Poor Friedrich, Graf von Telramund! Held in high esteem for his valor and service by the King, granted first dibs on Elsa (and, therefore, the governance of Brabant) by the recently passed Duke and for a time betrothed to her, then persuaded of Elsa’s guilt in the disappearance of his other ward by Ortrud and now married to that lady, goaded by her into confronting his mysteriously empowered rival not once but twice and losing both times, the second time for good! A pitiful giant, and a dramatically powerful role, but one without an aria to yield any Top Ten singles. Difficult, too, calling as it does for a sizable Heldenbariton that impinges in midrange, yet lies at the top of such a voice’s range for declamatory bars at a time. So its casting tended to fluctuate between true heroic baritones a little short at the top, or baritones of a higher type with less of the dark color and weight than one might want, back in the times when such voices were around. I imagine the American baritone Clarence Whitehill, who sang Telramund often in earlier days at the Met, as having been almost ideal for the part; his recordings show all the desired attributes. Emil Schipper, who recorded the feasible extracts, including the Act 2 scene with his then-wife, the contralto Olszewska, is also a useful model from a vocal standpoint (powerful depth in the middle, dominating brilliance at the top), though his handling of the text is on the peasantish side. On the ’30s broadcasts we get examples of both baritonal sorts. Schorr, I think, I have adequately summarized, and Julius Huehn, another American singer, is impressive in the ’37 performance, his strong baritone more than coping with the tessitura, and style and language well in hand for a young singer not born into either. He is less impressive on the 1940 broadcast.

And our basses? The part has less scope than the other principals, but after all this is Henry the Fowler, and the character has not only a necessary and extended function to fulfill, but more opportunity for characterization and true vocalism than it’s usually granted. There’s no competition I know of for Alexander Kipnis on “Mein Herr und Gott” (as solo only), and here Ludwig Hoffmann is a distinct improvement on List, and still singing it in Berlin in ’42, where, as I said in my old review of that release, “he blares on heartily.”  But think: in addition to those three, the same years could offer Ludwig Weber and Michael Bohnen in this role! Five greatvoiced basses, with vocal qualities and personalities whose distinctiveness comes across easily on recordings, to choose from on the highest international level.

Naturally, there is much to explore with Lohengrin post-1940, and at least up into the 1970s, some of it very good, in a few instances equal to, or even surpassing, what we can hear on these and other earlier recordings. But to make valid comparisons with our current situation, one has to re-calibrate radically. And the value of restating that fact? To help maintain an awareness that what one is hearing is only a stingy portion of Wagner’s opera.

We must not despair. ChatGPT, evaluating the current state of Wagner singing, assures us that it “continues to evolve and thrive, due to advancements in vocal training [surely improved over those duffers who taught Slezak, Melchior, Leider, Flagstad, et al.], but perhaps more significantly to “the use of microphones and amplification systems,” which “can help singers to achieve a more balanced and nuanced sound.” Say no more, Oracle.

And as to what we are seeing, read on.

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As my regular readers know, I have written on François Girard’s encounters with Wagner before, first about his widely endorsed Parsifal (3/19/18), and then about his Fliegende Holländer (4/6/20 and 4/11/20)—or, rather, his ideas, and some of mine, about the latter, inasmuch as the performance for which I held tickets fell victim to the pandemic shutdown. And as I hope the tone of my critique has indicated, while he seems to have been born into the presumptions of auteuristic practice (the director posited as co-equal with the creator, free to upend the meanings and cultural givens of the latter’s work in favor of his own), leaving me obligated to reject his work a priori because it violates the basic ethics of interpretation, I don’t harbor toward him the sort of animus I feel for, say, Oliver Stone or Dmitri Tcherniakov. I think Girard is genuinely fascinated by Wagner and trying to grapple with him; it’s just that he is undone by his inability to relinquish his auteuristic privilege (by now systemic) and its dominant cultural bias, that of presentism (by now implicit), and assume his true and honorable position as interpreter. As we like to say nowadays, he’s a victim as much as I am.

I urge any readers who have not seen those previous articles (and some who have—I needed a refresher course myself) to give them some attention, partly as background for what I’ll be saying here, and partly because Girard sees strong intertextual connections that influence his approach to these operas. So do I, but a) I’m writing down my critical perceptions, not putting them on the stage in the guise of interpretation, and b) I’m not sure Girard is picking the right text to conjoin with Lohengrin. It is obvious that there are thematic ties between Lohengrin and Parsifal. They spring from the same mythic sources, to the point that in story terms the Holy Fool is father to the Knight of the Swan, and Lohengrin thus the sequel to Parsifal. But we straightway meet up with the difficulty that the two operas were written in the reverse order, and that by the time Wagner came to write Parsifal (all the Grail matter churning the while), he was not merely a much-matured musician and dramatist, but a man entirely changed in intellectual and spiritual outlook from the one who had written his first three masterpieces. So I believe that it’s among Lohengrin‘s younger, closer cousins that we might find the most useful thematic correspondences, and that if we were to seek connection to one of later birth, it might not be Parsifal, but Die Meistersinger. Whatever we might discover, though, our perceptions would again belong on the page, not on the stage, for each of these works is an artistic entity unto itself, occupying its own clearing in the world of art and guarding its own integrity.