we’re accustomed to applying (the combination is rare), we’re mighty satisfied, and if not, not so much, even if we recognize other virtues at work. One can call this a bias, but of course I think it’s a salutary bias, the setting of a base point of reference before we go on to other attributes of artistry. And a final concession: F. P.’s point about Schorr’s timbre is well taken. There is little we would call demonic in it, and from that standpoint the Dutchman was not quite hand-in-glove for him, as were several other Wagner roles. Also (though I did not dwell on this in the article), with even primetime Schorr,  we are always aware that while the top Es and Fs at forte are secure and imposing, there is not the sense of much room above them. Until his last few years, he could sing F-sharps and even Gs (in Wagner’s writing for baritone, these are almost never sustained), but other singers, including Hotter and London at their best, released these pitches more freely. Here, though, it’s well to keep two things in mind. One, which I cite in the post and which is applicable to these Holländer extracts, is the constant admonition heard in the course of acoustical recording to step back from the horn for full-voice top notes, with the result that we never hear the whole impact of these in relation to the rest of the voice. The second is the testimony of many qualified listeners as to the sheer power of Schorr’s voice—in my book I refer to Hugh Thompson’s recollection of it pealing through the house “like a trombone.” Some of that comes through on Schorr’s best recordings, e. g., from the Walküre Wotan, but again we have to infer some of the live-performance effect.