This Sunday, Sept. 20, at 3:00 PM, I will be interviewed by tenor and voice teacher Steven Tharp on the first of a series of video chats under the auspices of the excellent training program Bel Canto Boot Camp. We’ll be discussing many topics relating to singing and to the current state of opera in general. All are invited, and here’s the link.

And in related news: Will Crutchfield’s “Record of the Week” series is always worth checking in on, but this week’s installment hits on a subject dear to me—the sobering contrast, of both quantity and quality, in the development of young voices (late teens and early 20s) today and those of some 80 to 120 years ago. I’ve written about this both in my book and in the “Before the First Lesson” series here. Will presents a number of startling examples to listen to, and his comments about them, and about this Youth Development Gap, are exceptionally well informed and analyzed.

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When I set September 11 as the date for resumption of tri-weekly posts, I did not envision that it would take the form of this article. But as the summer unfolded, and as the ongoing pressure system of the pandemic collided with the social justice protests and the vertiginous uncertainties of election-year politics, the impact of these developments on the already-prostrate performing arts moved from pending and probable to immediate and certain, and I felt an obligation to offer some thoughts.

I support both the narrow, short-term objective of the social justice movement (serious reform in police training and practice) and its long-term goals of equality of opportunity and access with regard to household wealth, employment, education, housing, and health care. And none of the concerns expressed below approach equivalency with death from a knee on the neck or paralysis from seven bullets in the back at short range. However, I write here about the arts—opera primarily, but the other classical arts by close association—and so it is occurrences related to them that have engaged my professional attention. These occurrences have ranged across several artistic fields, but have one thing in common: the experience of the EuroAmerican cultural mainstream as oppressive and as inimical to aspirations toward social equality and “diversity.” I think we must acknowledge that that tension exists, and needs to be addressed in something other than a dismissive tone. Perhaps I bring two advantages to the table: I’m a critic, and I’m old. I’m aware that these are seen by many as disqualifying attributes. But hard as it is to to apply rational thinking to an emotionally volatile topic, that’s something a critic is accustomed to at least attempting. And while with every generational turnover, there are certainly things the old can learn from the young, a great deal of useful education has actually happened the other way around.

To my regular readership of opera devotees: though this piece is quite long and takes excursions into other artforms, do not despair: it begins with opera, and ends with it, too. Please see the end of the post for a revised future schedule.     

Personal Prologue. I suppose the title should really be The Racial/Generational/Covid 19/#MeToo/HIV/LGBTQ Moment and the Performing Arts, with such living-memory ancestors as Gay Rights, Civil Rights and Affirmative Action, Poor People’s Campaign, and Women’s Lib Moments on immediate background, and Watergate/Vietnam/’68 hovering only a little beyond. Indeed, for my generation, the Sexual Revolution, Cold War/Nuclear/Space, and McCarthy-and-Blacklist Moments are part of the chain, too. Most of these have had implications for what we think of as the High Arts, including opera, and all have contributed to the atmospheric context within which we react to new developments. For example:

During my time of low-key activism in the Vietnam/Civil Rights era (an editors’ and writers’ group under the umbrella of the Fifth Avenue Peace Parade Committee), I made a sobering discovery: the new Left was not like the old Left with respect to high culture. The old Left, coming out of the Depression and WPA years, while certainly favoring folk and populist strains in the arts, also retained something of the ideal that all people were entitled to share in the riches of the high culture, to be uplifted by it—why should it belong to only the monied capitalist elite? I’ll give you but a single anecdotal example, which I guarantee is not atypical. In that very time, my dentist was Irving Peress. His name has surfaced again recently due to a new biography of Joseph McCarthy, because his Army promotion figured prominently in the televised hearings that brought McCarthy down. Irving was certainly on the political far left. Of the magazines in his waiting room, where one might have expected Time or U.S. News and World Report, the journal furthest to the right was Ramparts. And the music track that accompanied one’s cleaning or root canal in his office alternated militant labor or racial integration songs with Brahms symphonies. He could discuss either with appreciation; there was no contradiction between them.

The main purpose of today’s post is to share with you a kind of “Wanted Dead or Alive” compilation of persons and tendencies who are contributing to opera’s current problems. It’s part of an email from Fred Kolo (ID below), who has periodically sent thoughtful commentary almost from the beginning of Osborne on Opera three years ago, and it wasn’t originally intended for publication. But I liked it, and like the general idea of including such assessments from professionals in our field, as I did with “‘Jane’s’ Great List,” (1/3/20).  So I obtained Fred’s permission, and present his list herewith.

This will be the final post until September. After several years of high-intensity activity with the publIcation of Opera as Opera and the maintenance (at first biweekly, then triweekly) of Osborne on Opera, I had long planned a summer hiatus, and the lockdown of live performance gives further reason for a pause. I will have plenty to keep me busy. My teaching always comes first. It goes forward via Zoom, a technique that, though not without its limitations and annoyances, has functioned better than I’d anticipated for both my students and myself. And I’ll be working on my essay for Marston Records’ release of the recordings of Lawrence Tibbett, which in terms of both quantity and quality will, I think, be the definitive monument-in-sound to this great American artist.

Over the summer, I shall also be pondering the most productive future role for serious opera criticism disseminated by this now-retro means, the no-frills, long-form blogpost. It’s official that in New York there will be nothing resembling full-scale performance until midway through next season. Even that, I believe, is very much in doubt. Of all the hard-hit sectors of our economy, there is none further from the “ready, set, on your mark” line than the performing arts. Already-fragile companies will permanently close, and the survival of the Met itself is not guaranteed. Since live performance in the theatre is the only “site” on which opera as opera actually happens, we could say that not only are culturally significant works Missing In Action (which has not stopped me from writing about them), but that the artform itself is MIA. Its secondary manifestations—its audio and video recordings, its critical and historical literature—contain a wealth of material worthy of examination, but without the presence of the living art they are there-and-then documents without a here-and-now context.

“Systemic” is a word we’re hearing often these days, most often with regard to race-related social justice protests and initiatives, and to our ways of apportioning and paying for our health care. The use of the word seeks to establish an awareness that the obvious injustices and inadequacies that present themselves daily are not localized anomalies, but symptoms of biased assumptions built into the structures that govern these crucial social territories. That, in turn, implies that while there may be value in publicizing and demanding redress for individual occurrences, that value will be limited so long as those fundamental assumptions are not identified, then acted upon in a constructive fashion. I used the word as I began writing the Introduction to the completed typescript of Opera as Opera, in 2016. I was recounting my strategic withdrawal, fifty years ago now, from eleven years of hot-and-heavy reviewing of records and live performances. I wrote that “. . . I had come to perceive the performance problems I was seeing and hearing more as systemic than as particular to given occasions and artists. To write about them regularly was to risk turning into a repetitive scold, a severely compromised temporizer, or an outright collaborationist of the ‘educative,’ ‘appreciative,’ or promotional sort.” I go on to describe how developments of the intervening years, and the further clarification of my own thinking about these systemic problems, had brought me to the start of my work on the book.

A preliminary note: The full-length Porgy and Bess Roundtable of June10, produced by Joseph Horowitz’s Post Classical Ensemble, with a distinguished panel that includes yours truly, has now been posted, and is available to those of you who missed the original chat. You will find it here, and will then need the following password: 1O^%=0=Y. To skip some irrelevant warm-ups, start the video at 2:20. It’s well worth a look for anyone interested in the work and many of the issues, artistic and social, that crowd around it. And to today’s topic: 

While the musical and dramatic changes involved in reverting to the 1904 version of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, discussed last week, are significant, they pale in comparison to those necessitated by a return to the 1859 edition of Gounod’s Faust. The motivation for the revisions made in these two enduringly popular works were different. Puccini’s were undertaken to rescue his opera from the storm of criticism that attended its premiere—criticism that owed much to the operatic politics of the time, but which obviously hit on some of the composer’s own dissatisfactions with his work. Gounod’s had to do with re-shaping his already-successful opéra-dialogué, first performed at the Théâtre-Lyrique in Paris, to fit the presentational practicalities of other opera houses, first in Germany and the French provinces, then at La Scala, and finally at the Opéra itself (1869) in full grand opera form, complete with ballet. It amounts to a transformation from one music-theatre genre to another, though with much of the original music retained in the process.

Parts of the1859 Faust, notably the participation of Siébel and Wagner in the opening scene, have surfaced on previous recordings, and even in our familiar1869 version there have always been questions, in both staged and recorded productions, as to whether or not to include the “Spinning Wheel Scene,” and if so whether or not it should comprise Marguerite’s “Il ne revient pas,” Siébel’s “Si le bonheur,” either or both; as to which version, if any, of the Walpurgis scene to include, etc. In Sir Thomas Beecham’s 1947-48 recording with the RPO and singers of the Opéra Comique, Valentin’s “Avant de quitter ces lieux,” conceived in English (“Even Bravest Heart May Swell”) for Santley at the London premiere, was excised, as was once common practice in French houses apart from the Opéra. But the new recording emanating from the Centre du Musique Romantique Française at Venice’s Palazetto Bru Zane is the first to essay an inclusive return to 1859, with its stretches of spoken dialogue and mélodrame and its extensive additions, subtractions, and revisions of musical numbers. It also embraces the use of period  instruments. And while at first glance it seems odd to find this opera as No. 22 on the impressive list of French Romantic rarities that have to date been committed to disc by Bru Zane, as my readers will recall, I’ve considered Faust among the missing in action for some time now (see “MIA–Gounod’s Faust, 1/4/19).

I think it’s best to begin by listing and briefly characterizing this version’s departures from the familiar 1869 Faust, before evaluating the effects of each and of the performance itself. I’ll pass over the relatively minor changes that occur in the orchestrations of a few of the musical numbers common to both editions. I should add that the score I’ve used for comparisons is the full score published by Dover (1994, reissued 2013), which is a compendium drawn from three  sources (all much earlier, but undated) issued by Bote & Bock, Berlin; by Chappell & Co., London; and by Mapleson Music Publications, N. Y., together with some incidental apparatus provided by Dover’s editors. It is not the same as a full-blown critical edition, but is very useful all the same, including both Louis Schindelmeisser’s Dance Music for the Walpurgis episode (a curiosity, apparently used by some German companies for a time) and Gounod’s own ballet music; and Siébel’s brief intrusion into the Garden Scene (between the Quartet and Mephistopehélès’ Invocation), in which he comically interacts with Marthe and Mephistophélès.

As has happened on several occasions, an unusual convergence of work demands has resulted in a slightly off-kilter publishing schedule. I have divided my consideration of the Decca/London/La Scala Madama Butterfly and the Bru Zane/Talens Lyriques Faust into two installments, the Butterfly herewith and the Faust in one week’s time. A few preliminary updates from my last full post: 1) Richard Dyer has corrected my reference to Jean Madeira as Suzuki. She sings that role on the Columbia recording under Max Rudolf (with Steber, Tucker, and Valdengo), and not on the Met Record Club release under Dmitri Mitropoulos with Dorothy Kirsten, Daniele Barioni, and Clifford Harvuot. Mildred Miller is the Suzuki there. 2) The onstage surprise celebration of Lawrence Tibbett’s 25th anniversary with the Met took place on the evening of the first performance of Peter Grimes in the 1949-50 season, not after the broadcast matinee a few days later, about which I wrote. 3) With respect to my speculations about Armed Forces Radio Network transcription discs (my suspected source for that same Grimes), Arianna Zukerman writes that the Library of Congress owns an extensive collection of those, which it is in the process of digitizing. There must be fascinating material there, some of it not preserved—or at least not well preserved—in any other form, including some of interest to lovers of opera and singing.

Finally: We had a rare old time in our June 10 “Porgy and Bess Roundtable,” produced by Joseph Horowitz’s Post Classical Ensemble. Horowitz has posted a brief blog entry on the event, accompanied by some video excerpts, here. I don’t yet know if the recording of the entire discussion (it lasted nearly two hours) will be made accessible in the future, but will keep you informed. And to our subject of the day—  

Aspects of the Butterfly production and performance were so off-putting to me that, after viewing Act 1, I very nearly decided to not write about it at all, or to simply report on the doings of the first act and allow us all to imagine the rest. If, I thought, this is what we’re to get at the opera world’s highest professional level, it does not matter if it’s the first, second, or fifth edition (see below) or the Bowery Follies edition—the emotional emptiness will be the same. And this wasn’t because the performance wasn’t succeeding on its own terms, but because of the terms themselves, which no longer seem open to question. Yet (I continued thinking) the restorations, of which the most extensive (in terms of elapsed time) were already past, are worth some notice and preliminary evaluation, and I was aware that the post-interlude parts of Act 2 (in other words, Act 3 in the common act division) held some changes of potential musical and dramatic import. So, after a fitful night’s sleep, I forged ahead.

All opera fans past entry level know that despite a cast headed by Rosina Storchio, Giovanni Zenatello, and Giuseppe de Luca, Madama Butterfly was a fiasco at its premiere (La Scala, Milan, 1904), and that the opera underwent extensive redaction and retouching before settling into the “standard edition” we almost always hear today. Minor revisions were made immediately, between the first and second performances of the original production; more extensive ones by May of that year, when Butterfly was performed with great success at Brescia; more again for its London premiere in 1905; and yet more for its first presentation in Paris (1906, at the Opéra Comique), on the basis of which the “definitive” vocal score, in Italian, was printed. There were even further changes, for Puccini re-inserted a few of the cut passages for a 1921 production at the Teatro Carcano, Milan. Although that edition could arguably be deemed the composer’s “final wishes,” it wasn’t taken up by the majority of the many companies undertaking the work—by any that I know of, in fact. ^(I)

The purpose of today’s minipost is to announce a forthcoming video discussion I think many readers will find stimulating. Some of you will remember my extended essay on last season’s  Metropolitan Opera production of Porgy and Bess (see 11/3/19) and the follow-up responses to readers’ comments (see 11/22/19). You may also recall my reference (with links) to the reviews of that production by Joseph Horowitz, whose several books on American music (and music in America) include “On My Way”/The Untold Story of Rouben Mamoulian, George Gershwin, and “Porgy and Bess.”

Now, Horowitz has gathered a highly qualified panel to exchange thoughts about Porgy, its place in our culture, and the questions of race that inevitably surface around its performance, including whether or not white singers should be allowed to perform in it, and if so under what circumstances. It’s the second in a two-installment discussion on Gershwin, parts of a series of video chats and podcasts produced by the Post-Classical Ensemble, of which Horowitz is the Artistic Director, and will include musical examples. Besides Horowitz, the participants will include Angel Gil-Ordoñez, PCE’s Musical Director; George Shirley, performer of major tenor roles in many of the world’s leading opera houses and frequent spokesperson on the status of African-American singers on the operatic scene; bass-baritone Kevin Deas, distinguished concert and recital artist who has sung Porgy on numerous occasions; Mark Clague, head of the Gershwin Initiative at the University of Michigan; and myself. Bill McGlaughlin, host of many of the PCE podcasts and chats, will moderate.

This event, in the form of a Zoom chat, will air this Wednesday, June 10, at 6:00 pm. You do have to register, but that’s simply done. Here’s the link, which includes all needed instruction:

I hope many of you will tune in.

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NEXT TIME: As previously announced, I’ll be writing about video and audio recordings that feature the restoration of much material originally included , but subsequently cut, from the scores of two standard repertory operas: Madama Butterfly, in the 2016 La Scala production (on Decca/London DVDs) and Faust (on CDs from Bru Zane). Due to the pile-up of work, I’m giving myself a day’s grace on my usual Friday publication date. So look for it on Saturday, June 13.

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Today’s post is, as promised, the completion of the non-thematic, no-concept article I began two weeks ago with commentary on the 1956 Met broadcast of Manon Lescaut. As I was preparing for that, my colleague Joseph Horowitz sent me a message or two enthusing about the conducting of Paul Paray with the Detroit Symphony in a concert performance of Carmen from 1959. Horowitz is much more up on conductors and orchestras than I am, and his posts on artsjournal.com fruitfully explore several under-critiqued areas of our musical heritage. So when he enthuses about something, I pay attention. As it turned out, the Carmen and José of Paray’s Carmen were Jean Madeira and Brian Sullivan. Hearing them again started me thinking about not only their own careers, but those of others, some of whom participated in the Manon Lescaut performances of those years, and others who struck little bells because they connected to topics that were already active in my mind—Benjamin Britten, because I was assigning myself some homework in anticipation of the Billy Budd the Met had announced for next season, and Lawrence Tibbett, because of my involvement in Marston’s upcoming restoration and release of that great baritone’s recordings. These pieces jigsaw together for me in ways that are no doubt idiosyncratic, but which may throw some light on aspects of the American opera scene, 1948-59.

Paray was a French conductor and composer who spent a eleven or so years (1952-1963) as conductor of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. He recorded extensively for Mercury, which label was turning out some of the best-sounding orchestral recordings of that time (or this), and while to my ears the Detroit remained a recognizably American orchestra (as did the BSO under Munch or the CSO under Martinon), Paray’s French ear clearly had an influence on its style and sound.^(I) In this Carmen, I certainly hear a lot of what Horowitz found stimulating, especially when the orchestra is properly to the fore. The overture has great fizz and discipline—Paray finds the virtues of clarity and crispness without their often concomitant loss of weight. And those qualities prevail through most of the performance, along with some fine execution of instrumental interjections (the trumpets at several junctures) or solos (the violin picking up on Carmen’s “Tra-la-la-las” as José leads her to prison). At points, as with José’s outburst at “Non, je ne peux plus d’écouter!” and succeeding bars, the orchestra’s interjections make an impact one doesn’t often hear. There is also a strong momentum to the reading, usually to its advantage but sometimes not, as with a recklessly fast tempo for the smugglers’ quintet, which turns to shambles, and more crucially the opera’s final scene, which is brutally pushed in best sauve qui peut fashion. Perhaps broadcast constraints were pressing.

It would be frivolous to call the performing arts “essential industries” in the shelter-health-and-sustenance sense that has to take priority now. And the prospects for resumption of anything resembling “normal” activity in pursuits that require the herding of one or two hundred to several thousand souls in auditoriums, on stages, and in orchestra pits are, to say the least, uncertain. So we—all of us to whom opera and the other arts of the act afford shelter, health, and sustenance for heart, soul, and mind, and for confirmation of an important piece of our identity—are bereft. Fortunately for us, we have the awareness that even under circumstances more trying and tragic than our present ones, the passion and dedication of artists and devotees have always found ways to bring the striving for beauty and meaning back to full life. That will happen again, I am sure.

Meanwhile, there are secondary resources in plenty to help carry us through. Given the necessary adaptations to my own current situation—a fairly strict observance of a self-semiquarantine regimen, without access to the bulk of my reference materials (and no, not everything is online), in addition to late-life retraining to keep my teaching practice active via Zoom—I’ve taken the liberty to follow casual leads and paw about among these secondary resources, without much regard to whether or not an over-arching theme unites the findings. I’ve always found, though, that it’s in the nature of pawing about to turn up items that connect, at a micro- if not macro-level. In fact, that’s the tautological essence of subjective exploration, and the discovery that many such micro-connections are held in common plays a big role in the life of the devotee community. My original intent with this post was to lead off with a consideration of a recently released starry performance of Puccini’s Manon Lescaut, then follow with thoughts about two nearly (but not quite!) identical performances of Britten’s Peter Grimes, and finish with a glance at an old concert performance of Bizet’s Carmen from an unlikely source—all these from the 1948-59 time period, and full of these micro-connections. As sometimes happens, though, I have found myself with a lot to say about the Puccini performance, particularly in regard to its leading tenor, Jussi Björling. So the remainder of my proposed material will follow at more modest length in two weeks’ time, and a full post on a date TBA after that. The micro-connections will still be there.  

The Manon Lescaut is a recent release from the St. Laurent Studio of the Metropolitan Opera performance of March 31, 1956. The romantic protagonists are sung by Licia Albanese and Jussi Björling, and the conductor is Dmitri Mitropoulos. This was a broadcast that acquired a legendary status among devotees, partly on its merits as one of those electric afternoons, partly for its presumed superiority to the RCA Victor studio recording starring the same protagonist pair, and partly as one of the relatively few complete opera broadcasts by Björling, who had dismayed us with frequent cancelations. It happens that I was there. If you should acquire this two-CD set, take a look at the photo on the verso of the track listing card (a view I don’t recall seeing previously reproduced), and let your eye follow along the aisle by the wall on the right to where it curves in at the back, you will see the precise location along the rail of my Family Circle standing room spot on that day at the old house. It was a favored location, won by charging up five flights of stairs faster than the competition when the 40th Street door was thrown open, and knowing exactly where you wanted to be for the fullest view. Kept us regulars in shape.

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.

In last Monday’s post, I mentioned thinking about Der Fliegende Holländer in the light of its small share of opera’s journey through what we loosely designate as “The Modern” and on into our present “Postmodern” condition, in the course of which the artform seems to have gotten lost. And some of my thinking was occasioned by a look back through Patrick Carnegy’s Wagner and the Art of the Theatre. This impressively researched, well-written book traces the production histories of Wagner’s operas, from the practices of the theatre world into which they were born down to those of our own, with thoughtful efforts to contextualize them artistically, politically, and socially. Any such history will tend to organize itself around emblematic statements or movements of “reform,” and for Wagnerian stagecraft one such is the short but eventful life (1927-1931) of Berlin’s Kroll Opera, where Otto Klemperer was the music director. Carnegy devotes an entire chapter to the Kroll, and within that chapter pays significant attention to the company’s production of Holländer. For any in-depth understanding of the Kroll’s place in its cultural milieu and of Klemperer’s stature over the long span of his life and career, I would refer you to Carnegy’s work and to Peter Heyworth’s splendid two-volume biography of O.K. Here, I’ll only note that the company was rebelliously modernistic and anti-Romantic, very much influenced by the revolutionary trends in the Weimar culture, with all their cross-pollinations among artforms, and that Klemperer, though steeped from childhood in the older musical and theatrical assumptions, was by this time a strong advocate of that newer spirit. He had experienced a “revulsion against anything that smacked of exaggeration or emotional indulgence” (Heyworth), and had turned away from Wagner (thenceforward, he preferred R.W.’s early operas to the later ones). He leaned now toward Bach and Mozart among the classics, and Stravinsky, Hindemith, and Krenek among his contemporaries.

At the same time that I was dipping into Carnegy and Heyworth, I re-acquainted myself with O.K.’s recording of Der Fliegende Holländer. It dates from some forty years after the Kroll production, so we cannot assume that it represents what he did with the score then. Still,  I was curious to find if I could hear in his conducting and work with the singers some musical correspondence to the modernist elements of that long-ago event, and—apart from the question of liking or disliking that aesthetic—get some sense of whether or not there was the kind of eye/ear unity that is notably lacking in so many contemporary productions. Klemperer’s standing in the postwar decades was lofty—especially in the UK, where much of his effort was concentrated—but among record-buyers and connoisseurs worldwide, as well. The revolutionary of the ’20s was now, along with Furtwängler, Walter, and Erich Kleiber (all of whom he outlasted), a grey-eminence connection back to the Wilhelmine days and all that had happened in the interim—and a complex, strong-minded personality, to boot. As a young critic assigned in the early 1960s to review the operatic portion of his growing discography, I approached the task with deep respect and, perhaps, some hesitancy to buck the unchallengeable credentials and established wisdom.