Patrick Bade
The Royal Opera House Covent Garden Between the Wars
Patrick Bade - The Royal Opera House Covent Garden Between the Wars
- I’m just tilting the image so you can see this wonderful 17th Century portrait I’ve just bought. It’s behind me on the wall. I might see if I can find a chance later to talk about that in its context. But here we have the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, as it looked between the wars, still surrounded by the rather scruffy fruit and vegetable market. And you can see workers delivering things to the market in the foreground. Now, before the First World War, Covent Garden had been one of the world’s top opera houses, in competition with the Paris Opera, Berlin, Vienna, New York. But everything closed down in 1914. After the war, there were very limited seasons with local singers singing opera in English. There was a hiatus of six years before international opera was resumed at Covent Garden in 1924. It was ironic in a way that the first season, and indeed all the seasons up to the mid-1930s, were dominated by singers and conductors who came from the countries we’ve just been fighting with, from Germany and Austria. So that first season in 1924, it opened with a series of German operas conducted by the great Bruno Walter from Berlin. And at 1924, it opened with two Ring cycles, one after the other. And those Ring cycles introduced two singers who were going to dominate the seasons for the rest of the decade. On the left is Friedrich Schorr. Many connoisseurs consider that he was the finest Wotan and Hans Sachs who was a great Wagnerian singer of the 20th Century. And he sang every season from 1924 to 1933. Notoriously he had sung Wotan at Bayreuth in 1925, which was the first spring cycle attended by Adolf Hitler.
Hitler was appalled to discover that Wotan was sung by a Hungarian Jew. So Schorr was given a very short shrift when the Nazis took power in 1933. And disgracefully, the Covent Garden dropped him as well because they needed singers from Berlin and they wanted the goodwill of the Nazi regime, and they didn’t want to offend the Nazis by having a Jewish Wotan dominating their Ring cycles. On the right hand side is Frida Leider. She was also a star from Berlin. She didn’t sing in the first cycle. She sang in the second cycle, and she was, became one of the most loved singers in London throughout the interwar period. And, well, she would be my choice for Brunnhilde or Isolde. Of all the singers recorded in the 20th Century. You’ll hear, it’s a wonderfully bright, shining live voice. It’s heroic, but she doesn’t sound like a Russian weightlifter on steroids, like some Brunnhildes. She really sounds youthful. And you’ll hear at the end of this excerpt, she had a marvellous trill. This is the best trill I’ve ever heard from a Wagnerian soprano. So here we have Brunnhilde being summoned by Wotan, and letting out her famous battle cry at the beginning of act two of Die Walkure.
Later in the season, she was joined by a young Heldentenor from Denmark called Lauritz Melchior. I think pretty well universally acclaimed as the greatest Wagnerian Heldentenor who has ever lived, certainly the greatest on record. And so they became a fixture singing together from 1924 right up until 1938. And I’m going to play you an excerpt of the love duet from Tristan and Isolde. It’s one of those recordings that in a certain way does a disservice because after this, for me, no other performance is quite satisfactory. I must have getting on for a hundred versions of this duet in my record collection. And I have never heard another version either on record or live that came near to this for the exquisite lyricism of both singers.
So those performances initiated, I would say, a golden age of Wagner singing. And there was a parallel, of course, Golden Age of Wagner going on in New York at the Met at the same time. It’s ironic, really, that if one wants to hear very great Wagnerian singing in the Nazi period, there was no use going to Berlin. It was going on in New York primarily, and in London. But the most legendary performances of that 1924 season were of Richard Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier. This was put on in the original production. Strauss and Hofmannsthal insisted that the Alfred Roller sets and costumes, which had been produced for the world premier in 1911 in Dresden, should be used for all performances wherever Der Rosenkavalier was performed throughout the world, right up till the Second World War. So this is what the presentation of the rose would’ve looked like in 1924. And these performances in ‘24 introduced a legendary cast. Three members of that cast, I think, can be said to have provided the ideal for their roles. Against which every singer since has had to be measured. First of these was the great Lotte Lehmann. Now interestingly, she had sung the other two soprano roles in Der Rosenkavalier. The young Sophie and lover of The Marschallin, Octavian. She’d sung both those roles. But up till 1924, she’d never sung the role of The Marschallin. And she was invited by Covent Garden to do it 'cause they assumed that she knew the role. And she actually didn’t tell them that she didn’t know the role. She’d never sung it before. But from the moment she first sung it in London, she was The Marschallin. And any singer who wants to take on this role or any singer who wants to take on any Strauss operatic role should listen to her. Above all, I think it’s for her command of the parlando, the conversational elements in Strauss’ scores. Where the singer has to, in a way, talk across the orchestra, chat away, and she can do it. She does this, it’s a beautiful, she has a gorgeous voice, of course, it’s a beautiful sound. But she chatters away completely naturally. Just as though she was having a normal conversation. And you’ll hear it in this excerpt I’m going to play you now.
And the role of the loathsome sext pest Baron Ochs was actually conceived and written for the Viennese bass Richard Mayr. In fact, he didn’t sing in the world premier in Dresden because the Vienna Opera wouldn’t release him. But he was very strongly identified with this role. This was his great role. And he’s just so perfect in the part. He’s kind of gross but funny. And not totally dislikable despite his really gross and horrible behaviour. And he has the perfect accent, which those of you who speak German or understand German , that he has a rural Austrian accent.
And the third singer who has proved a model for all subsequent singers who’ve taken on the role was Elisabeth Schumann. And I’m going to play you the famous moment in act two. She’s presented with the silver rose. The silver rose has been perfumed with Persian essence. And she sniffs it and her voice rises ecstatically in response to the sensation of sniffing the perfume. And once again, I don’t think any singer has ever floated these highline phrases quite as exquisitely as Elisabeth Schumann does here.
So they were the standard cast all the way through the ‘20s into the '30s. This is a programme for the very last occasion that the great Lotte Lehmann sang The Marschallin in London. You can see it’s Wednesday, May the fourth of 1938. In fact, she never got through the performance. She was extremely distressed by the Anschluss. And very worried about the half-Jewish daughters of her husband, who were trapped in Vienna. And this performance was being broadcast. And halfway through the act one, the listeners were shocked to hear Lotte Lehmann break off singing and say in English, I can’t carry on. And she staggered off stage. And the rumour was that she had been bullied or mistreated by Nazi members of the cast, particularly Tiana Lemnitz, who was singing Octavian, who was a red-hot Nazi. Never, never changed her views. I know that from people who knew her after the war. So I mean, it must’ve been strange really for Lotte Lehmann. And if you know Der Rosenkavalier, in the first act, the curtain goes up, she’s actually in bed with her lover. So there she was in bed with this red-hot Nazi, Tiana Lemnitz. As I said, that is a story that’s been repeated many times, but apparently both Lehmann and Lemnitz after the war denied the story, and Lehmann said it actually had nothing to do with Lemnitz.
That she was just so tense and distressed that she couldn’t carry on with the performance. Well, Mozart. Mozart, it’s strange to think that before the First World War, Mozart was not standard repertory. Performances of Mozart were really rare. It was only in the 1920s, with the founding of the Salzburg Festival, in the 1930s with the founding of the Glyndebourne Festival, that Mozart really took off. But there was some very fine performances of Mozart at Covent Garden. 1926, there was a wonderful Don Giovanni, which featured Frida Leider as Donna Anna, Lotte Lehmann as Elvira, Elisabeth Schumann as Zerlina. In this picture, we’ve got Frida Leider as Donna Anna and we have Richard Tauber as Don Ottavio. They sang it together but actually never sang it together at Covent Garden. They sang it separately there, their roles separately there. So I’m going to play you a bit of the great Richard Tauber singing the aria “Dalla sua pace” from Don Giovanni. Which he did in seasons of 1938 and '39.
So suave and seductive. You think, well, this is one Don Ottavio who could have given Don Giovanni a run for his money with the ladies. Well, this is the great Lotte Lehmann, again, who was considered the finest Leonora of her era in Beethoven’s Fidelio. And she sang this in the mid-1930s under Sir Thomas Beecham. And in the same cast there was Erna Berger as Marzelline. And in the 1980s, well late-'80s, it was, '89 I think, I met Erna Berger. We had long, long conversations about all the people that she’d sung with. And I said, how was that? How was Beecham and how was Lotte Lehmann? And she said, “Oh, Beecham, Beecham, you know, "he was a fine conductor but he had no sense of humour.” I thought that was really interesting. 'Cause English people are always saying that Germans don’t have a sense of humour. And my guess is that, well, English humour, German humour, it’s like ships passing in the night. And obviously Beecham didn’t get the humour of Lotte Lehmann and Erna Berger. But the other thing she said to me, which I thought was fascinating, 'cause by that time the Nazis were in power. This is the mid-1930s. Lotte Lehmann, the world’s most celebrated German soprano, could not go back to Germany. She’d burnt her boats with the Nazis. So this was Erna Berger’s one opportunity to hear her. And she said she stood in the wings to listen to Lotte Lehmann throughout the whole performance. Even when, of course, Marzelline is not involved in the action. And she said what really fascinated her, what really, really impressed her, was not so much Lehmann singing, but her speaking of the German text. She had a very beautiful speaking voice and she spoke very, very movingly. Well, I don’t have a record of that, but I do have a record of her singing the great aria. So here is the central section of the aria “Komm Hoffnung.”
That’s a voice that Puccini described as being as sweet as honey. There’s a letter he wrote to a lady friend. He didn’t expect to like Lehmann, 'cause he didn’t really like German sopranos, but he was completely won over by her. Now we have an excerpt from a live performance at Covent Garden in 1937. And this is interesting for a number of different reasons. It starred as, this is a Flying Dutchman. And as the Dutchman, we have the wonderful German baritone Herbert Janssen. And he had just fled from Nazi Germany. He was warned that he was about to be arrested. He was not Jewish, but he had openly expressed contempt of the Nazis. And in fact, after some gala performance, he was summoned to have dinner with Goebbels. And his answer was, I may have to sing for that man, but I’m not going to eat with him. Well, that was a very unwise thing to say openly. And he fled from Germany with nothing but the clothes that he was wearing. He arrived in London and he went to see Betta Geismar, the former assistant of . He was already a refugee in London. And she put him in contact with Beecham. And actually for once Beecham was on the side of the angels. That didn’t happen very often. And he helped him out and immediately got him roles at Covent Garden. So he was a wonderful Dutchman. With a very warm, very distinctive tone. You recognise him immediately when you hear his voice. And with him, and this is also very interesting, was the new girl on the block of the period, which was Kirsten Flagstad. She made a sensational debut in New York in 1935, immediately acclaimed as the greatest Wagnerian voice of her time. And she was picked up by London very quickly. And this is particularly interesting because she’s singing the role of Senta in the Flying Dutchman. You would’ve thought she would’ve liked this role because she was Norwegian. She was passionately, passionately patriotic Norwegian. She felt intensely Norwegian. And this is the only famous Norwegian heroine, I suppose, in all of opera. But I don’t know if she ever sang it anywhere else except in London in this season. And she certainly never recorded it. So, this is very interesting to hear Janssen and Flagstad in a duet recorded live from the Flying Dutchman in 1937.
In 1926, the great Russian bass Feodor Chaliapin came to London for a season. He was quite a veteran by this time. He’d been certainly singing on stage for well over 30 years. And he was universally recognised as the greatest singing actor of the 20th Century. Sometimes people say to me, well, of course, a generation ago, singers couldn’t act. They could just sing. This is so wrong. There were always great singing actors, and he was supreme. And so there was a real sense of historical occasion when he came and sang this season in 1926. And luckily new technology came to the rescue. The previous year, electric recording had been invented, the microphone was introduced. So it was possible for the first time for a recording company like HMV to come to Covent Garden and set up their equipment and record a performance live. So this is a tremendously exciting historical occasion. And we can hear Chaliapin really strutting his stuff as a singing actor in this scene from Boito’s Mefistofele, and doing some wonderful whistling through his teeth at the end of the excerpt, if we get there.
Now, moving on to Italian opera. Italian opera tended to be somewhat eclipsed in this period by German opera, but there were some great highlights, notably the three seasons, 1929 to '31, when the Great American Soprano Rosa Ponselle appeared in London. And for me, Ponselle’s voice is unique. She was of course of Italian heritage, but born in America. I would say that this is the greatest Italian dramatic soprano voice on record. It’s so noble, it’s so ample, it’s so smooth. I always think that if the Statue of Liberty could sing, she would sing like Rosa Ponselle. So she debuted in London in her most famous role, which was Bellini’s Norma. Before she sang it, she was taken to be introduced to her childhood idol, Nellie Melba. She’d been taken as a child to see Melba at the Met in New New York. Melba was an obnoxious cow as usual. And she was very dismissive to Ponselle. She said, well, don’t imagine that the British public will applaud after you’ve sung your big aria. Custody, well, we don’t do that kind of thing here. Well, luckily, she was proved wrong. The British public were absolutely blown away by the quality of Ponselle’s voice. And they went crazy at the end of this aria. Just going to play you the opening declamatory . That gives you a sense of the greatness and nobility of her voice.
Now the perfect poise of that final note is really a thing of wonder. British singers, 'cause today there are many of the leading operatic singers in the world have come from the British isles. But there were very few English singers who achieved major international careers. Really only one actually, Eva Turner who sang at La Scala and she sang in Naples. Never sang at the Met. But she sang with great success at the Colon in Buenos Aires. And she sang in Chicago. And many people think that at least in terms of vocal confidence and power, she was the greatest Turandot of all. She was really born to sing this role. It’s the most incredible sound, the sheer volume and sort of metallic penetrative power of this voice. So, there are two commercial recordings of the big aria, but I’m not going to use either of them. This is from a live recording made in the coronation season of 1937. And we’re going to get the climax of her big aria. And you’ll get a sense of this, the elemental power of her singing. And I’m going to try and take it to the end. And you’ll hear a little bit of the Italian tenor, Giovanni Martinelli.
Martinelli, who sings with her there later, Ruth Lee said, “Oh, that woman, Eva Turner, "she gargles with steel.” Well, 'cause Torandot was a brand new opera. Well, in '37 it was, what? 10 years old. But when the very first performances in London in 1927 were with this exquisite soprano Lotte Schoene. She was originally Vienesse, but in the '20s, she was a much-loved star of the Berlin Opera until in 1933, like Vitri Shaw, she was booted out immediately. The Nazis took power because of her Jewish origins. And also very disgracefully, she was dropped by Covent Garden, and dropped by HMV, her recording company. 'Cause I suppose a lot of their sales were in Germany and they knew that they couldn’t sell her records in Germany. But this is perhaps her most famous record of Liu’s first aria. You get a sense of her exquisite artistry, very delicate voice.
I’m sorry to cut her off so quickly, but I’m running out of time, so I want to make sure I get to the end of this talk. Move on to Conchita Supervía who only appeared in two seasons, '34 and '35 because of her premature death in childbirth in 1936. But she was another absolutely adored singer in London. She married a Jewish businessman called Ben Rubenstein in 1931, and she wanted to appear at Covent Garden. She was already having a huge success in Paris. And she actually paid for the Managing Director of Covent Garden, Jeffrey Toy, and his musicologist brother, Francis Toy to fly to Paris. That was, of course, a very new thing. It was only in 1925, from 1925 onwards, that you could fly to Paris. So she flew them at her expense to Paris Hotel, everything paid for, and to hear her in Rossini’s opera La Cenerentola, which had dropped out of the repertoire for a hundred years. And it was largely revived because of her. And they were so absolutely enchanted by her performance, that she was scheduled to sing it, the role of Cenerentola, Cinderalla, at Covent Garden in 1934. And here she is.
Now odd in a way that the English fell in love with Supervia because normally English taste is not for singers with a rapid vibrato. And she of course has a very marked one. One critic said her voice sounded like an umbrella dragged along park railings. That was a great age of tenors. Caruso had died in 1921. And these four tenors were all vying on to take on the mantle of Caruso’s Pertile. Martinelli . We’ve already heard a tiny bit of Martinelli. In fact, all four of them did sing at Covent Garden, but not very often. And the reason for that was they were just too expensive. And there’s a famous telegram in the archives of Covent Garden dating from 1934, when an agent of Covent Garden was sent to Milan to make an offer of 300 pounds of performance to Gilli and 150 pounds of performance to Larry Volpe. And the answer was Gilli in dignity refuses. Larry Volpe will never get over the insult of being offered half what Gilli was offered. But he did sing that in 1936 with the wonderful German soprano, Elizabeth Rehberg. Of course, they were very much in the late-20’s into the early-'30s. They were regular performances at the Met. But I think there’s only this one season that they sang together in London, in Aida. And here there are in act three of Aida.
Now Gilli refused to sing at Covent Garden in 1937 for political reasons. Well, from really from 1936 to 1939, politics were creating mayhem on the operatic scene internationally. That was because Britain and France had sanctioned Italy after their invasion of Abacinia. But anyway, he got over it and he came back to London in 1938 and 1939 and sang his signature role of Rudolfo in La boheme.
In 1938 his mi mi was an English singer whose real name was Dora Labette. But as I said, English singers were not, apart from Eva Turner, they didn’t really get much of a look in at Covent Garden. She was the lover of Sir Thomas Beecham and the mother of his only child. And he was very determined to launch her on an international career. So he renamed her with an Italian sounding name. She was born in Purley, the suburb of Purley, south of London. So he called her Lisa Parley and he introduced her at Covent Garden actually in 1937. She came onto the stage dressed as Mimi and he spoke to the orchestra. And he said, “I’d like to introduce you to our new soprano, "Madam Lisa Parley.” And they all applauded politely, and then she started to sing, and I think it was a trombonist from the orchestra shouted out, “Bo Blamy, it’s Dora.” And it was a Dora Labette, of course. And she’s a lovely singer. I like her very much. But no Italian soprano ever sounded like this. This is a completely English sound.
This is the coronation season 1937. And the Covent Garden were trying to pivot away from the German repertoire and the dominance of German singers and artists. But politics increasingly poisoning everything. I mean, if you look, this is in the 1938 season. And we’ve got, I haven’t got time to go through all the stories of these. But every single one of these has an interesting story. By this time of course, Taulbor is a refugee and a real bogeyman for the Nazis. They absolutely hated him. Whereas Bockelmann red-hot, Nazi Herbert Janssen refugee from Nazi Germany, Frida Leider in disgrace, she remained in Germany but in disgrace because she refused to divorce her Jewish husband, and so on. So every one of these things, Lotte Lehman forced to flee, Tiana Lemnitz another red-hot Nazi. So you had very complicated situations. Now this is of course, new, again, the new boy on the block, 1939, a Swedish tenor Jussi Bjorling still in his mid-20s at the very beginning of his career creating a sensation in Il Trovatore. I’m going to play a little bit of an aria in which he demonstrates a very nice trill. And what surprises me, when he recorded the same role commercially after the war, he doesn’t trill. And I rather wonder why, but let me see where is. Actually, I think I’m going to skip this 'cause I’m sure you know . Anyway, I’m going to go on to this where 1939, of course the Second World War is very much on the horizon. The politics is pervading absolutely everything. And you really wonder what the atmosphere was like backstage for this performance of the Bartered Bride, where you have three Jewish refugees here, Marco . And Sabina Calta. Alongside singers who are quite enthusiastically openly Nazi like Hilda Konetzni. And also this is of course a great Czech opera at a time when Czchoslovakia has just been invaded and occupied. So I imagine it was quite tense. Again, this is very interesting 'cause this is a live recording of an actual performance that turned up quite recently.
The very, very last performance to be given at Coard before the outbreak of war. And it was shut down once again was Tristan und Isolde with the great French soprano, Germaine . And so, the Covent Garden finished its season, that would’ve been in July, I suppose. And she then crossed the channel and she went to Bayreuth and she sang a series of Isoldes in Bayreuth. So the very last opera to be heard at Bayreuth before the outbreak of war was also Tristan and Isolde with the very same soprano. And the photograph you see was taken at that time had a really fatal impact on the life of . You can see Hitler looking adoringly at this very beautiful blonde French singer. And at the time that was in all the newspapers and everybody was thrilled about it, that a French soprano had had such a success. But of course after the war, this picture really came back to haunt her and it’s a really terrible story what happened to her after the war, and how she was condemned and persecuted. I’m going to finish with the very end of Tristan and Isolde with .
Dreadful to cut her off, but I think I have to, to answer a few, there’re just a few questions.
Q&A and Comments:
Beecham was almost never on the side of the angels in Beecham, he was, I sort of think of him as the Boris Johnson of the musical world. A man with absolutely without moral compass who was prepared to sell his soul to the devil and was very happy to deal with the Nazis and tour Nazi Germany. And happy to jetison Jewish singers from his Magic Foot recording because he wants to record it in Berlin with a Berlin Philharmonic. He was, I could go on and on. Beecham was not a person of great moral principle.
Q: How do you enjoy current productions of operas that you feel have already heard?
A: I know, I think a live performance is a very different thing. And somehow when you are in the theatre, you just have to get swept away by it and enter the spirit of it. And there’s no use sitting there in the seat and thinking Frida Leider did it better. In fact, I heard a very fine performance of Tristan, at least musically fine in Munich last week. And I thoroughly enjoyed it despite the memory of Frida Leider and Melchior.
I’m not sure I think it remember that Covent Garden was also very much for much of this period, completely under the control of Beecham. And I would repeat about Covent Garden, what I said about Beecham. I don’t think that Covent Garden was antisemitic. They were just not particularly sympathetic. And I think they realised that they, they needed German corporation to get the singers that they wanted for their productions. And they weren’t prepared to go out on a limb to employ or protect Jewish singers. They were just, that wasn’t their first priority.
Yes, there was ballet going on at this, at Covent Garden in this period. I think so. I don’t know. I don’t really know a lot about ballet. I can’t really tell you what is an English sound. Well, you just heard it. It’s actually I made a whole CD for a French company, slightly jokey CD called Virgins and Matrons, and it’s made up of recordings. It’s, I would say to, it’s not so noticeable today as it would’ve been in the past, but the English tended to singers to produce this very pure instrumental sound without much vibration, vibration and without much warmth or passion.
You, Dora Labette would’ve been a very typical example.
Q: After the war, did any of the pro-Nazi singers acknowledge that they were on the wrong side of history?
A: Yes, yes. Erna Berger did actually in her autobiography, but most of them didn’t. It’s amazing that the kind of amnesia that there was after the war. People just conveniently forgetting what happened.
Yes, Barter Bride was normally sung in German and all those Czech operas, of course reached the world through German opera houses. So know things like, or nearly all the, the even sort of things like Yana Czech and Alka and so on. For a long time until quite recently, they tended to be sung in German rather than in Czech. Well, partly 'cause I suppose they didn’t have language coaches.
And, oh, my favourite evening place is La Fresque. F-R-E-S-Q-U-E. And of course La Trambla is a spectacular experience. Not I you’ll eat well, but it’s more for going to the place in the atmosphere. So that seems to be it for today.
Thank you all very much. And in August, of course, we’re all moving into somewhat lighter subjects. So I’ll see you again on Wednesday.