With my apologies for the extra day’s delay:

Two of the most luminous stars in the constellation of interwar Wagnerian singers, soprano Frida Leider and baritone Herbert Janssen, have recently been given significant recorded attention. We (especially we Americans, I suspect) tend to think of them as belonging to successive though overlapping generations, inasmuch as Leider last sang here in 1934 and was obliged to curtail her operatic activities on the eve of WW2, whereas Janssen sang on into the 1950s, based at the Metropolitan. But they were born only four years apart (Leider in 1888, Janssen in 1892—not 1895, as given in at least one source) and in their prime singing years crossed paths repeatedly, principally in Berlin and London. Both would easily dominate their respective vocal categories today. Leider is, at least nominally, the center of attention on an Immortal Performances release that, in that label’s fashion, incorporates as much as can be stitched together of her Isolde, built up from surviving portions of a Met broadcast of March, 1933 (thus, the earliest “live” Leider we have), filled in with stretches from an unpublished broadcast of 1936, with these sources restored as much as possible and other materials (studio recordings) sequenced in and sonically matched to them where feasible. Janssen’s case is much less complicated: he is the subject of a six-CD set from Marston that contains a wealth of his recorded work in both opera and Lieder, most of it in-studio but some broadcast-derived, from 1927 to 1947.

Leider made her debut as Venus at Halle in 1915, and thus at the relatively late age of 27. She rather beat her way through the bushes in houses (Rostock, Königsberg) where rehearsal and production standards were by her own account deplorable but where she did, from the start, sing leading roles, until landing at the Hamburg Staatsoper (1920), where her artistic identity seems to have jelled. After a guest Isolde in Berlin, she joined the Staatsoper there in 1923, remaining as a principal soprano until 1938. Her international breakthrough came in 1924 with a Ring cycle under Bruno Walter at Covent Garden, whereto she was to return, a great favorite with audiences and critics, until (again) 1938. She first sang at the Bayreuth Festival in 1928, and then from 1933 to, yes, 1938. During these years she made guest appearances at La Scala, the Vienna State Opera, and other leading European houses as well as the Colon; in the U. S., she sang four seasons (1928-32) in Chicago and, frustratingly, only two (1932-34) at the Metropolitan. It was a great career, but—as with so many singers of that time, including Janssen—one much influenced and limited by the twin catastrophes of the Third Reich and the Great Depression. Her operatic appearances ceased in 1938, when her Jewish husband (Rudolf Deman, who had been concertmaster of the Berlin Philharmonic) was forced to flee to Switzerland for the duration.

Leider recorded extensively, starting with Grammophon/Polydor acousticals in her Hamburg and early Berlin days, and after 1927 with electricals for HMV/RCA Victor. In terms of repertoire, the recordings reflect her stage career quite faithfully, with liberal sprinklings of Mozart, Verdi, and Puccini in amongst her Wagner and other German offerings in the early years, narrowing to almost exclusively Wagnerian selections later. She did a number of acoustical/electrical remakes, e. g., the Fidelio aria and Donna Anna’s vengeance aria, first in German, then in Italian—these were roles that, along with the Marschallin and Rachel in La Juive, she retained as late as her Chicago seasons. During WW2, though operatically inactive, she made some Lieder recordings with the distinguished accompanist Michael Raucheisen.

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All singers we would grade as superior strive for a sustained legato, elasticity of movement, control of dynamics, etc., and since these attributes were first declared aesthetically necessary by Italian pedagogues, all good singing in the Western classical tradition can be broadly termed “Italian.” Yet if I had to choose one characteristic that might set off Leider’s voice and singing from those of other great Wagnerian sopranos, it would probably be an especially Italianate quality of tone and of guidance, specifically with respect to vibrato. Among Wagnerian sopranos of whom recorded evidence provides a reasonable basis for comparison ^(I), perhaps Leider’s contemporary Helene Wildbrunn (b. 1892) is the most closely comparable. Her voice was evidently more massive than Leider’s (her records, good late acousticals from the same years as Leider’s earliest ones, give us strong hints of that), and more substantial in the low range (she’d begun as a contralto). But we also hear much of the same continuity of firm positional engagement on the line, and of distinctly vibrated tone, that we hear in Leider’s singing. Still, any comparison of the two will disclose a more consistent sense of “riding the vibrato” (as if the aliveness of the tone were itself impelling the line forward), along with a greater pliancy in the shaping of phrases, in Leider’s singing. Though both instruments are of heavy calibration and both under excellent technical control, we’d say that of the two, Leider’s makes the more lyrical  impression. And if we listen alternately to Leider and her great immediate successor Kirsten Flagstad—whose voice was marked by such a unique ease of voluminosity, and certainly did not lack in continuity of legato—I think we’d hear Leider’s as the livelier sound, more eager to arrive at its destination, irrespective of tempo.

The post scheduled for today, Friday, May 19, has been rescheduled for Monday, May 22. It concerns the art of two great Wagnerians, soprano Frida Leider (particularly her Isolde, as revealed by Immortal Performances’ reconstruction of her singing of that role from broadcast and studio sources, 1928-1936) and baritone Herbert Janssen, who is the subject of a six-CD release from Marston, also from a variety of live and studio performances,1927-1947. My apologies for the delay.

CLO  

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.

A confluence of life events has compelled me to re-schedule the post originally announced for today to Friday, April 7. I will be discussing Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin—its new production by the Metropolitan Opera, the performance led by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, and of course the masterwork itself, especially in the light of the interpretation proposed by it director, François Girard. My apologies for the delay.

C. L. O.

Dear devotees:

Owing to an apparent defect in the publishing function, many readers did not receive my post of Friday, January 27, entitled Fedora!? It is up and running on the site, but for convenience, here is a link.

I always appreciate notifications of non-receipt following the announced date of a posting. We’re trying to track what may have caused the glitch. Thanks for your patience.

CLO 

In its search for works that will hold the attention of today’s audiences for at least a season’s run of performances, the Met has followed two summoned from the days when the term “standard repertory” was not quite yet making sense (Cherubini’s Medea and Mozart’s Idomeneo) to one that had secondary standing in the time of its flourishing, Umberto Giordano’s Fedora. By “secondary standing” I mean two things, first, that it was one of a number of operas from its era that never acquired a high critical reputation but which, in the hands of gifted performers at home in its stylistic assumptions, was a programmable piece so long as those assumptions were in place, then settled into relative obscurity as soon as they were not; and second, that it has always been considered Giordano’s second-best opera, meaning that it is perceived as at least somewhat better than, say, La Cena delle beffe, Madame sans Gêne, or Siberia. Such “second-bests” are trotted out when enough time has passed to qualify them as novelties, and/or when a management has ticket-selling singers who will consent to the leading roles.

Fedora premiered at the Teatro Lirico in Milan in 1898, with Gemma Bellincioni and Enrico Caruso as the protagonist couple, and proved successful for some years thereafter, especially in Italy and South America. It arrived at the Metropolitan in 1906, with Caruso opposite Lina Cavalieri in her company debut, and with Antonio Scotti in the baritone role of De Siriex, and had a three-season run in the mid-’20s starring Maria Jeritza, Giovanni Martinelli, and (again) Scotti.^(I) It then languished locally for seventy years, till a revival mounted for Mirella Freni and Placido Domingo, and hasn’t been seen since. I missed that ’96 production. So, my acquaintance with Fedora being only a rather spotty one via recordings, I betook myself down to the Big House to see what I could recover of the onetime excitement.

Like a healthy plurality of 19th-Century opera libretti, Arturo Colautti’s for Fedora was worked up from a popular play, thus ensuring that a rudimentary structure, an established level of theatrical playability, and some audience familiarity with the subject were all in place at the outset. In this instance, Giordano was seeking to capitalize, as did Puccini a few years later with Tosca, on one of the several boffo box office hits of Victorien Sardou. So fashionable was Sardou for the last three decades of the Ottocento, and so unfashionable ever since, that a quick look at Fedora’s standing in its time is at least a matter of curiosity to anyone encountering its operatic adaptation now. Though it was quickly incorporated into the repertoires of nearly all the leading dramatic actresses of the era, it had been written expressly for Sarah Bernhardt, whose personality and range of effect the playwright had shrewdly assessed. That range is suggested in the report on her Fedora by the New York-based critic William Winter who, first noting that Sardou had placed “great stress on the feline elements” of his title character, wrote of Bernhardt that her “intensely vital, impulsive, passionate, erratic personality comported with the character of Fedora, and therefore her performance was excellent.” Winter disapproved, of course. Knowledgeable and perceptive, he also carried to the point of censoriousness the then-common belief that the stage should show only those personages and situations as could be held to be morally elevating—or at least that any others meet their proper comeuppance and that Virtue triumph in the end. Of Fedora he said that its “distinguishing characteristic  . . . is carnality,” and as for the actress, he christened as “The Bernhardt Doctrine” the conviction that ” . . . any kind of conduct, so long as it is activated by ‘love,’ is necessarily impressive and interesting.”

Those of you who read my brief commentary on the Met’s Idomeneo revival (8/10/22) may have wondered why I passed over any mention of the singer of the title part, Michael Spyres. This was by no means because I considered his contribution artistically negligible, but because I wished to take a more extended look at the vocality he is presently championing. The role of Idomeneo, though designated for tenor, lies unnaturally low for any voice we think of as belonging to that category. (Except for a single appoggiatura on an A in “Torna la pace,” its highest note is G, accessed many times, often in passing but sometimes in sustained or declamatory mode.) That’s because it was written for Anton Raaff, a star of the preceding generation whose voice was well past its “best used by” date in 1781. We would normally assume that a role of that time that looks this way on the page must have been written with the presumption of higher ornamental improvisations by the singer. But that seems not to have been the case with Idomeneo. In any case, such interpolations would have been rendered in one variety or another of the reinforced head-voice adjustments with which all tenors then accessed anything above—at a stretch—an old-tuning A, and which we wouldn’t recognize as “full voice.” ^(I))At the lower end, the part requires low Ds, and even a C, which must be solid and sonorous enough to provide a balanced ground against all three female-voiced principals singing far above the “tenor” in the Act 3 quartet. Yet the combination of tessitura and floridity in the writing would prove problematic for almost all voices we define as baritone.

We have to concede that vocal categories are mutable (certainly the histories of “tenor” and “baritone” illustrate that), and that in declaring one to be “normative,” we are selecting it over other possibilities. But in an effort to examine the legitimacy of a proposed outlier category, we do need to be clear about what we are measuring it against. Where “tenor” and “baritone” are concerned, the standard I’ll be using here comprises 1) voices intended to interpret Western classical music; 2) specifically, operatic music of that tradition; 3) thus, music meant to be sung acoustically from a stage, with orchestral accompaniment; 4) finally, music that reflects both categories as settled upon (with much, though gradually diminishing, overlap with previous usages) some 150-200 years ago—in short, what we still think of as the “modern” tenor and baritone vocalities. Eliminated, therefore, are all voices cultivated for microphone usages, regardless of their pitch ranges. Once the requirement for acoustical projection is removed, the categories collapse not only as to amplitude, but with regard to aesthetic standards and technical control as well, and no valid comparisons can be made. This excludes from our consideration all pop/folk/rock singers of the past 80-90 years, and the voices of our popular music theatre of the past 65 or so as well, whether or not they make “legit” noises, since all shows (even the revivals of once-acoustical ones) have been miked during that time.^(II) It also excludes some (not all) voices cultivated primarily for art-song interpretation, and others trained to our inferences of Baroque vocality. These types do sing within the Western classical tradition, and acoustically, but with limitations of amplitude and (usually) of range relative to our standard. And a final grouping cast into outer darkness by this definition is that of the male falsettists—imitation evirati—who call themselves “countertenors.”

A household Covid invasion has forced me to delay the post scheduled for today, Nov. 18. I will be discussing the many fascinating vocal implications of Michael Spyres’ “BariTenor” album, as well as the return of last season’s Met Don Carlo, now in four acts, in Italian, and with a nearly all-new cast and conductor.

I will aim publication for Tues., Nov. 22, and will inform you if there are further changes. A happy Thanksgiving to all.

CLO