A quick note to start: In 1994, my longtime colleague Joseph Horowitz published his fascinating Wagner Nights, an account of the life and times of the conductor Anton Seidl, who introduced Tristan und Isolde to America (Metropolitan Opera, 1886, among many other performances during those German-language seasons), led the extraordinary series of popular summer concerts (heavy on Wagner) at Brighton Beach, and inspired the foundation of the Seidl Society, a largely female organization of cult intensity in support of Seidl’s work and of Wagnerism in the U.S. It was Horowitz’s research in the Seidl Society archives at the Brooklyn Historical Society that restored this artistically vital but forgotten history, with its enticing Gilded Age background and cast of larger-than-life characters, to our cultural memory.

Now, Horowitz has fictionalized the story in the form of a novel, The Disciple, bringing the era and its people, from great artists, iconic critics, and society stars to the black children sponsored by the Society, to vivid life. It has just been published here by Blackwater Press. And sure enough, Chapter One tells the tale of that Tristan premiere, starring the veteran Wagner tenor Albert Niemann and the great Lilli Lehmann, seen through the eyes of one of the most authoritative of those critics, Henry Krehbiel, while Chapter Ten takes us briefly into a coaching session with Seidl and Jean de Reszke, as the latter prepared for the crowning challenge of his legendary career. With that, to today’s topic.

Thinking ahead to a new cast and production of Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, I returned to a book that had once led me not only into the depths of this opera’s mythical and historical sources, but to a framework for the understanding of the entire operatic canon as it then stood. The book is Love in the Western World, by Denis de Rougemont, first published in 1940, then re-issued in 1956 in a revised  edition that reflected the passage of momentous times and, in particular, the author’s seven years in the United States. (The book was re-published in English one more time, in 1983.) I went back to Love in the Western World partly to refresh an old fascination, but also in anticipation of the contrast it would most likely provide with what I was about to see and hear. I had some previous acquaintance with the work and ideas of the director, Yuval Sharon (see Yuval, 12/16/24) and his design partner, Es Devlin (see Otello: Devlin in the Details,1/18/19), and all the musical and vocal elements of the production were familiar to me, so I was sure that any resemblance between their collective vision and de Rougemont’s (with mythical material, there’s bound to be some) would be strictly coincidental. And I believed that de Rougemont’s book would provide a good test of the limits on the use of a secondary source in conceptualizing a production, and of how far well-supported but idiosyncratic arguments may serve interpretation before leaping the boundaries of an integrated production, that is to say one whose theatrical and musical spheres are reconciled with each other, and with the creator’s text. Or to put it another way: the boundaries within which a coherent correspondence among music, words, and theatrical action may be found, a correspondence which in turn affects us and gives us a basis for the kind of belief—temporary but intense—that a performance experience asks of us, and whose meaning (for us, the affected) we may then consider for our own lives and beliefs.

Today’s article will doubtlessly be of keenest interest to voice professionals—singers, teachers, coaches—but I hope it will also be of use to devotees who may have had little or no vocal training, but who listen closely with an ear cocked toward connoisseurship. I’m always writing about voice in these posts, usually in the context of specific performance events, but sometimes by way of analyzing the singing of artists who exemplify technical command and/or intriguing deviations from it. I’ll provide a listing of such pieces at the end of this post, and encourage selective referral to them by way of background. Here, I will be presenting what I consider a refinement on my previous way of framing how voices work—or should work—developed in part through preparation for two talks I have delivered to the membership of the Jussi Björling Society, which some of you may have seen. [Here is a link to the first of these talks, which is the more relevant to today’s subject. It includes recorded samples.] And I’ll add a few words concerning the possible uses and misuses of a view on breath control (“support,” if you will) that was part of a line of descent in German pedagogy that had a degree of prominence over here in the postwar years. It has, so far as I’m aware, vanished from the conversation, yet might have something to contribute to our thinking. Please bear in mind that while we’re talking here about the dynamics that create the pre-requisite conditions for wonderful singing, it is ultimately the ear, guided by the singer’s aesthetic and dramatic imagination, that must direct those dynamics toward an artistic result, and that must be cultivated and re-directed from the start, in conjunction with our functional work.

The term “triune” happens to convey, precisely and concisely, the incorporation of three varieties of balance into a single point of concentration that illustrates my ideal of technical accomplishment in singing. If its theological implications give some readers pause when speaking of our vocal trinity, with hints of blasphemy on one hand or of pretentiousness on the other, we can call it simply the three-in-one oil of the voice. The Jussi Björling Society was a natural venue for exploration of this idea, since the great Swedish singer perfectly demonstrated its consummation in a lyrico-spinto tenor voice. In Opera as Opera, I proposed the existence of two broad categories of singers, one comprising those whose voices could be best described as bright, lean, and taut, the other of voices more accurately heard as dark, plump, and loose. (These are relative categories, of course, with most voices partaking of some qualities of both.) I also suggested that all great singers—male or female, higher or lower in range, and of any “weight” of voice—operate very close to the dividing line between these categories, and that any good singer is not far from it. In my teaching, I sometimes use the playground image of trying to stand on a teeter-totter: if your feet are equidistant from the center bar, with equal weight to either side, you can maintain your balance. But if one foot is farther from the bar in either direction, you must overcompensate with your weight distribution, and will not be upright for long. In the book, I use pairings of great singers whom we can define as slightly to the B/L/T side or over on the D/P/L one, to make the distinction as clear as possible. And I trace a migration of general usage throughout the 20th Century, from brighter/leaner/tauter in the early years to darker/plumper/looser by the postwar decades, which saw the last generations of what I term “greatvoiced” singers.

My next post in this series will be published a week from today, on Friday, Mar. 6. It will be on aspects of vocal technique, a more refined version of things I’ve written about in the past, and will be entitled Voice: the Triune Balance. Plus: A Note on the “Stauprinzip.” Exactly what these terms mean awaits a reading of the piece.

CLO

Dear devotees,

In discussing singers of the baritone role, Riccardo, I somehow neglected to insert the name of Mattia Battistini in the opening, leaving readers to connect the widely space dots farther down. This has now been corrected. My apologies for the confusion this must have caused for many readers.

CLO

In the Met’s new production of Vincenzo Bellini and Carlo Pepoli’s I Puritani, the signs of trouble for both eye and ear came early, the first arriving with a glance at the program’s list of characters, which revealed the presence of three non-singing figures not to be found in the score’s list of personaggi: a Young Arturo, a Young Elvira, and a Lord Talbot. Sure enough, they were there to turn our attention from ear to eye during the Introduzione, which after the wonderfully premonitive opening was dedicated to a dumb show given over to a fragment of backstory involving our hero and heroine in preadolescence and the hero’s father, the last in full Cavalier regalia. With the true start of the opera’s action, in a pattern soon to be followed by Donizetti and Cammarano in Lucia Lammermoor, an opening chorus is succeeded by a two-part aria in which the baritone antagonist, in dialogue with an allied comprimario character, sets forth his complaint. In this case, though, the complaint is a fragrant, elegant reflection on a lost love (cavatina, rather as if Di Luna had been given “Il balen del suo sorriso” on his first entrance) and then an uplifting paean to the memory of that love, with an implication of lingering hope (cabaletta). What I am quite sure I heard in this scene is a baritone (Artur Rucinski) with a voice of acceptable quality but very narrow span making his way through the aria’s first part (the dramatic recitative “Or dove fuggo io mai?” and the cavatina “Ah! per sempre io ti perdei“) in a workmanlike, monochromatic fashion, with little recognition of the inflectional opportunities offered for emotional contact or of the ornamental felicities that render up musical enjoyment. I say “quite sure” because as the singer was undoubtedly doing his best to make something out of his music and I was  doing my best to attend to his efforts, he and I were equally beset with a great deal of assigned busywork—the signing and handing off of documents, like a whilom war correspondent filing dispatches—to which we both were required to attend while the aria slipped on past.  So I sensed at the outset that I was to be confronted with staging innocent of any sense of priorities in the presentation of a major set piece. Then, after the interjected appeal from the comprimario companion to heed the patriotic call, the baritone launched into the cabaletta (“Bel sogno beato“), whose energy and simple line in the upper-middle range brought his voice a bit more to the fore, though he did little with the music and its repeats beyond reciting the wordnotes—until, at the close, he interpolated a high G. The note was neither big nor beautiful, and it did not develop while held, but the hold was very long, through the 21 bars of orchestral music that bring the scene to a close, and accompanied by the frank visual signifiers (arm outstretched, visage illuminated in a glow of self-congratulation) for “Applause, please.” And upon conclusion of this provincial appeal a great roar of shouts and whoops burst forth from all sides of my balcony perch. What a feat! Never heard anything like it!

Arabella, with music by Richard Strauss to a libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, returned to the repertory of the Metropolitan Opera this fall in the production directed by Otto Schenk and designed by Günther Schneider-Siemssen (sets) and Milena Canonero (costumes), last seen eleven years ago. It was conducted by Nicholas Carter; the revival stage director was Dylan Evans. I saw the performance of November 25.

Arabella’s an opera I’ve always mildly enjoyed, without ever feeling terribly close to it or impelled to dig into in search of hidden treasure. That is also the tone of most of its early reception here, and it has never established more than a tertiary position in the Met’s repertory, or occasioned much excitement elsewhere in the U. S. Yet it has its American enthusiasts. Two of my esteemed colleagues from back in the day, Peter G. Davis and David Hamilton, wrote about it as a work of stature.^(I) Peter called it Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s “most immediately lovable and glowingly human creation,” and David, while noting some flaws, wrote that “the central characters, finely drawn by the librettist, are often eloquently, and always fluently, sustained in the music.” Another, Matthew Gurewitsch, recently spoke feelingly about how “immediate and real” the opening scenes seem to him, with their “deeply emotional” yet “kaleidoscopic” orchestral writing, and though he concedes that one can’t quite make all the pieces of the story add up, he thinks the work should be taken as a “fairy tale”—a characterization the creators themselves employed more than once while working on it. And Patrick J. Smith, in The Tenth Muse, his historical study of the libretto, deemed Hofmannsthal’s for Arabella “. . . the story in which heart and head become one in wisdom and emotion” and is thus “. . . the logical culmination of Hofmannsthal’s librettistic development.” There are informed devotees who prefer Arabella to Der Rosenkavalier. So this time, a little surprised to see it back among the season’s offerings for six performances, I resolved to see if my sympathies could be more intimately engaged. And trying to get a fix on Arabella, and on me in relation to Arabella, has proved to be a little more complicated than anticipated.

“Ort: Wien. Zeit: 1860,” states the score—Vienna, 1860. In their correspondence, composer and librettist talked casually about “the 1860s,” and at one point, more specifically 1866. But 1860 was the final choice. In a July, 1928 exchange about the overall atmosphere and style of the opera, contrasting it with that of Der Rosenkavalier, Hofmannsthal characterized the time as “. . . more ordinary, less glamorous, more vulgar,” and Strauss called it a “somewhat rotten” era for which he was initially reluctant to write music. Politically and socially, it was a time of liberalization. A constitutional monarchy had been established and Vienna declared its capital, setting in motion the vast project—at least as comprehensive as Baron Haussmann’s contemporaneous one in Paris—to reshape and expand the old city. It was in 1860, in fact, that ground was broken for the Ringstrasse around the path of the now-demolished fortified wall, opening Vienna up  to its suburbs, followed soon by their incorporation into the city, and kicking off the construction boom in grand municipal and imperial buildings, museums, theatres, and residences that was to characterize and delimit the new Vienna. ^(II)So, although the events of 1848 were still vivid in the collective memory and military adventures had recently gone badly, the 1860s were a time of enormous energy and optimism in the city and throughout Austria, which by 1867 had become the western half of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the “Dual Monarchy,” with Vienna still the seat of the imperium. Yet for Strauss and Hofmannsthal, it was not a well-remembered time, and their opera seems to not belong to the world of these evidently favorable political and economic developments.

The article scheduled for today, Fri., Dec. 12, will be published on Monday, Dec. 15. In it, I’m discussing the work itself, its time and milieu, some early audio recordings (and one video) of it, and the recent Metropolitan Opera revival of its Schenk/Schneider-Siemsen production.

With apologies for the delay,

CLO  

My article on the Met’s revival of the Strauss/Hofmannsthal Arabella is now scheduled for Friday, Dec. 12.

Till then,

CLO

Ward Marston’s restoration of the April 15, 1938 performance of Richard Wagner’s Parsifal by the Metropolitan Opera (Marston 54008-2, 4 CDs) is a release that recommends itself by virtue of its mere existence. Previously circulated only in incomplete and hard-to-listen-to form, it is taken from the only broadcast that preserves the legendary pairing of Lauritz Melchior and Kirsten Flagstad in the roles of Parsifal and Kundry and, exceptionally among Met Wagner performances of that period, is note-complete. It is also the earliest integral recording of the opera save one, a 1936 performance from the Teatro Colón that Marston issued some thirty years ago, and to which I’ll also give attention here. After years of frustration in dealing with the best surviving recorded materials—Marston describes these efforts in unusual detail in his note in the accompanying booklet—he has at last been able to bring the sonic quality to a level representative of listenable restorations from those years, as well as with  the consistently high standard set by his own work. Regardless of any enthusiasms or reservations over the particulars of the performance, it is thus a recording that no opera devotee—certainly no Wagnerite—will want to be without.

The Met was in serious difficulties in those mid-to-late Depression years, both artistically and financially, though it’s not as if nothing of note other than Wagner was happening. The season in question, for instance, saw the new production of Otello with Rethberg, Martinelli, and Tibbett, the Elektra revival with the intense Rosa Pauly and a distinguished supporting cast, and the ongoing repertory attractions of such stars as Ezio Pinza, Lily Pons, Lawrence Tibbett, and Lotte Lehmann. But in that same season and the surrounding ones, a third of all performances were of Wagner’s operas, and in all of them save Das Rheingold and Die Meistersinger, Melchior and Flagstad were the usual, if not quite invariable, protagonists. Melchior had been firmly in place, essentially unchallenged in Heldentenor roles, for some dozen years, most effectively partnered in the early ’30s by the superb Frida Leider (see Two Great Wagner Singers, 5/23/23).^(I) But it was the arrival, out of nowhere it seemed, of Flagstad that turned Wagner performances into automatic sellouts at a time when sellouts were rare. When Martin Mayer, in the relevant chapter of his history of the Met’s first 100 years, pegged Flagstad’s debut on January 15, 1935 as  “the event that saved the Metropolitan Opera,” he was probably guilty of some exaggeration—but not by much. And when in the spring of ’38 the company returned to home base from its annual tour for three post-season performances, all three were of Wagner operas, and all starred Flagstad and Melchior: Parsifal on the evening of Wednesday, April 13th, Parsifal again on the afternoon of the 15th (the present performance), and Tristan und Isolde the very next day, also a matinee; thus, three performances of these challenging scores in less than four full days. For Artur Bodanzky, the Met’s chief Wagner conductor since 1915, the burden was a severe strain on his already precarious health (he died just a year and a half later). His then-assistant, Erich Leinsdorf, had led the Parsifal of the 13th and, in a practice not without precedent, spelled Bodanzky by taking over Act 2 of the April 15th performance. ^(II)

The article scheduled for today, a consideration of the new Marston release of the 1938 Met Parsifal, starring Lauritz Melchior and Kirsten Flagstad under Artur Bodanzky (Acts 1 and 3) and Erich Leinsdorf (Act 2—we’ll explain), plus several other contemporaneous Parsifal items, will be published tomorrow, Oct. 11. With thanks for your patience,

C.L.O. 

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