Patrick Bade
Wagner at the Met

Patrick Bade - Wagner at the Met

- Everybody knows that Adolf Hitler venerated the operas of Wagner. But if you wanted to hear great Wagner singing during the years of the Third Reich, that’s 1933 to 1945, you would not have gone to Berlin or Vienna. You should have gone to New York. New York was enjoying a kind of golden age of Wagner performance. And the two, the backbone of those performances were the two singers you see on the screen: Friedrich Schorr on the left, and Lauritz Melchior on the right. Friedrich Schorr, he was Hungarian and he was Jewish. His father was a Canto. And it’s a little bit obscure. Lauritz Melchior, I’ve had this discussion with listeners before, most people think that Melchior was also of Jewish origin, though a little bit further back, I think, than Schorr. So fairly obvious reason why they left the Third Reich and came to New York. So Friedrich Schorr made his debut at the Met in 1924. Oh, I’ll just go back to the two again for a moment. I think most connoisseurs would agree that Melchior was incomparably the greatest Wagner heroic tenor that has lived, or certainly that has made recordings. And many people would say that Friedrich Schorr was the greatest Wagnerian heroic baritone in the roles of Wotan and Hans Sachs. And know, with these two singers, they really sing. And that’s what Wagner wanted. He didn’t want singers to bark his music, and he certainly wasn’t in favour of the sort of awful, shriek-y, wobbly, un-lyrical sounds that you so often get in Wagner operas. He wanted his operas to be sung in a Bel Canto way, and that’s what we get with these singers. Friedrich Schorr has this wonderful, velvety, smooth, mellow sound that I think I like him even better as Hans Sachs than I do as Wotan.

It’s enormously likeable and sympathetic characterization that he gives of the cobbler, Hans Sachs. And we’re going to hear him hear in a duet from the meister singer with the German Saxon Soprano, Elizabeth Rethberg. She’s actually the first of the singers I’m talking about tonight to arrive at the Met. She arrived as a very young singer in 1922. Her debut role was Aida. And she remained at the Met for 20 years. She sang a wider range of roles than probably any other singer of her era at the Met. The Met, I’ve mentioned before, the Met tended to typecast singers, but she was an exception to that. In fact, she sang more Italian opera and French opera than German opera. Her three Wagner roles were Eva in the Meistersinger, Elsa in Lohengrin and Elisabeth in Tannhauser. And she certainly makes a very believable and lovely Eva, as you’ll hear in this. It’s a very pure sound, very youthful, lovely, bright, silvery sound that blends so beautifully with the dark velvet of Friedrich Schorr. And this scene, it’s actually a shoe fitting, I suppose, the most famous, well, I don’t suppose there is another shoe fitting in opera. Lauritz Melchior, when he was young, he was a rather handsome man and really quite believable as a Wagnerian hero. But over the years, of course, he was rather overindulged, as you can see, and in later years, needed to be tightly corseted for his stage appearances. It’s an incredible voice, a bright, metallic, like a trumpet. But he was also capable of very tender singing, very beautiful shading from loud to soft.

So I’m going to play you, this is Melchior really, at the height of his powers in 1941. This is a performance of Die Walkure. This is live from the Met, and it’s on the 6th of December, 1941. And it was a real golden age cast with Friedrich Schorr as Wotan, Helen Traubel, we’ll hear more of her later as Brunnhilde. It should have been Lotte Lehmann, the greatest Sieglinde of all. But she fell ill. And of course it was very difficult, you know, during the Second World War, to find substitute singers. So they pushed out onto the stage a 22-year-old girl who’d never sung in public before, her name was Astrid Varnay, to take the role, take the part of the great Lotte Lehmann. Here she was appearing on stage with the greatest Wagnerian singers of the 20th century. Tremendous responsibility. And actually, she’s marvellous. Sadly, I don’t think she ever quite sang quite so well again. Her career, she had an important career, but it’s really a story of vocal decline rather than improvement. You’re going to hear just a tiny bit of her in this excerpt. And then we hear the blazing voice of Lauritz Melchior at the end of act one of Die Walkure. Now, it should have been a case of A Star is Born because Astrid Varnay had tremendous success. You can hear the public loved the performance. But she was upstaged because, as I said, this was the 6th of December, 1941.

And while that performance was taking place, Japanese aircraft were taking off on their way to Pearl Harbour. So the next day, the headlines were, of course, not about the previous day’s performance of Die Walkure. But just to go back to Melchior for a moment, he made his debuts quite a young man in 1926, in a matinee performance of Tannhauser, and he, nobody really took much notice of him at his debut because he was completely eclipsed by a media frenzy that was going on about the debut of a soprano later in the day. I mean, it’s amazing to us to think that at the Met in these days, in the 1920s, you could have a performance of Tannhauser in the afternoon and then go on to a performance of Rigoletto in the evening. But that’s what happened. And there was a young, very young, 19-year-old soprano from Kansas City called Marion Talley, and there was tremendous excitement. Everybody thought she was going to be a huge star. In fact, she wasn’t. She fizzled out very, very quickly. And of course it was Melchior who stayed the course. His partner on countless occasions in Europe, in Berlin, in London, in Paris, in Vienna, was Frida Leider, and she also partnered him for just two seasons at the Met, 1933 and 1934. She would be my choice, my personal choice as the, for the roles of Brunnhilde and, particularly, Isolde. It’s not an absolutely huge voice. It wasn’t as big a voice as that of Kirsten Flagstad. Her top notes were not as powerful as those of Birgit Nilsson. But she would be my number one choice, ‘cause it’s, again, it’s the beauty of her singing, the lyrical beauty of her singing. And it’s a wonderfully bright, thrilling sound.

And you’ll hear in this excerpt of Brunnhilde’s battle cry that she also has a perfect trill, which neither Flagstad nor Nilsson had. Now, she was greeted ecstatically by the New York critics, and they said that she was the greatest Brunnhilde and Isolde to have appeared in New York since Olive Fremstad before the First World War. But strangely, despite her huge success, she only stayed two seasons, 1933-1934. It’s a bit of a mystery to me why she didn’t stay in the States. She could have done that. She went back to Nazi Germany. She was married to the leader of the Berlin Philharmonic, a man called Rudolf Deman, who was Jewish, and who of course lost his job with the Berlin Philharmonic when the Nazis took power. He was relatively safe until 1938 because he had an Austrian passport, not a German passport. But of course, after De Angelis, he was also very endangered, and eventually he went into exile in Switzerland. He survived the war in Switzerland with Leider sending her money to support him throughout the war. But I suppose it’s, you know, it’s with hindsight, we can say, of course she should have left. She should have gone to America.

She could have earned a living there. But I think, you know, as I said, she would’ve been very restricted if she’d stayed in New York. She would’ve been given nothing to sing, really, except Brunnhilde and Isolda, whereas in Europe, she could sing Verdi, she could sing a whole different range of roles, and she had a magnificent villa outside of Berlin. So it was, it would’ve been a difficult choice. She would’ve had to give up a lot of things to leave Germany and go to America. Oh, I’ll play you again, this is actually one of my, this is a Desert Island Disc for me. This is so beautiful. This is the love duet from Tristan and Isolde, and said she was the regular partner of Lauritz Melchior. They must have sung Tristan together on absolutely countless occasions. And their voices blend so beautifully. This is the most lyrical version that I know on record of the love duet from Tristan and Isolde. Now, Frida Leider reigned supreme in those really heavy roles of Brunnhilde and Isolde. But the soprano who reigned supreme in the more lyrical roles of Wagner, Eva, when she was young, then Elsa, and Elizabeth, and above all, Sieglinde, is Lotte Lehmann. She was, without doubt, the greatest Sieglinde that we have on record. And luckily we have a well, very high quality commercial recording of Acts One and Two of Die Walkure with Lehmann and Melchior, fabulous, one of the greatest recordings ever made of anything, I would say, one of the top opera recordings.

And we also, from the Met, we have a number of live recordings of her. I mean, she’s a singer that I revere and adore. And as you can see, I never met her actually, but I did have a correspondence with her and she sent me the photograph you can see on the left hand side. And it’s just such a gorgeous voice. Both Pacini and Strauss were absolutely in love with Lehmann’s voice. And Pacini, who actually heard her initially with some reluctance, 'cause he had a prejudice against German Sopranos, but he was blown away by her performance as Mimi. And he wrote to one of his girlfriends in a letter that Lehmann had a voice as sweet as honey, and you’ll hear that in this excerpt from Lohengrin. Lehmann made, actually, quite a belated debut in New York. Her North American debut was in Chicago, in the final seasons of the Chicago Lyric Opera before it collapsed in 1932. She was a big star there from 1929. She was delayed getting to New York because her archrival and enemy, Maria Jeritza, there were deep rivals in Vienna, was queening it in New York. And she made very, very sure that Lehman didn’t get a look in. But she was, she was eventually dropped by the Metropolitan Opera in the early thirties because she was too expensive and too difficult and too much for a prima donna. And so Lehman came and was adored by the New York public as a leader singer as well as an opera singer. But she suffered, as so many singers did in New York, again from typecasting, and she made one appearance as Tosca, but the New York critics wouldn’t accept her as that. And so she was just stuck singing a tiny handful of German roles.

Elsa, Eva, she sang for a couple of times early on, and mainly Seiglinde and the Marschallin were the roles that she sang. I mean, in Vienna, she’d sung a huge range of roles, I think over 90 different roles in Vienna. But in New York, she was just stuck singing about three or four roles. So when Leider left at the end of the 1934 season, there was a gap, who was going to replace her. So the talent scouts were out and they found two candidates to replace Leider. And the first of these was the Australian soprano, Marjorie Lawrence, who had been trained and had begun her career in Paris and had tremendous success in Paris. And she was a very striking woman. She was very athletic. I think she’s the only woman in the history of the Met in Gotterdammerung, who actually made her last act entrance on horseback for the emulation scene. And she’s a very, very fine singer. It’s a powerful voice, warm, a very lovely quality and an emotional singer. So I’m going to play an excerpt from the last act of Die Walkure. This might strike you as a bit odd. It’s in French because it’s a recording she made in Paris before she for left for New York in 1935. As you can hear in that, that she’s a very, very fine singer indeed, and she was greatly appreciated both by the New York public and the New York critics. But her career was overshadowed or curtailed by two factors.

The first of these was the arrival at the Met in the same year as the Norwegian soprano, Kirsten Flagstad, who I’ll talk about in a minute, who really overshadowed Marjorie Lawrence. And the second very tragic event was that, during the Second World War, she sang a season at the Opera in Mexico City and she contracted polio and she was paralysed from the the waist downwards. And that pretty well interrupted or stopped her career. She did sing a few performances. She had a comeback and she sang a few performances of Isolde and Electra sitting down. You can see this here, she’s giving a concert, I think in Sydney on the right hand side seated. And a film was made of her story called “Interrupted Melody”. It’s one of those films that get shown on TV from time to time. But Kirsten Flagstad, this phenomenal, extraordinary voice, even though I’ve expressed a preference on artistic rounds for Frida Leider, Flagstad is the voice of voices. There is no other voice to compare with it in the German repertoire. Rosa Ponselle tells a nice story in her memoirs. Their careers overlapped for two years. Flagstad arrived in at the beginning of 1935 and Ponselle left the Met in 1937. So they must have heard each other on many occasions. And Ponselle said one day she was in the empty opera house of the Met, and she went out onto the stage and just for the fun of it, she let rip and her huge and wonderful, gorgeous, dark, rich Italian voice, she poured it out into the auditorium. She hadn’t noticed that Flagstad was on the stage behind her and Flagstad stat thought she’d do the same. So you had the, God, what it would’ve been.

Can you imagine sitting in the empty auditorium of the Metropolitan Opera and hearing Flagstad and Ponselle competing with one another. But Ponselle said very generously that it was the only time in her entire life that she felt underpowered, singing on the same stage as Kirsten Flagstad. So here she is. This is, you can see this actually on YouTube. This is an Flagstad, or the image here is the Flagstad singing Brunnhilde’s Battle Cry. And it was included in the film, the big broadcast of 1938. Rather bizarrely, she’s introduced by Bob Hope, and as far as I know, I think it’s the only film that there is of Flagstad, and it’s very fascinating to see it. But I’m not going to actually play that piece. I’m going to play a bit of the Dawn duet from Gotterdammerung, where she’s singing alongside Lauritz Melchior. They became the great draw of the Met. The Met was in big, big financial trouble in the 1930s. And that’s why they let go some of their most expensive singers like JEEL-EE and Maria Jeritza. But it said that Flagstad and Melchior, between them, saved the Met from bankruptcy 'cause everybody wanted to hear them together. But they didn’t actually really, in fact, they didn’t like each other at all. They didn’t get on. I think quite a lot of jealousy between them with each wanting to claim credit for having saved the Met. But they certainly make a fantastic combination. Just listen to this.

Now this of course gives you an idea of what sets look like, although this is a scene from a movie. This, I think, sets at the Met for the Wagner performances would’ve looked very like this. They’re very literally just what Wagner asked for, he asked for a Rocky Mountain pass, and that’s what you get, a Rocky Mountain pass. Very different from any Wagner IHN-SEHN-EER-UHM staging that you get today. Now, Flagstad left the Met abruptly in 1941 under very, what eventually became very controversial circumstances. She was an adored singer in America. In some ways, she took on the role that Schumann-Heink had, Madam Schumann-Heink earlier as the sort of mother of the nation. When Schumann-Heink died, it was Flagstad who was asked to replace her to sing Silent Night at Christmas on the radio. So there was great dismay in 1941 when she decided to go back to Nazi-occupied Norway. I’ll talk a little bit more about that at the end. But she was a very loving and devoted wife. She was a very kind of domestic person actually. And she didn’t want to be separated from her husband. So she went back to Norway. Again, what to do? She left, you had a double disaster because just as Flagstad left the Met, of course, Marjorie Lawrence was struck down by polio and their shoes were filled, actually, very capably by an American-born soprano, Helen Traubel. Tremendous voice. Really, really powerful. Really, really solid voice, almost, I would say, in the Flagstad league. She was a bit short at the top.

You can hear this in, I’m not sure she ever had a top C, she certainly doesn’t sing them in any of the performances broadcast from the Met. But she’s, nevertheless, one would love to hear a voice like this today. I think the only singer in the world today with a voice to compete with Flagstad and Traubel is Lisa Anderson, who’s looking very promising. But, so we’re going to hear an excerpt of Tristan and Isolde. This is a live performance with two very fine singers. The first singer you’ll hear is the Swedish mezzo, Kirsten TOH-BOHL, who sang roles, or Brigitte BRAN-GAYN-EHR. She sang all the big Wagner mezzo roles very well. And then you’ll hear the voice of Helen Traubel singing with tremendous vehemence and passion in the narrative and curse from Tristan and Isolde. You need tremendous power and stamina to sing that music, the soprano. I mean the orchestra is like a great raging ocean, and the soprano has to cut through all that, that massive sound and project into the auditorium. This is Alexander Kipnis, and I finished my last lecture with him. He was another singer who made his North American debut in Chicago and came to the Metropolitan belatedly at the very end of the thirties. He was of Ukrainian-Jewish origin. During the First World War, he was of course a prisoner in Germany. But his voice was discovered and it was so remarkable that he was released and he made his debut at the Hamburg Opera House. And he was an essential singer throughout the 1920s and into the thirties for Wagner performances in Germany.

Oh, I forgot to mention right at the beginning, of course, Hitler first went to Bayreuth as the guest of Winifred Wagner in 1925, and he was outraged to discover that the Wotan was sung by the Hungarian-Jewish Friedrich Schorr. So Friedrich Schorr was dismissed immediately from the Berlin Opera in 1933. But Kipnis was regarded as absolutely irreplaceable. There was, he was the great Wagnerian bass. I played him last time actually singing a bass baritone role of Wotan. But his real forte was the bass roles of King Mark and Hunding and Hargan, and a tremendous black, dark sound. But so in fact, the Nazis tried to hang onto him and it was very difficult for him to break his contract with Berlin. Eventually he managed to get out of it and to escape from Nazi Germany in 1935. And he spent the last years of his stage career in New York singing at the Met. And here he is, this is again, it’s from the same live performance of Walkure that we heard earlier with Melchior and Varnay, the performance of the 6th of December, 1941. This is Hunding in Act One. So I’ll move on 'cause we’ve moved on to, oh, here he is again. Now I’m going to finish with a kind of coder to the golden age of Wagner at the Met. But Melchior and Traubel retired when the new director, Rudolf Bing, came in. He wanted to sweep away the stars of the previous regime and create his own opera regime at the Met. And he was very determined to bring back Kirsten Flagstad.

And this was extremely controversial because she had agreed to go back to Nazi occupied Norway. And there was a huge hate campaign organised against her. When she returned to America, there were demonstrations, there were stink bombs thrown in her concerts, all sorts of protests. And I have to say, I think it’s very, very unfair. I mean, she loved her husband. She wanted to be with him. She actually behaved very honourably. She refused to, she gave up her career almost completely. She refused to sing in public in Norway while it was occupied by the Germans. And despite very pressing invitations and pressure from the Nazi regime, she absolutely refused to sing in Nazi Germany during the war. The only performance she gave were actually in neutral Switzerland during the war years.

But eventually I think she did win people around. She was very warmly received in England. She didn’t have the same kind of problem in England at all. People just loved her. They were very happy to have her back. So she’d had this gap of several years when she’d hardly been singing. And the voice, that she had also lost her top Cs, the famous complete Tristan recording conducted by Furtwangler, there are two top Cs for Isolde, and in that recording Flagstad doesn’t sing them, they were sung for her actually by Elisabeth Schwarzkopf who inserted them. And you can hear that if you know it. But the rest of the voice was still intact. Tremendous, if anything, it was even more powerful, even more amazing. The bottom of the voice has this tremendous richness and this really paves off in act two of Walkure, the so-called scene where Brunnhilde announces to Sigmund his forthcoming death. And I’m going to finish with part of that scene.

This is a post-war recording with Flagstad singing with the Swedish tenor, Set Svanholm. He didn’t have any problems, and that really, I mean people were so inconsistent about all of this at the end of the second war. He had happily sung in Nazi Germany. He sang in the Bayreuth festivals during the Second World War. Nobody seemed to hold that against him. Why they were so mean to Flagstad is a bit of a mystery to me. Think I’d probably better finish. We’ve run out of time, so I’m going to open up the questions.

Q&A and Comments:

Did I have a good Christmas? Yes and no. Thank you. I was actually working with some very nice clients, but we had a rather disastrous journey on the way to…

Where I’d put Bryn Terfel. It’s a, I wouldn’t put him in a league with Schorr. He’s a very, it’s a great voice. Definitely, it was a great voice. Not in terrific state these days. But no, he’s a fine singer. But I wouldn’t put him on a scale with Friedrich Shaw. Thank you, Tanya.

Frida Leider was very close to her mother. That’s a, yes, Catherine. Yes, I know we talked about that, didn’t we? Yes, you’re right. And that was another reason, of course. It’s very difficult. What did you do in those circumstances?

And Catherine, again, there are some great documentaries about Lotte Lehmann on YouTube, master classes, 'cause she was very famous for her master classes. And she had, she was the teacher of Marilyn Horne. She was the teacher of Grace Bunbury. So she was a very successful teacher. Thank you, Catherine.

Brynn, at the current times, well, as I said, I think his, what last time I heard him, he was not in terrific vocal state.

Q: Were there any clashes in New York between singers who had to leave Germany and those who still supported the Nazi regime?

A: This is very interesting. I mean, because there was the same, of course, Buenos Aires. In New York, I don’t think any of the really top Nazi singers actually appeared in New York, but they did at Glyndebourne, Willi Domgraf-Fassbaender, and they did in the Colon, Bueno Aires. Tiana Lemnitz, who was a red hot Nazi til the day she died, even after the war. I mean, famously in London, there was a Rosenkavalier performance with Tiana Lemnitz and Lotte Lehmann. And of course the curtain goes up and the two of them are in bed together. And Lotte Lehmann, after a few bars collapsed and left the stage. And the story was that there had been clashes and tensions and that Lemnitz had been very nasty to Lehmann. Although I’m told by somebody who knew them both that they both denied this story and said it wasn’t really true.

This is Jack saying, I can’t really imagine how music written for a specific language can be successfully translated into another. Well, I don’t know. I don’t think I agree with you about that, actually. I’m very fascinated. I love Wagner sung in French and Italian. I really do. And I actually have produced some CDs for a company called MAHR-UH-BRAN or Wagner sung in those languages. And actually, I like Verdi in German too. Marjorie Lawrence excerpt was the first time you’d heard Wagner in French. Here comes heresy, the French vowels and the Wagnerian score shockingly, . I love that phrase. Thank you.

Can I please to steal it from you? Oh no, you were using SHLAHG in the sense of a blow to the ears, are you, rather than , cream to the ears? I adore Wagner in French, although, you know, it is, if you hear Walkure acts one with JZAH-TEEL, who’s a wonderful Sigmund, instead of singing , he sings , which is a lot gentler on the ears, I would say, than .

Thank you Anita. Lee, you’re so right. Yes, I meant Lisa Davidson. That was not Lisa Anderson. Lisa Davidson, that’s who I meant. Thank you.

Thank you Barbara. Happy New Year to all of you as well. And thank you, Judith. You did indeed note cream, not a blow. Good. Well, I agree with you. I absolutely love, Lohengrin in French or Italian, try listening to Aureliano Pertile in Lohengrin. It’s the most gorgeous thing you could possibly imagine. I’ve never heard a German singer sing Lohengrin as gorgeously, not even Melchior. I’d rather have, he’s absolutely wonderful.

Thank you all very much. And I’m back with some of you tomorrow night with a very different subject to repeat my Swiss lecture. So thank you and goodbye till tomorrow, and happy new Year to everybody.