Patrick Bade
Those Who Left and Those Who Stayed, Part 2
Patrick Bade - Those Who Left and Those Who Stayed, Part 2
- I’m going to continue this evening with the stories of the people who left Nazi Germany in the 1930s and those who stayed. And I’m up to the letter L in the alphabet. So I’m going to begin tonight with the Austrian base Emmanuel List. And as you can see from these two postcards, he had two careers. One, when he was the star of the Berlin Opera up to 1933. And then he was forced to leave and he went to America and he continued his career at the Metropolitan Opera for another 15 years until 1950. Now, he was forced to leave because he was from a Jewish background, humble working class Viennese family. He started off his career actually as a tailor in Vienna. But his voice was discovered and having a great voice was in the 1930s, of course, the very best passport you could possibly have. And he certainly had a great voice. Its huge inky black Wagnerian bass voice perfect for the Wagnerian villains of the Ring Cycle. Now, his was a talent that would have been appreciated anywhere in the world at any time, but he had the misfortune to be the exact contemporary or the greatest Wagnerian base of all. Alexander Kipnis, I played him in many lectures and I know there are many listeners who love his voice and appreciate his great art. So it must have been a bit galling really for Emmanuel List that he was always in the shadow of Alexander Kipnis. He got to the Met first in 1933. And my guess is he gave out a great sigh when Alexander Kipnis, also a refugee from Nazi Germany, landed up in New York a few years later and they were singing, they were competing in the same roles at the Metropolitan, but Emmanuel List’s greatest moment, I think you can say, was his participation in June, 1935, in a recording made in Vienna under Bruno Walter of Act One of Wagner’s Die Walküre.
And this is generally reckoned to be one of the greatest recordings ever, greatest operatic reportings ever made. I strongly recommend it to you. It has Lotte Lehmann and Lauritz Melchior. She was the greatest Ziglander of all. He was the greatest Zigwon of all. And Emmanuel is, if he’s not quite on that level, he doesn’t let the side down. He’s pretty impressive. Sounds wonderfully malevolent as the brutish hounding in Act One of Die Walkure. Moving on to his colleague in that recording, Lauritz Melchior, I think by general critical consent, the greatest Wagnerian tenor ever, probably certainly of the 20th century, certainly the greatest on record- huge, amazing voice. He sang Tristan over 200 times. He was inexhaustible, thrilling, thrilling singer. And so he had actually had a career on both sides of the Atlantic all the way through the 1920s and the ‘30s. I find it very interesting that several listeners were very, very sure that he came from Denmark and at the time it was rumoured that he was of Jewish origin and several listeners asserted, yes, he did come from a long line of rabbis, but I don’t think, he was one of those people like Richard Tauber, I think, who certainly wasn’t religious and probably didn’t think of himself as Jewish. Well, he had this glorious career at the Met until 1950 when he fell out, big time, with the new director, Rudolf Bing, who had earlier been of course the manager of the Glyndebourne Festival. And he flounced out of the Met in a huff, but he continued his career on the other side of America in Hollywood, very successful in cameo roles in a number of musicals. So I thought I’d just amuse you by playing this great voice in a rather unexpected piece of music.
I’ve mainly been talking about people who crossed the Atlantic in a westerly direction to get away from Nazi Germany and to get to the safety of America. But Maria Mueller crossed the Atlantic in the opposite direction. She was a Sudeten German. She was born in Terezin later to become so notorious, of course, as a site of a concentration camp and maybe that her Sudetenland origin accounts for her political views. She was a very, very ardent Nazi. She had been at the Met, she arrived at the Met in 1925 and she had a very respectable 10-year career from 1925 to '35. She was never really a huge star. The critics appreciated her. She always got good reviews, but I think she was regarded as a useful singer rather than a really exciting one. She was in the shadow of two other specialists in the German repertoire, Elizabeth Rethberg from Dresden and Maria Jeritza, whom I talked about last week, and I think she decided she would have better opportunities in Germany once Hitler came to pass. So she goes back across the Atlantic to Germany and she’s singing at the Bayreuth Festival and so on. She gave an interview in 1938 for a book called Kutzler Plowden Artist Chat, in which various musical figures ask for their views on life and so on. Several of them took the opportunity to protest their loyalty to Hitler and their enthusiasm for him. She’s one of them, she’s very gushing and she says the most wonderful experience of her whole life was being invited to dinner with the Fuhrer. And there’s another story she tells about giving a concert in Munich and walking onto the platform with a pianist and who was sitting in the front row in the middle of the front row, but Adolph Hitler. Well, I suppose it might put you off even if you were an enthusiast. And apparently she and the pianists were so taken aback that they simultaneously started different songs and had to start again. She says how gracious and charming the Fuhrer was, smiling at her at this mishap. Well, in a way it pains me to say it, but the record I’m going to play you is really, I think, a rather beautiful record. She was of course for many the absolute in embodiment of Arian womanhood, and she’s really, I think, rather good in the role of Agatha in Der Freischütz.
I have no idea what the political opinions of Sigrid Onegin were. She was of Swedish origin. She was born in Stockholm, but most of her career, her early career, was in Germany. She was a big star in Berlin and Munich. But the fact that she left Germany to go and live in Switzerland during the Nazi period suggest to me that she wasn’t unlike Maria Muller. I think she was probably not an enthusiast for the new regime. The Rudolf Bing, who I’ve mentioned several times, who was the director of the Glyndebourne Festival, then of course of the Met for many years. He writes about her in his memoirs. He obviously didn’t like her personally because he said that when she sang the role of Lady Macbeth, she didn’t need to act it. She was Lady Macbeth in real life. But he said she had the most beautiful metso voice that he ever heard in his entire life. And it is, her records are really extraordinary. It’s an incredibly gorgeous, sumptuous, and at the same time very pure voice and an extraordinarily flexible, as you can hear in the page’s song from Meyerbeer’s “Huguenots”. It’s called trill. And as you know, there’s nothing I like better than the good trill. This is Alfred Piccaver who was known as the Viennese Caruso. Of course he was neither Viennese nor Italian. He actually came from Lincolnshire in England. But he arrived in Vienna in 1913, just before the First World War. And Vienna instantly fell in love with him and remained in love with him until the end of his career in 1937. When I play you his voice, I think if you’re familiar with Caruso, I think you’ll see why people called him the Viennese Caruso. It’s a incredibly sumptuous, rich voice with baritonal qualities; very full in the lower and middle part of the voice and very velvety voice. So as I said, Vienna instantly fell in love with him. Of course, the following year, the First World War broke out, and he was technically an enemy alien. So he should have been interned as a prisoner of war. But the Viennese were not prepared to do without him. So they insisted that he can continue singing at the opera. Every now and then, he’d make a token attempt to escape and they’d pick him up and bring him back and push him out onto the stage and make him sing again. And so he was a much, much loved figure in Vienna. Nineteen thirty-seven obviously his career was coming to close, in fact, he did sing for a few more years in concert. And I think he probably realised that the political situation was becoming very threatening. So he came back to England and I’ve chosen to play him actually singing in English in a familiar English song.
Just before the Angelos, in fact, he came back to England, he spent the war in England. But Vienna was his great love as well. So eventually after the war, he went back to Vienna and spent the rest of his life there. Now seem to have a lots of tenors today. This is another tenor, Danish Helge Roswaenge, who was the leading exponent of Italian tenor roles in Germany throughout the Nazi period. And German critics always refer to him as being a very Italianate tenor. He doesn’t sound it to me, he sounds very Germanic. It’s not an open-throated sound like a… it’s a more kind of guttural, throaty sound. Nevertheless, a very impressive singer, as you’ll hear in a minute. So he joined the Nazi party in 1933, very promptly when the regime took over. And he also divorced his Jewish wife, whether for career reasons or maybe they’d just fallen out of love, I can’t say. And was very much in with the regime. He sang on a lot of official occasions, used to be seen for Hitler’s birthday concerts in April every year. So I’m going to play you what is probably his most famous record. For one note, really, he does an absolutely stunning top D higher than the top C in the “Postillon de Lonjumeau”. Well you can tell me whether you think it’s a pleasant sound. It reminds me of Rossini. The very first time he heard a tenor sing a top note from the chest as Roswaenge does here, he said it made him think of a capon on having its throat slit.
Ah, now a relief from tenors, an exquisite, exquisite soprano. This is Lotte Schone. It was her married name actually. She married a Herr Schone. That Schone, as I’m sure you know, in German means beautiful. So her nickname was, people refer to her as De Schone Alota because she was very beautiful and the most delightful artist, and of course her very favourite singer with record collectors. She left wonderful, wonderful records. She was Viennese, but the most important part of her career was based in Berlin, where she was a protege of Bruno Walter. She was also a much loved singer at Covent Garden. She was the first Liu in the first production of, of Turandot at Covent Garden in the late twenties. And her records of the two arias of Liu were really worth seeking out. They’re wonderfully delicate and poignant. She was forced to leave in 1933, very rapidly. Apparently her last performance, because she was an adored singer in Berlin. And the audience cheered and cheered and cheered and didn’t want to let her go. But I think I quoted her the other day saying, well, they may love you on stage, but they’re quite likely to throw a brick through a window of a Jewish shop the next day. And she went to France and she spent actually the rest of her life in France. She continued her career singing at the Opera-Comique, and in other places in France. When the war broke out, she and her husband and their two children were trapped in France and they fled to the Ult Subwat, the mountains bordering Italy. And that is of course in itself a very interesting story. There could be a very, very fascinating session. I must suggest this to Trudy, if we could find somebody to talk about it, about what happened to Jewish refugees in the Ult Subwat. It’s one of the places where many, many Jews survived the war. The local inhabitants were mostly very, very, bravely hospitable to Jews and hid them. And it also helped that this part of France until 1943 was occupied by the Italians and not by the Germans. And the Italians had no interest really in doing the dirty work of the Germans in rounding up Jews to send off to concentration camps. She and her husband both survived and their children. The husband, they split up for the duration of the war. They thought it’d be safer, each one taking one child. And apparently she spent a lot of time during the war wandering in the forest, in the mountains, singing Schubert Lieder to raise her spirits. How wonderful that would’ve been. Can you imagine in the mountains there, hearing this exquisite singer singing Schubert Lieder.
On the right hand side I can’t help showing off this painting of the Ult Subwat. This is exactly the region where Lotte Schone was hiding during the war. It’s a painting I bought recently by, it’s right in front of me, actually as I talked to you, it’s by Elmina David. Just before Covid, I had the great privilege of having dinner with the very distinguished French writer and critic on the DuBirth, who’d been a great friend of Lotte Schone right up until her death in the 1980s. And we talked a lot about her and he said, what an a lovely, incredibly lovely human being she was. That she was somebody who was beautiful inside and out and how she was completely, despite all the things that had happened to her and the loss, really, of the last part of her career. He said she was completely without any bitterness towards anyone and that she remained essentially a very happy person until the end of her life. Now I’m going to play you a record that she made in 1934 in London for H M V. They set up the Hugo Vault Society and they commissioned various distinguished singers to record songs by Hugo Vo. Hegar Vorsinger was one of the singers. Herbert Janssen and so on, but they never issued Lotte Schone, the songs that Lotte Schone recorded for them in 1934. And the reason is pretty obvious, that the chief audience, target audience was Nazi Germany and they probably felt that they couldn’t issue the set with songs recorded by a Jewish artist. So she luckily had copies of these recordings that she’d made and they were eventually issued towards the end of her life. So this is the Elfan Leid, the Elf song by Wolf, sung by the delicious Lotte Schone.
- Sung with feather-likeness and delicacy. Oh, another wonderful soprano. Now one of my all-time favourites, this is Elizabeth Schumann, always a great favourite with the British public from her first appearances in London in 1924. She was somebody, everybody who knew her, loved her, and said she, rather like Lotte Schone, she was just somebody who was very warmhearted and good humoured. But she had actually, in her personal life, was quite tempestuous. She first of all married a Prussian aristocrat, but she then fell in love with the conductor Otto Klemperer, then a very young man, and they had a passionate affair. And her Prussian aristocratic husband came to the opera in Hamburg with a horse whip. And during a performance he publicly horse whipped Otto Klemperer. So she left, wisely I think, her first husband. She married twice more. Both of them, oddly enough, Jewish men. She was clearly a serial lover of Jewish men. That’d be interesting to talk to her about that. But she was fled from Vienna, although she was not herself Jewish. But at the time she was married to a Jewish man. They fled from Vienna at the Angelos in 1938 and she went to America where she became a professor at the Curtis Institute. And you see her on the right hand side wearing a British Army uniform because she became a member of ENSA, which was an organisation made to entertain the troops. So she toured Europe at the end of the war with the British Army. And apparently her main reason for doing with this was that her sons, the son of the dreadful Prussian aristocrat was in Germany. He’d been a fighter pilot on the German side for the Nazis. And she was desperate to see him and be reunited with him. And this was her way of doing it.
Two photographs of her here on the left during her final tour, which was to South Africa in 1951. And on the right receiving her American citizenship. Now I want to play you a broadcast she made of a master class where she’s talking about the song Morgen of Richard Strauss, which she recorded commercially twice. And it’s a song that suits her absolutely perfectly. And I just love this. When I hear her voice, I just fall madly in love with her. Her delicious accent and her charm. There’s such charm and musicality comes across in her speaking voice. And she’s talking about, of course she knew Strauss very well. She was one of his favourite singers. And they toured together, they toured America together, performing his songs. And she says, the composer Richard Strauss, wanted me to sing the phrase, still own lungs in the one breath. She says, but at the end she says very, very severely of that, that singers have to follow his instructions and do what he says. And she ends with it is your duty to sing what is written.
[Schumann] And the composer wanted me to sing still the lungs in one breath, although he wrote a little eighth pause between. Then there still, there is an eighth of pause, but he wanted to have a breath before liedersteining to get this liederstein. Liederstein is to come down a staircase or to come down a mountain and it is like steps. Therefore he wanted to have to take a breath. Now, when you come to this part, it is absolutely necessary to get the tongue clearly through, keeping absolutely the beats of the bar. Could you play this? 1, 2, 3.
[Schumann] 1,2,3.
[Schumann] You are allowed here to take the end a little long, right? You see, because there is nothing, there is only the three beats of the bar. But important are these one, two, three. It brings the tranquillity. Of course, some singers announce and go on. I mean especially when they are with piano, they think they can do what they want. The accompanist will go with them. Different, is it, when you sing with orchestra, the conductor’s not very enchanted about it. He beats a little quicker. But it shouldn’t be, absolutely not. Your duty is to sing what is written.
This is another great favourite to the Viennese public. Leo Slezak, and his career went back to the turn of the century and he was one of the top singers in the Mahler period. He had something, a bit of a sort of love-hate relationship with Mahler, who could be quite a bully towards his singers and who didn’t always appreciate Leo Slezak’s famous sense of humour. He was notorious for his practical jokes. His autobiography is entitled, “What Time Does the Next Swan Go?” And that refers to a famous incident when the swan got stuck in the last act of Lone Green and failed to appear on the stage. And apparently Slezak went to the front of the stage and addressed the audience and said, “What time does the next swan go?” He’d retired from opera by the time of the Angelos. He was still giving concerts and he was rather like Melchior, he became a much-loved character actor in movies playing cameo roles. He was in trouble with the Nazis because his son, Walter Slezak, went to America and Hollywood and played caricatures of Nazis in various Hollywood movies of the period. So I’m going to play you one, a late record, really right at the end of his career. I think his, the last record he made for me are amongst the most beautiful. It was a huge voice, it’s a Wagnerian voice and famous Othello that he sings here. A Greek song with great delicacy.
I can’t resist again, showing off my things from my collection. These are two portraits of Leo Slezak that are actually here in my flat, The porcelain figure statuette I found in Vienna last summer. And on the right hand side, a medallion of Leo Slezak by Oscar Nemon that was given to me by his daughter, Aurelia Young, who many of you will have heard talking about her, her father, Oscar Nemon, who’s famous, of course, for his sculptures of Freud, and Winston Churchill. And now another tenor. You said, this is very tenor heavy, but this for me is the most beautiful tenor voice of any of them I’m going to play to you tonight. This is Joseph Schmidt who was Romanian and came from a very orthodox Jewish background and had a cantorial training, which I think partly accounts for his extraordinary technique, his amazing flexibility. But rather like Gitta Alpar, who I started last week with, he was one of those people who burst into fame in a way, at exactly the wrong moment, just as the Nazi regime was happening. In fact his greatest hit, he appeared in a movie, Ein Lied geht um die Welt, and that came out in 1934. So, and you can imagine, and it was hugely popular, the German public, but obviously not with the Nazi regime itself. As I mentioned last time, he was tiny. I think he was under five foot four, which meant that he, I think he only once appeared on stage in an opera.
So he was more famous for his records, for his radio broadcast, and his movies. And it’s a, I think, a totally thrilling voice. Very individual timbre, very special, instantly recognisable rather like Leisha Talbot. And I’m going to play you a favourite record of mine, of Joseph Schmidt. It’s a song by Kaman. “You Shall be the Emperor of my Soul”. It’s a very gorgeous love song. What rather intrigues me about this is the gender-bending abstract of it. I mean nowadays we’re in, of course everybody’s got themselves into such a tiswas about gender. It’s really got out of hand I think on both sides. So I think it’s quite interesting to look back to the interwar period where it was quite normal for either women or men to sing love songs addressed to their own sex. I don’t think anybody thought anything about it, really. And so, I mean, it would’ve been very easy for him if he had thought about it. instead of the Kaiser. He could have changed that “you are the empress of my dreams” instead of singing “you are the Emperor of my dreams”. Anyway, it’s a gorgeous song with a very lovely melody.
- This is Fritz Shedry, who’s Viennese and he started off his career actually as an assistant to Mahler. Mahler appointed him assistant in 1907, his last year at the Vienna Opera. And had a very respectable career in Germany, but as a Jew he left in 1933, initially went in Eastwards rather than Westwards. He went to the Soviet Union and was the chief conductor of the Leningrad Philharmonic for several years. But by the late thirties with the madness of Stalin becoming evermore evident, he decided to leave and cross the Atlantic, went to America and spent the rest of his career there. Yet another tenor. This is a tenor day, as I said, and he is, I suppose, my favourite tenor of all. This is Richard Tauber. And he was Austrian. His father was Jewish, his mother was Catholic. They separated. He was brought up by his mother as a Catholic. And my guess is that he never really thought of himself as Jewish until the Nazis told him that he was. And for some reason or other they had a particular obsession with Tauber, I think possibly because he was so loved, he was so popular. And this is a photograph of the Entartete Musike exhibition, which paralleled the Entartete Kunst exhibition. Touring exhibition denouncing all degenerate music, music by blacks, music by Jews. As you can see, there’s a large photograph of Tauber on display in the Entartete Musik show. He just, he was so loved, I think he just couldn’t understand it, couldn’t grasp it. And in fact, he went back to Germany quite late in the 1930s. And it was only when he was beaten up on the streets by Nazi thugs that he realised that he was no longer welcome in Germany.
So he’d put down roots in Britain. He married an English actress, he was so loved in England. And he made a series of films, “Blossom Time”, where he played Schubert on the left-hand side. Would really recommend that you watch that on YouTube because he does a whole concert of Schubert songs and it’s absolutely terrific. And he also made a film O Du Frohliche where he sings every role except the Soprano role. He sings the baritone role of the prologue. And, he really hogs the whole thing, I suppose. And so in the late twenties and thirties, he became very popular in operata. But he also returned to Covent Garden in the late thirties singing in Mozart, Don Giovanni and Die Zauberflote. He was slated to sing Tamino in the Beecham recording of Die Zauberflote, but Beecham wanted to use the Berlin Philharmonic. So it needs to be recorded in Berlin by this time. Of course, it was impossible for Tauber to return to Nazi Germany. When the Second World War broke out, he was actually on tour in South Africa again and he was very popular in America. He could very easily have gone to America, which would’ve been a much safer option for him. Instead, he chose to come to Britain. As I said, he had very close ties and deep roots in England.
It was a risk, in 1939 or '40, there was every possibility either that Britain could be successfully invaded by the Germans or, pre-Churchill, anyway, there was every risk that the British government would’ve done a compromise with Nazi Germany, in which case he would’ve been in big trouble. But he, along with Vera Ling, he was one of the real morale boosters of the British during the war. According to his wife, Diana Napier, there was not one single day of the Second World War when he did not sing somewhere before the public in England. He wrote his own operata, “Old Chelsea”, which was very successful and was actually recorded, there’s a recording of it that was made for the entertainment of the troops in North Africa. And of course he toured the country. Golders Green Hippodrome as you can see. And he surprisingly perhaps, the music of Franz Lehar, Mary Widow and the Land of Smiles continued to be very much loved and performed in Britain, right through the war. And of course he sang a lot on the radio and he was the housewive’s favourite. And there may be some British people listening to me tonight who are old enough to remember this.
[Announcer] Presenting the Richard Tauber programme. We welcome back the celebrated tenor in the first of a new series of programmes and the orchestra directed by George Melachrino. To open this new series of programmes, Richard Tauber sings a song that we first came to know as the signature tune of that fine musician and brilliant pianist, Fred Hartley, who composed it. Its title undoubtedly reflects the belief of both composer and singer. Life is nothing without music.
I must finish soon because I’m running out of time. And my last person I want to talk about is Bruno Walter, who was originally from Berlin, but moved to Vienna and was a protege of Mahler. He worked very, very closely with Mahler. So he was chief conductor of the Berlin in Berlin. No, the , I think it was in Berlin. Anyway, in '33 he was very abruptly forced to leave. He then went to Austria where he ran the Salzberg Festival up 'til 1938, again forced to leave very rapidly after the Angelos and then goes to France. The French, he was idolised in France, the French were very, very happy to have him and immediately gave him French citizenship in 1938. But then once again, of course, 1940 has to leave yet again and move across the Atlantic. And he spends the rest of his life in the United States. And he was certainly one of the most respected, one of the most revered conductors of the 20th century. He was always devoted to the cause of Mahler. Now that Mahler is so widely loved and so widely performed, it’s difficult to imagine that Mahler was almost totally forgotten between his death or certainly between the 1930s.
And there wasn’t really a great deal of interest in Mahler until a Great Britain Mahler revival of the 1960s. So Bruno Walter was the one person who continued to support the cause of Mahler and to perform his works. And I want to play you the famous Adagietto. You all know it, I suppose, from the movie “Death in Venice”, in a recording that he made in New York just after the war. And I’m sure there are many, many Mahler devotees I know amongst our audience. I’d be quite interested to know what you think about this performance. Because you might be surprised by it about speed in the score. Mahler marks the Adagietto, Sehr Langsam, very slow. And this has been taken maybe too literally by conductors in recent years. The two conductors who worked most closely with Mahler, who have recorded this piece, Bruno Walter and Willem Mengelberg take it much, much faster than any modern performance. Bernstein takes 12 minutes, Bruno Walter takes seven minutes, 37 seconds, and Mengelberg even faster at seven minutes and eight seconds. So I’ll just play you the first bit so you get a flavour and a sense of the flow and the tempo of Bruno Walter in this music.
Q&A and Comments:
Q: - Let’s see, what happened to Maria Muller after the war?
A: Well, she actually, she continued to sing after the war. I don’t think anything happened to her. I don’t think she was punished and I don’t think she even had… there were a number of singers and like Helge Roswaenge, for instance, who for a while were forbidden to sing after the war. I mean, she was coming to the end of her career, but there are post-war recordings of her and then she retired and spent the rest of her life living in Barroit. Same question really. I think, people, most people were forgiven very, very quickly after the war. And that has to do with the Cold War and the fact that America in particular was very, very keen to reestablish Germany as a normal country because they wanted to use Germany as a bastion against the communist regimes of Eastern Europe.
I dunno what happened to Roswaenger’s first wife. I really should try and find that out. I actually met his second wife once. I mean, he was already dead. But I met her when I was a student in Munich.
Was Maria Muller a real, I think she was. No, I, from the way she talks in that book, Kuntzler Plowden, I think she was a real Nazi believer. But as you say, there were an enormous number of people who just saw it as a career opportunity.
Yes. She agrees with Rossini about that.
Hi Dee. Certainly, as you say, it’s not at all the kind of sound that would be produced by a real Italian tenor.
Thank you, Sheila. Yeah, I think it’d be so interesting and maybe I’ll suggest that to Trudy, if we could find somebody who really knows about it, what happened in the Italian section. Of course, Charlotte’s Salomon, she didn’t survive as you know, I don’t know why she was taken or how she was taken.
This is Francine. This is the station in New York City that plays, because German and Viennese-like music was continued to be very, very popular in both London and New York all the way through the war. Yeah.
Why did opera singers fleeing the Nazis go to the Met and not to… Now that’s a complicated and very interesting question. Some did come to London. But the Covent Garden initially was very dependent on importing singers from Germany and they didn’t want to offend the Nazi regime in case they couldn’t get the other singers that they wanted from the Berlin Opera. So that seems to be the reason why, I mean, absolutely disgracefully, they ceased to employ the great Wagnerian base Fidrish Shore. But also there was a lot more opera going on, I suppose, in New York than there was in London. And once the war started, of course, there was the Covent Garden and the Sadler’s Wells completely shut down. It’s one didn’t get stuck.
Slezak fails, step backwards onto the swan on time. Well there are different versions of that story, actually, and some people say it wasn’t even Slezak, it was another singer that said it. I’ll be coming to Fort Vengler in a week or two, about two weeks time, I think.
Schmidt is a wonderful singer. I so agree with you.
Seeing Walter’s second films. Yes, there is a correspondence, they had a very intense correspondence during this whole period. Cesar of course died, just at the end of the Second World War. But somehow they managed to write to one another through the Nazi regime and through the war.
Q: How about Elizabeth Schwarzkopf?
A: I’m not sure if I even dare go there. I could, I could say a few things about her. She’s not a singer I care for really as an artist. And I think she was a pretty appalling human being.
Q: Are more of these singers Viennese?
A: Not necessarily. Even the Viennese, both Lotte Lehman and Elizabeth Schumann, of course, they were based for a large part of their careers in Vienna and regarded as being Viennese. But they were not, they were neither of them Austrian. They were both German. It’s interesting, this is Claire saying that in the Netherlands, of course both Tauber and Schmidt were very, very popular in the Netherlands. Tauber and Schmidt should have been rivals, but in fact they had a very fraternal relationship. And Tauber even conducted concerts in which Joseph Schmidt was singing.
“Death in Venice”, thank you for the link.
Q: Did Roswaenger have children? Do you know?
A: I don’t know. I don’t know if he had children or not. He was married twice. Zarah Leander I will be coming to in not next week, but the week after. I’ll be talking about her in the context of the German film industry.
Charlotte Salmon went to get married at a registry office coming out of hiding. Oh, thank you for letting me know that.
How did, well of course, Tauber was he was unbelievably shocked. And, the first, of course he was really shocked at being beaten up in the street. And when he happened to be, I think in Italy at the time of the Angelos, which, so of course he, apparently he, went into for several days into a very deep depression and the Angelos and of course the loss of his native land. At what stage did the modern start to put an bear Shostakovich and so on. There, in 1933, because the Bags Botec, which had been very, very popular in Berlin, been very successful, because the production was immediately shut down by the Nazis and the Covent Garden, while, it’s not an honourable story. The Rollup has got on Covent Garden. As I said, the fact that they dropped Jewish things dropped Lotte Shone, presumably also because she was Jewish, but they were willing to buy cheap productions that had been banned. And so that’s how Covent Garden got Schwanda of Weinberger that was performed I think in 1935. And they also offered to buy the production of . So it would’ve been put on at Covent Garden in 1935. But in fact the Nazis had already burned the scenery and the production. So in fact, Covent Garden had to wait 'til well after Second World War for a production of .
Yes, I am going to talk about Paul Robeson because Trudy, she asked me, could I think of two people that I regard as heroes that I would like to present as heroes. One is Myra Hess and the other one will be Paul Robeson. So I will be talking about Paul Robeson I think in about a month’s time.
So I won’t see you next week because I’m off to Munich with a group tomorrow. But I’ll be back in Paris on the 1st of May and I’ll be talking to you then about cultural life in Nazi Germany.