First, a corrective note: A. J. Klein has kindly written to note that in the Lohengrin performance I characterized as complete except for the usually cut extension to “In fernem Land“—“unless I missed a cut”—I did indeed miss one: the entire Act 3 passage beginning with Lohengrin’s “O, Elsa! Was hast du mir angethan!” through the extended ensemble that follows and Lohengrin’s prediction of victory over “the Eastern hordes.” It’s not an uncommon excision—marked “VI–DE” in my vocal score—but Mr. Klein is entirely right that the passage is both musically and dramatically significant, and belongs in the opera. My thanks to him, and my apologies for succumbing to daze.    

I promised in Part 1 of this article to give attention to the Met broadcast of Dec. 21, 1935. It is one of three prewar transmissions from that source that are worth hearing, especially in relation to what it is possible to hear today. One is the performance I referred to in Part 1, in which Rethberg is the Elsa. That’s from January of 1940, and Rethberg’s colleagues are Kerstin Thorborg, Lauritz Melchior, Julius Huehn, Emmanuel List, and Leonard Warren (as The Herald), under Erich Leinsdorf. Another is from March of 1937, when Flagstad sang Elsa, Karin Branzell Ortrud, René Maison Lohengrin, Huehn (again) Telramund, and Ludwig Hofmann the King, with Maurice Abravanel conducting. I’ll allude to them for the things that seem special about them. The 1935 cast: Lotte Lehmann, Marjorie Lawrence, Melchior, Friedrich Schorr, and List, under Artur Bodanzky. I’ll focus on it despite some serious flaws (and the least satisfactory sound of the three), because when it’s special, it’s the most special of all.

Let me get the complaints out of the way first. From the moment Bodanzky arrived in New York in 1915 to assume leadership of the Metropolitan’s German wing (there was such a thing then), he declared his intention to cut anything that seemed to bore his audience. He must have been acutely aware that he was now conducting for an American audience, and perhaps that New York’s demographics had been shifting away from the proportions that had not long before made all-German-language seasons feasible. So he adopted a policy of significant redactions in the works under his jurisdiction, and these remained in effect until his death in 1939. It may also be that starting in the ’30s the Saturday matinees, from which the broadcasts emanate, were cut more heavily than other performances because of the evening performances to follow. In any event, in the Lohengrins I’m speaking of, Scenes 3 and 4 of Act 2 are ground into hash, and Scene 3 of Act 3 (the opera’s finale) cuts to the chase in an all-too-literal sense. While in many important passages (e.g., the Prelude, the first two scenes of Act 2, and the scene I’m about to examine) his leadership has a definition of musical profile and tautness of dramatic tension that few others equal, in others (the aforementioned Act 2 sequences, or the maniacal sprint through the Act 3 Prelude) one feels a lack of patience with the formalities of the score, so that the music does not unfold with the necessary sense of inevitability. The choral work is scrappy and poorly conveyed by the recording. Cuts and conducting taken together, does the opera still play? Yes, but we are cheated of its full impact. Vocally, too, there are disappointments. List has just the right sort of voice for Heinrich—a roomy true bass, impressive at both ends—but with everything between, except for the few softer, solicitous phrases, afflicted with shakiness. In Act 1, we are at points made painfully aware that the great Schorr’s time with this high-lying role has really elapsed. (Fortunately, he somehow pulls things together for the big Act 2 scene with Ortrud.) Finally, Melchior, distantly positioned, does not sound comfortable at the outset. Relative to what we hear today, these are First-World problems, but important, nonetheless.

Luckily, the crucial two-character scenes come across much better on this broadcast than the congested choral ones, and receive the most caring treatment. Important as the first two of Act 2 are (Ortrud/Telramund, Elsa/Ortrud), The Bridal Chamber Scene marks the opera’s turning point, the juncture at which what is most often taken as its central theme, “trust,” meets its moment of tragic failure. And splendid as the nearly complete Melchior/Bettendorf studio recording cited in Part 1 is, the combination of Lehmann, Melchior, and Bodanzky in live performance transcends it (or any other I know) by a substantial margin. Before I talk about why, I’m going to take a few moments with the scene itself. Structurally, it breaks down into five parts, plus a postlude, crafted by the creator into a throughwritten scene of cumulatively quickened pace and heightened emotional tension. But to trace its psychological progression, we must start with the characters’ state of mind at the outset.

Dear devotees: the above-titled post, scheduled for today, Apr. 14, will be published tomorrow, Sat., Apr. 15. Thanks for your patience.

CLO

I will have a couple of sad notes to append to today’s article, but first a cheerier one: Joseph Horowitz, author of the recent award-winning Dvořak’s Prophecy and The Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music and many other books, is now publishing a novel, The Marriage: The Mahlers in New York. The sojourn (1907-1911) of Gustav Mahler and his ever-intriguing wife Alma in New York, first with the Metropolitan and then with the re-organizing Philharmonic, has  been given relatively slight attention by his biographers. So a book dedicated to this period, so crucial in the history of both organizations and so close to the end for Mahler himself, is self-recommending to opera and classical music devotees—all the more so for providing a close-in view of the intimate life of this extraordinary couple. The Marriage is being published in late April by Blackwater Press, and can be pre-ordered here. 

The first thing to be recorded about the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin is that it replaces the one designed and directed by Robert Wilson in 1998, which in any case had not been in the repertory for 17 years. That effort was abstract, emotionally cold, executed in a glacially slow-motion mimetic style and governed by a theory of the “separation of elements” (above all, of music from action) that was specifically and intentionally anti-Wagnerian, and occasionally beautiful, though for the most part in ways unrelated to the opera. At the time, it was the longest step the company had yet taken in the direction of postmodern, auteurial, eye-over-ear production. I wrote about it, about Wilson’s aesthetic, and about a species of companion piece called Bob (we might think of it as a comic intermezzo to the opera seria called Lohengrin) at length in Opera as Opera, to which I refer any interested parties.

The new Lohengrin is directed by François Girard, with the collaboration of a design team headed by Tim Yip (set and costumes), and is conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin. I will get to it, and to thoughts about the work itself, in “Lohengrin, Part 2: Production,” next week. But first, in line with my insistence that just because most contemporary productions stand opera’s natural balance of elements (between ear and eye, action and environment) on its head doesn’t mean I have to follow suit, let me give due attention first to performance. In experienced time, as distinct from clock time, this was the longest Lohengrin I’ve ever seen or heard. This had nothing to do with redactions or restorations. Unless some cut slipped past me amid other distractions, the score was rendered complete except for the extension to “In fernem Land,” wherein Lohengrin explains Gottfried’s enchantment and his own selection in Grail Land to answer the call from Elsa, and the choral responses. This is musically one of the score’s lesser passages, and it clogs up the progression from the Narrative to the climax, for which reasons Wagner decided it should be eliminated. Nearly all productions, and even most recordings, have followed his advice.

Nor was the experienced duration due to the tempos chosen by the conductor. In fact, throughout Act 1 I was hopeful that this might be the best of N-S’s readings I’d yet heard.  In the Prelude there were places I wished had been given more definition, as with the ascending violins over a pp tremolando in Bar 15 (the violins are in eight parts here), marked as phrased staccati and later echoed in Lohengrin’s Act 3 Narrative to the words “um neu zu stärken seine Wunderkraft” (“to strengthen afresh its [the Grail’s] miraculous power”—referring to the Heavenly Dove’s yearly descent). N-S glided through this as if to tamp that thought down, and indeed the strings were, in terms of sonority, the weakest element throughout the evening. Still, the Vorspiel was at least sweetly played, and gathered climactic force where needed. The action started at a decent clip, if without any real sense of a mustering forth, and throughout the act all that trumpet work, onstage and in the pit, was crisp, the short punctuating chords under the Herald’s proclamations precise, and things in general swang along nicely right through the finale. So far, so good in the bright, smoothed, high-center-of-gravity Late Modern manner, to which the only antidotes we have had in this century in big German scores have come from Christian Thielemann and Daniele Gatti. From there on, however, the pit fell into a swoon, if not a coma. The problem was signaled with the ominous opening phrases of Act 2, where those groaning cello and low woodwind depths had nary a hint of their wonted grating buzz and the subsequent build-up into the Ortrud/Telramund scene had none of the brooding tension, the anguish, it must have. And so it went to the end: nothing wrong with the tempos, and nothing technically wrong with the playing, either, save that it lacked the essential quality of an operatic orchestra, that of suspenseful dramatic action, and therefore of meaningful engagement with the singers, under whose work there was not the web of thematic development and summoning of atmosphere needed to establish an interactive sonic environment. Then, two or three times, we got a great obliterative blast from the brass, far out of the proportions otherwise observed. At this point, we have heard enough of N-S to realize that this is his predilection, and that the longer he remains the shaper of the Met orchestra, choosing new players and grooming the lot, the more that predilection will prove determinative. The soundstage came to life periodically through the work of the chorus (Donald Palumbo, Chorus Master), whose excellent balance among choirs, exactitude of rhythm and attack, and sheer numerical sufficiency provided what grandeur there was to be had.