Patrick Bade
Two Great Jewish Singers from Riga: Hermann Jadlowker and Inese Galante

Patrick Bade | Two Great Jewish Singers from Riga Hermann Jadlowker and Inese Galante | 09.11.22

Visuals and music played throughout the presentation.

• Thanks, thanks, Trudy. Well tonight I’m talking about two great Latvian Jewish singers who are both born in Riga, they both began their careers there. People often say to me, well with a name like Patrick, how do you land up talking so much about all things and people Jewish. Patrick not being obviously Jewish name. And so I’m going to tell you that because it is actually relevant to what I’m talking about tonight. In the 1980s, I was working at Classic FM Radio with Mel Cooper on a series of programmes about the history of the Metropolitan Opera. And one night we were working very late at Classic FM and Mel said to me that he was due to do a charity lecture for a Jewish charity in Scotland about great Jewish singers. And he was having a bit of a panic because he really couldn’t think of any. Well, I’m sure you know by now that one of my great private passions is for historic recordings of the human voice. So it was quite easy for me to just dictate him off the top of my head to talk about Jewish singers.

I knew what their real names were because in the early 20th century, a lot of singers who had obviously Jewish names changed their names. It was difficult to have a career in the opera house internationally with two obviously a Jewish name. So I knew, for instance, that Rosa Reiser was really Rosa Burschstein, and that Jan Pierce was Jakob Pincus Perlmuth, and that Richard Tucker was Ruben Ticker. So, I gave Mel all this information, then I went home, and I made a tape. And in the 1980s, that was still actually a cassette tape. And he sent a bicycle to my house and picked it up and he went up to Scotland, he gave the talk. And I really didn’t think much more about it for a couple of years until a lady called Brenda Josephs in London, she approached me, she wanted to put on a similar lecture for a Jewish charity on a Jewish musical theme. And she said, can you think of anybody who could do it? And I said, well, I could do it. You know, I’ve done, I put together this lecture for Mel if the audience don’t mind having a non-Jewish speaker. And she said, no, that was no problem at all.

So I gave the talk and there was a lady at talk, called Vera Coleman, who later became a very good friend. And she said to me, would I do repeat the talk for what was then called the Sparrow Institute in London, that later became the London Jewish Cultural Centre. So I did that. And then I did a couple more talks with them. And then one day, Trudy said, well I did I think the third talk and Trudy Gold said well you know the audiences seem to like you here and we’d like to hear more of you and we’d like to involve you at the centre on a regular basis, and so I said, to her well, you know, I think I’ve exhausted my Jewish repertoire, and she said, well, you know, it doesn’t have to be, she, quoting or misquoting Jonathan Miller, she said, well, it doesn’t have to be Jewish, it can be Jew-ish. And that has really been almost my motto ever since. The more I got into it, the more fascinated I became, really, about assimilated Jews and the role that they’ve played in the world in the modern era. I’ve built up really quite an extensive library on the subject, I’m very involved in it, and I absolutely adored my work at the London Jewish Cultural Centre. It was, of all the places I’ve worked, it was certainly the most enjoyable, and I absolutely love the audiences there there, and they were always very warm and very welcoming.

Anyway to get back to the subject of tonight’s lecture on the left we have Hermann Jadlowker who was born in 1877, and on the right Inessa Galante who was born in 1954. She may still be singing I’m not sure I haven’t heard from her or heard of her for a while. The most famous story about Hermann Jadlowker concerns a gala performance of Lohengrin that was put on in Berlin just before the outbreak of the First World War in honour of the Tsar Nicholas II who was on a state visit to Germany. And at the end of the performance Kaiser Wilhelm, who you see on the left, said to Tsar Nicholas and what do you think of my Lohengrin? And Nicholas said to Wilhelm, what do you mean your Lohengrin? He’s my Lohengrin because he came from Riga, which at the time was owned by, it was part of the Russian Empire. So it’s a rather nice idea, this humble Jewish boy from Riga being quarrelled over by two emperors.

Well I said he was born in 1877, he was born into middle class, reasonably prosperous family, but they were from, they were pious, so they were happy for him to sing in a synagogue and that’s where he started his career. And I think this is actually very important because the cantorial tradition of singing preserved certain bel canto skills, which were really on their way out by the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. So, I think he acquired certain skills that are indeed the most remarkable aspects of his singing on record. So as I said, his family were very opposed to him becoming secular singer in the opera house. So, he actually had to run away from home. He went to Vienna and trained as a singer there and then began his, he had, he made his debut 1899 in Cologne moved on to Stettin Karlsruhe. It was in Karlsruhe that he was heard by Kaiser Wilhelm who was very taken with him and made sure that he would offer a contract at the Berlin Opera.

Now he was an incredibly versatile singer, it was a big voice, you know, he could take on very heavy roles and it had a dark baritonal quality to it, but it still had a very good top, he has good top notes. So here you can see him in two Verdi roles, Rigoletto and a very very young looking Radames. It’s not common for same singer at the same point in his career to be able to sing Rigoletto, Aida and a little bit later he sang Othello. So, that gives you a sense of his range. He sang the obvious popular Puccini roles, Boheme, Madame Butterfly. He sang quite a lot of French repertoire. In Germany, of course, everything would have been sung in German anyway. But so, the Afrikanerin is l'Afrikan of Mayerberg and on the right hand side that piece is Don Jose in Carmen and he sang a lot of Wagner. He sang the middle heavy Wagner roles, he sang Walter in Meistersinger, he sang Tannhauser and he sang Parsifal as you can see on the left hand side.

Here he is, the heaviest Italian role of all, rather unfortunate makeup, making him look a bit like, you know, the jazz singer, but here he is as blacked up as Portella. But I’m going to start with his most celebrated record. with his most celebrated record. It’s a record which is regarded by connoisseurs of singing, collectors and critics as being one of the most remarkable tenor records ever made. And it’s of an aria from Mozart’s Idomeneo. Here is the young Mozart. Idomeneo was his first mature opera that he wrote in 1781. He wrote it for the court in Munich. And he was very thrilled by the quality of the orchestra, which was brought from Mannheim, and was considered the finest orchestra in Europe at the time. And as always, Mozart was working with very particular singers, so he was tailoring the music that he wrote to the skills of the singers. And the tenor who sang the role of Idomeneo, he was called Anton Raff. And Mozart liked him, he talks about him warmly in his letters, but he says, you know, he’s over the hill, he’s passed it, the one thing that he can still do really well is chopped noodles. What he meant by chopped noodles was very elaborate, florid decoration of the vocal line.

So, Mozart went really over the top with this aria. It’s a fantastically difficult aria. In Italian, the title is Fuor del Mar, but here it’s sung in German, noch tönt mir ein Meer im Busen. And this, actually, when Jadwiga Lofke recorded this, the opera itself was not in the repertoire. It wasn’t until the 1930s that Richard Strauss produced a performing version of it, not till after the Second World War that it became part of the regular repertoire and this aria. I’m going to play you has always been I think rather off-putting for tenors because it is so fiendishly difficult. So, I’m going to play you the second half of the aria ending with incredible, incredible florid runs, unbelievable precision of Gerd Bloch-Kersing, unmatched I would say by any tenor on record, and ending with the most spectacular tenor trill that you will have ever heard in your life.

♪ Music plays ♪

Oh, well one thing that fascinates me with listening to historical recordings, we now have more than a century, we have a good 120 years of recordings of singers, and we can see how singing has changed in that time, and we can see how vocal skills are lost and they’re regained. So I think for much of the 20th century there was the kind of skills that we you just heard there that seem to have been lost forever, but in the last decade there have been a couple of tenors working really, really hard on their technique, and some of that florid brilliance has been regained, particularly with two American tenors Lawrence Brownlee and Michael Spires. And just earlier this year, Michael Spires brought out a CD, you can see it’s called Barry tenor, but he’s another tenor. I don’t think his voice is as big, probably, as as Jadlowker’s, he’s certainly unlikely to ever to undertake some of the heavier roles that Jadlowker sang, but it’s got a very dark baritonal quality to it, and it also has a very remarkable top going up to some extremely high notes. But what is most amazing I think is his florid technique. So, I’m going to eat this record just came out this year. I heard him sing this aria earlier in the year in April in Paris. He did a concert at the Chateau de Champs-Elysees. The audience went absolutely crazy when he sang this. They just never heard anything like this in their lives before. And it’s not that far off Jadlowker, I would say. And there is even, by modern standards, an exceptionally good trill, not quite as extended, not quite as precise as Jadlowker’s, but still a real trill and a very good one.

♪ Music plays ♪

Now moving on to another notoriously difficult aria. This is Il mio tesoro from Mozart’s Don Giovanni, which was premiered in Prague in this theatre, the Estates Theatre still exists, which as you can see is in a neoclassical style rather than the Rococo Quivilier Teatro which I showed you earlier, and Mozart obviously had a very good tenor. His name was Antonio Baglioni, and he must have had the most phenomenal breath control, because Mozart wrote very extended, ornamented vocal lines without putting any place in it where the singer can break and take a breath. So, this aria was so difficult that when Mozart staged the opera the following year in Vienna he had another tenor who I think took one look at the score and almost fainted and said I can’t sing that. And Mozart wrote an alternative aria, Della sua pace, which is usually, I mean, both arias are so beautiful, you don’t want to miss either. So most modern productions will find a way to squeeze both arias in. But so here is Jadlowker again doing these runs with machine precision. It’s a, as I said, a big voice. He doesn’t lighten it up for the runs, but the precision is extraordinary. He does, however, break the lines to take unwritten breaths.

♪ Music plays ♪

So he broke the line twice there to take quick breaths. I want to compare that with another very, very famous recording. And these recordings that I’m playing you tonight, any record collector will tell you, these are the gold standard of how these arias should be sung. So, actually on the right here, we’ve got a score which I picked up a few years ago of the opera. As you can see, it’s got a German text as well as the Italian and this was the score that belonged to the great tenor Alfred Piccaver, who was the top tenor in Vienna in the 1920s and he sang “Don Ottavio” and you can see through this aria he’s marked it up with little crosses or little lines to show you where he actually broke to take a breath. He certainly didn’t do all those runs in one go and I’m not sure if there’s anybody, I think there might be a couple of tenors around now who’ve done it, but again for many many decades the only version on record where the runs were done without breaks was John McCormack. So, I’m going to play you that now, and you can make a comparison. It’s a much smaller voice than Jadlowker, sweeter, I’d say it’s a more ingratiating voice, it’s a very attractive voice and he sings very stylishly indeed with a rapid florid work that is also excellent and close in precision to that of Jadlowker.

♪ Music plays ♪

Now, I love the way that he ostentatiously slows down at the end as though to say, look I’ve still I’ve got lots more breath I never need to breathe here. Apparently he himself late in life somebody played his record to him and he listened intently and at the end he said, oh, my god I don’t know how I did that that’s absolutely impossible. Well I think they’re both wonderful versions, both very, very spectacular. I think here probably the palm has to go to McCormack. I’m very interested in all your opinions, of course. This is not a subjective thing. So, your opinion is certainly as good as mine in these matters. Now, the other record apart from the Idomeneo, which is kind of canonic, and which is always quoted as an absolute wonder of the gramophone, is Jadlowker version of the Serenade Ecoridente from Rossini’s Barbara of Seville. And there are two very great versions that come down to us from the beginning of the 20th century, and I’m going to play both of them to you, and you can vote on it if you like, you can tell me which one you think is better. And we are are starting off with Jadlowker. You’ll notice in the orchestral introduction, which gives you the tune that he is about to sing, how the tune has a trill in it. I mean, this is normal in Italian opera, that the orchestra will tell us a trill is coming and we are going to look out for it. In the 19th century everybody was very very trill conscious, or if any critic writing review would comment on the singer’s trills and how good they were or not. And once again, of course, Jadlowker’s trills are absolutely exemplary, unmatched by any later tenor. And of course, the florid work is really spectacular. So, I’m going to play you the whole aria now with Jadlowker.

♪ Music plays ♪

That’s a real wow record, isn’t it? But I’m going to play it to you now with the Neapolitan tenor Fernando de Lucia. He’s actually almost a generation older than Hermann Jadlowker, and he’s certainly a singer who preserves some of the finest bel canto skills of the 19th century in his singing. There are some similarities, it’s a baritonal voice, although he didn’t have the brilliant top notes that Jadlowker had, so very often the arias actually had to be transposed down for him. So it’s a warm, dark baritonal voice but with a very characteristically Mediterranean rapid vibrato in the timbre which may, or may not please you. I think it’s possibly slightly exaggerated by the recording process. He also, he has wonderful florid work without a trill, he doesn’t even attempt to trill, but the rapid ornaments are marvellous and there’s a certain sort of military precision about Jadlowker. Delucia sounds very Neapolitan, very easygoing, very seductive and charming. And he makes enormous use of rubato that robs time. So, he’s speeding up and slowing down all over the place. I mean, no conductor on Earth today would allow him to sing it the way he does on this record.

♪ Music plays ♪

Of course, if he sang the whole opera at that speed, you wouldn’t get home till dawn. But I’d be very interested to know what you think of those two versions and which one you prefer. I mean, they’re both spectacular and amazing. I think possibly if I were Rosina standing in my bedroom, I’d be more likely to let in the Neapolitan de Lucia than the somewhat Prussian sounding Jadlowker. So at the high point of Jadlowker’s career was when he went to New York, and he was at the Metropolitan for three years from 1910 to 1913. And New York was enjoying a kind of orgy of opera because there were two opera houses in competition with one another, was the Metropolitan and it was the Manhattan, Manhattan Opera of Oscar Hammerstein and the Metropolitan of course had great conductors, had Gustav Mahler, Toscanini. The Manhattan Opera had, you could say, the three sopranos, the three sopranos. Nellie Melba and Luisa Tetrazzini, coloratura sopranos in deadly rivalry with one another, backstage must have been quite interesting. Melba, who really sort of inherited the mantle of Jenny Lind and Patty as the Queen of Song, and in the middle is the very beautiful and glamorous and charismatic Mary Garden, who was a great singing actress.

So yes, for sopranos, you would certainly want to go to the Manhattan Opera. But tenors, the idea of three tenors, I suppose, goes back a long way. You’ve got the greatest tenor of all, without a doubt, Enrico Caruso in the middle, so he’s the king linchpin of the Metropolitan Opera, and on the left you have the very elegant Alessandro Bonci, so he had a monopoly really on, I think, Barbara Seville, Mozart, Rossini, Mozart, he was going to get first pick all the time. And on the right is the Viennese Leo Slezak, who was, he owned the role of a tello and he was the main Wagnerian tenor, the Tannhauser, Walter and all that kind of thing. So it was, Jadlowker, he had a respectable career in New York, but I think the New York critics and the New York public regarded him as a useful tenor because he could sing anything and he was very musical. He could sing it at the drop of a hat. And when one of these three gentlemen was not available, Dick Lee Caruso, he could sing, and if anything Caruso could sing, he could sing, and he could sing it very well. So that was very useful.

He never quite broke through to major stardom in New York. There was one occasion when he and Caruso actually sang on the same stage on the same evening that was actually not in New York. It was on a Met visit to Paris in 1910 when they put on Cav, and Pag, and Caruso got to sing his trademark role of Pagliacci, in Pagliacci Cagno, and we’ve got, Jadlowker Cagno on the right hand side here, but he sang the Turidu in Cavalier Rusticana on that evening. So I’m going to again compare the two, and I’ve taken a little aria from Il Trovatore and we’re going to hear, actually we’re going to hear Caruso first, of course Caruso the voice is just so gorgeous, it’s so warm and enveloping and velvety. I don’t think Yad Lakhfa could quite match it just for the sheer quality of beauty or voice. And then again you have Caruso’s wonderful phrasing. I always think listening to Caruso phrase in Italian aria, it’s like a great cellist. It’s like you sort of, the voice is, the vocal line is bowed in a way that a cello might. This little excerpt also has two trills in it. Caruso could trill. There are a couple of quite good trills by Caruso on record. Not here. There’s a, I’d say this particular trill is barely there at all. It’s kind of a smudge. It’s a vestigial rather than a proper trill.

♪ Music plays ♪

Now let’s hear Jadlowker sing the same thing, with a wonderful drill of course.

♪ Music plays ♪

And I got one more comparison with Leo Slezak, the great Austrian tenor, and we’re going to hear them in just the final notes of the tenor aria from Die Königin von Saba, The Queen of Sheba by Goldmark. This is a notoriously difficult aria to sing, Maga Ceturna, or the end of this aria. The tenor, it’s for a big voice, it’s for a heroic voice, and he has to ascend slowly and quietly to the very top of the voice, that very difficult transition from chest to head tone, what some people call falsetto. The difficulty is to do it imperceptibly, so there shouldn’t be a break, there shouldn’t be a sense of the singer yodelling. So first of all let’s hear Leo Slezak do it.

♪ Music plays ♪

And then we’re going to hear Jadlowker sing the same passage.

♪ Music plays ♪

Very hard to choose between the two, both of them absolutely miraculously skillful pieces of singing. So at the Met he was rolled out to sing two important premiers, the Humperdinck’s Königskinder, and Volferari’s Le Donne Curiosi. And when he went back to Germany, he was chosen by Strauss to sing Bacchus in the world premiere of Ariadne of Naxos. Strauss was absolutely ecstatic about him, thought he was the ideal singer for the role, was very keen that he should continue to sing it. I was going to play you a Strauss song that he recorded, but I must leave some time for Inessa Galanta, so I’m going to skip that, and I will play you instead an electric recording, because this gives you, I think, a better sense of the size and the timbre of the voice. He continued his career right to the end of the 1920s, so this record was made in 1927, it’s just an Italian song, and you can see the voices absolutely intact as are the spectacular trills.

♪ Music plays ♪

At the end of his stage career, he moved back to Riga and he took up his old role as cantor in the synagogue and also became a noted singing professor, but was smart enough to get out in time. In 1938, he left for Palestine where he spent the rest of his life. I was contacted by a listener after an earlier lecture from South Africa saying, I think distantly related, saying that they were considering inviting him to South Africa to be a cantor there. But he continued to sing in Israel, he sang on the radio, he sang in concerts, he even sang in a performance of Berdy’s Mast Bore. I would love it if somebody could turn up some radio archives, anything that he did in Palestine during the war period, it would be so fascinating. Anyway, so I haven’t really allowed myself enough time to do justice to the wonderful, wonderful Inessa Galante. First part of her career, of course, was during the Cold War in the 1970s and 80s, and she was a mainstay of the opera in Riga, so I’m going to play a little bit of her Violetta. This is a performance of 1981, 1989 rather, just before the Iron Curtain came down, which in a way released her, and up to that point her career had been entirely behind the Iron Curtain in communist countries. So it wasn’t until after 1989 that she could then move to Germany and widen her reputation. This is a live performance from Riga in 1989.

♪ Music plays ♪

So she settled in Germany and began a respectable career in German opera houses, but it was in the early 90s that she brought out a debut album, and there was one track on it in particular that created a worldwide sensation. It was an Ave Maria, which on the CD it’s attributed to an 18th century Italian composer called Caccini, but a recent scholarship suggests it’s not by him, it might be by somebody else, never mind, it’s very beautiful. And this is so gorgeous. And, of course, it became a really popular item on classic FM radios around the world in the 1990s.

♪ Music plays ♪

Terrible to interrupt that, I’m so sorry, but at least you get the sense of how gorgeous that voice is. It’s a very individual voice, an incredibly beautiful voice, but she’s one of those singers who fascinates me not just… There are lots of singers out there with beautiful voices, it’s her artistry that really grips me, and I was so lucky to attend her Wigmore Hall concert on the 21st of October 1999. I think it was one of the greatest vocal concerts I’ve heard in my entire life. I was absolutely blown away by her, as was the entire audience. Luckily that concert was actually published on CD and this is a song from that concert recorded live in 1999.

♪ Music plays ♪

Unlike Jadlowker she singer who is conscious, and proud of her Jewish heritage. So I’m going to finish this with a little Yiddish folk song.

♪ Music plays ♪

Right, that’s it. So let’s see what we’ve got.

Q&A and Comments

Didn’t get the name of the baritonics. It’s on the list that you’ve been sent the list. It’s Mare, it’s Michael Spires, Michael Spires. Maria Bordi, she goes with McCormack, I think I would have to agree with you actually, wonderful, spectacular though Jadlowker is, McCormack is more the thing. The singer with the sheet music next to the picture was absolutely amazing, that was McCormack, Amazing. That was McCormack. So I see he’s got your vote as well. Thank you, Barbara.

Q: Didn’t B.B. King change the thrust of virtuosity in his composition, “The Trill is Gone?” A: I don’t know that. That’s very interesting. I must follow that one up.

The second aria, Iad Klothgo, is unquestionable, he is amazing, he’s completely amazing in everything he does. Nanette, yes, you’re talking, I think, about Fernando de Lucia. No conductor today would let him pull the rhythm around the way he does, and I think that’s wrong. I think that, you know, those bel canto composers, they expected the singers to do that, they wanted the singers to do that, but now, of course, it’s the conductor who’s in charge, not the singer, so I don’t think any modern conductor would give a singer the kind of leeway that De Lucia had on that recording. Vedlova, what’s, I’m not sure what that is.

Jadlowker, Jadlowker, yes. You prefer Russian, Prussian, precise and unbelievable, that’s Helen. The actor Walter Schleser, actually yes, he did look like his, very much like his father. Of course, the poor father who’s remained behind in Austria under Nazi control, suffered very much when Walter was performing in anti-Nazi movies in America. Thank you, Elaine. Caruso is Caruso, what can I say? I agree with you, it’s unique. This is Maria. Oh, you prefer Jadlowker because you don’t like the rapid vibrato. And you also prefer Caruso’s Manrico. I think, well, for me it’s pretty even Stevens with those two, but I accept your opinion.

You’re, you know, this is my friend Michael, and he’s always spot on. I do agree with him that Jadlowker spectacular that singing is, he doesn’t really caress the phrases in the way that Dilocea and Caruso do. But then of course they’re Italian. So it’s a different thing. This is Dennis, who’s been to the Riga and you had the privilege of hearing in Aida. I mean that’s very interesting because, you know, hers is a lyric soprano voice. Aida can be sung by lyric soprano, but it’s more often sung I suppose by a dramatic soprano, but I bet she was great in it. I bet she was. she’s such an artist. Yeah, is there, that is so remarkable, isn’t it, that Duluccia could, not Duluccia, Jadlowker could do all those trills and frills and was still sing heavy Wagner roles is absolutely amazing. There’s that, using a lot of head voice, mezzo voce. Mezzo voce is suppose the transition from the chest to the head voice.

Such a lovely opera. I’d really love to sing it, see it. I mean it was a stand, it was standard repertoire in particularly in Vienna right up to the Nazi period. And it was somehow after the war it was gone and never really came back again. Yes, this is Uri saying he thinks that Jadlowker covers his voice much of the time, which gives a less direct connection than the others like Guruza. That’s an interesting point. Well, the Holocaust, I mean, God, it’s robbed us of so many things. There’s so many great singers, so many great musicians. Well, as Trudy would always say, it may have robbed us of the cure for cancer. So it robbed us of an awful lot. That good point, Herbert, that Caruso is singing in his native language. That is always an advantage to sing in your native language. Thank you Alice, and I’m glad you love Inese. When did you sing that journey? I’d like to know because I don’t think people knew that Caccini piece, until that record came out in the 1990s.

Katrine, Anissa Galanta’s voice is truly spectacular. Yes, it is. Thank you. Thank you, Erika. Love to you, Erika, in Greece. Oh, somebody else who was at that concert, Wigmore, too, having discovered her by, as I did actually, by accident listening to the radio. This person doesn’t give a name, stop the car just to listen, find out who was singing, is a spectacular record, thank you. Thank you Susan and Marjorie. and Marjorie, this is Nicky who prefers the Neapolitan, and the Lady Surely Can Sing. Jadlowker must be one of the most underrated, well he’s not really, I mean Jadlowker is very known and revered by connoisseurs and collectors, and Trilling is part of the Jewish cantorial tradition. You it’s I know it’s a I don’t think you can get that Wigmore Hall recycle anymore it is it’s well of course, CDs are on the way out anyway I’m sorry to say. I don’t know about Inese Galante’s family, or their wartime experiences.

But thank you all very much and I’m staying on a musical topic, but rather a different one, next talk about Jenny Lind and in particular her relationship with the composer Mendelssohn. No recordings of Jenny Lind, unfortunately. So I’ll see you again soon. Thanks everybody.