Patrick Bade
Musical Life in Vienna and Salzburg 1918-1938

Patrick Bade - Musical Life in Vienna and Salzburg, 1918-1939

- Thanks, Wendy, and thanks, Shawna. And hello to everybody. And hello again to a number of people, I think, who were with me at Jewish Book week earlier today for a wonderful interview with Charles Dellheim. Once again, I very strongly recommend his book “Belonging and Betrayal.” It’s a wonderful book. So what you see on the screen is actually my mother’s school atlas, and it dates in the 1920s, and it shows you the shape of Europe after the Versailles Treaty. So you can see that Austria has been radically reduced in size. It’s lost all its ethnic minorities and its widespread territories. It’s now a small landlocked German-speaking country. And at the Versailles Treaty, the French leader, French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, he notoriously said he wanted to reduce the German-speaking peoples to Asiatic poverty, and for a while he succeeded. In Vienna in 1918 to 1919, there was real starvation, real hardship, and of course, this coincided with the Spanish flu with very devastating results. Two greatest Austrian painters, Gustav Klimt on the left, Egon Schiller on the right, they both died in that flu epidemic of 1918 to 1919. And there was also a brain drain away from Vienna, much of it going to Berlin. Berlin acted as a magnet for all kinds of talent in the 1920s. And here are three great Austrian composers. Zemlinsky left, Schoenberg in the middle, and Schreker on the right-hand side, and they all turned up in Berlin, and they were there on and off through much of that period up to 1933. I know Trudy’s talked about Red Vienna.

Of course, Austria was going backwards and forwards between extreme left and extreme right. And perhaps most remarkable achievement of the left in this interwar period was the creation of these great housing projects like the Karl-Marx-Hof. This is what it looks like today, and this is what it looked like soon after it was built. And there are other projects like the Amalienbad, this swimming pool. So it was a kind of, so you can see, it’s very beautifully decorated. It’s a kind of public palace for the working classes. And there was still some very distinguished modern architecture. This is one of the most famous buildings constructed in Vienna starting in 1926. This is a house that was commissioned by Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein, who you see on the left-hand side. She was the sister of the great philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, and he designed this house for her, which still exists. This is what it looks like now. These days, it’s a Bulgarian culture centre in Vienna. This is what it looked like when Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein was still living in it. So rather a bit of a mismatch really between the Louis Seize chairs you can see in the background and the chinoiserie and the very stark architecture of the building itself. And their brother, this is Paul Wittgenstein, who was a member of this very distinguished Viennese Jewish family. He was a great pianist who tragically lost his right arm in the First World War.

I’ve mentioned him before, and he’s chiefly remembered today for having commissioned a whole repertoire for the left hand, including the famous Ravel piano concerto. Strauss wrote pieces for him. Benjamin Britten wrote a piece for him, Franz Schmidt I’m going to talk about in a minute, and probably the composer he was closest to, though, was Korngold. And this is the opening of a left-hand piano concerto, oops, composed for Paul Wittgenstein by Korngold. And if you listened to my talk the other day, you’ll recognise the musical fingerprints of Korngold, these very characteristic leaping intervals. Alma was still there with her third and last husband, Franz Werfel, living in splendid luxury on the Hohe Warte, which is sort of like the Hampstead of Vienna. And she had effectively a musical and cultural salon, and distinguished foreign composers and musicians who came to Vienna were often put up by her in this house. Ravel stayed with her. Darius Milhaud stayed with her. But I want to give you a quote from her diary. I meant to give it to you last time, but some reason or other, I didn’t. If any of you have any doubts about what kind of a woman she was and what kind of attitude she had, this is what she wrote in her diary at the end of 1932 with Hitler poised to take power in neighbouring Germany. She says, “In Germany, everything is topsy-turvy.

More and more, it is not a battle between north and south, between Protestantism and Catholicism, but simply a confrontation between the Jew and the Christian. With communism, the world domination of Judaism stands and falls because they have world domination with the help of the proletariat, which they have radicalised. At the helm of nearly all countries sit beastly Jews. It is, after all, understandable that the different nations and countries can’t stand for this, but there will be blood baths before the world is cleansed. And therefore, I am for Hitler.” That’s the 6th of August, 1932. So that’s pretty unambiguous I would say. So Vienna is still, whatever Norman Lebrecht says about it, it was still a very important musical capital, and it was still an important intellectual capital and a great capital also for, a very important city for medical science and of course for psychoanalysis and any kind of treatment of mental illness. This is the apartment block where Freud lived, and I’ve got some nice photographs I want to show you of the interior. It was all recorded before it was packed up and dispatched to London in 1939. You can see Freud was quite a collector. I always think of collecting as, on this scale, as a kind of personality disorder. I know, ‘cause I suffer from it myself. But you can see 'cause he had great collection of not just Chinese ceramics, but all sorts of, well, you can see Greek things, South American things. So this is rather interesting.

You see his desk as it was in Vienna. And this is how it looks now in London, in the Freud Museum in Hampstead. Here is of course the most famous couch in the world. And it was also, Vienna was important for, I would say the most important city in the Western world in the 1920s for art history. This is the great Ernst Gombrich, one of the most influential thinkers and art historians of the 20th century. He actually left Vienna in 1935, so before the, three years before the Anschluss. I knew him when I was a student. He taught me very inspirationally, and I met up with him later towards the end of his life, and he always sounded like he’d just got off the boat on the way from Vienna. Funny for such a musical man that he never lost a trace of his Viennese accent. And this is his great friend and colleague from Vienna. This is Karl Popper whose most influential book was titled “The Open Society and Its Enemies.” So that is, I must read that actually 'cause it’s certainly a book that is extremely relevant to what is going on throughout the Western world at the moment where I feel the open society is under attack, under attack. I think one can say it’s under attack from all sides, from left and from right. Arnold Hauser, another great Viennese, well, actually originally Hungarian, but Viennese intellectual. This book, I kind of groan when I when I see it.

I always used to know when I was marking students’ essays, undergraduate and post graduate essays, I always knew when they’d been at “The Social History of Art,” which is a very, very doctrinaire Marxist take on the history of Western art. I mean, it’s an interesting book, but I used to warn my students this, he’s really putting the history of art into a very strict Marxist straightjacket. So of course he was one of the many Viennese intellectuals, and art historians who came to London and really revitalised, we can say vitalized, created art history as a discipline in this country. Here’s another Viennese art historian, Johannes Wilde, who was actually not Jewish, but his wife was, and so he fled to protect her. And on to the left is his great protege, Count Seilern. Count Seilern, his mother was, I think, an American heiress from a newspaper fortune, and he was a pupil of Johannes Wilde in Vienna and became a passionate collector. Of course, his studies were in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, and his collection was really a recreation of the collections of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in miniature. So Venetian painting and Flemish painting were the strong points of his collection. He was luckily able to get it out of Vienna before the Second World War, and he added to it when he was in London. So there are two exquisite small Bruegels. This is one of them, the “Flight into Egypt.” He owned over 30 paintings by Rubens. He was very passionate about Rubens. Here are two of his paintings. And this, the so-called “Seilern Triptych” is a key painting in the history of Northern artists. He discovered this. This was actually in a sale at Christie’s, and I have to admit that Christie’s failed to spot it or its importance, it was misattributed.

So it was Seilern who spotted it for what it was, which is an early work by Robert Campin and the first major work of the great age of Flemish painting in the early 15th century. So that was a fantastic thing for him to buy at Christie’s actually during the Second World War. And he also had wonderful drawings, Hugo van der Goes on the right and this lovely drawing by Rubens of his second wife on the right. Now, I’m going to talk mainly about music in this talk. And again, whatever Norman Lebrecht says, Vienna was still the musical capital of the Western world, and of course it was a city. This is the time of the Second Viennese School, which was founded by Schoenberg, and here are his two most important followers, Anton Webern on the left-hand side and Alban Berg on the right-hand side, actually painted by Schoenberg. Schoenberg’s still a very controversial figure. This is a caricature of the time showing the kind of riot that would result from a Schoenberg premiere in Vienna in the interwar period. And I want to play you his, a bit from his third quartet, which was premiered in Vienna on the 19th of September, 1927, with the Kolisch Quartet. They were the leading Viennese string quartet in succession to the Rose Quartet. They, again, were a completely Jewish quartet, and so they followed Schoenberg into exile in America at the end of the ‘30s. And this is a very fascinating recording because it was a private recording made in studios of United Artists overnight, United Artists.

Alfred Newman was the house composer there, and he borrowed the studio so they could make recordings of all four of the Schoenberg quartets that were made as a gift for Schoenberg. I can’t remember which birthday it was, probably his 60th birthday, I suppose. So here is the quartet that played the premiere in 1927. And this is, I find this a very fascinating document. This is Franz Schmidt. I imagine that may not be a name that’s very familiar to many of you, but when the Anschluss happened in 1938, he was, I suppose in a way, the last man standing because, well, a number of composers had died or they’d ceased composing, or of course many of them went into exile. Now, nothing in his life history before 1938 would suggest that he was either pro-Nazi or anti-Semitic. He was a great protege of Mahler. He was a lifelong friend and supporter of Schoenberg, and the composer that he was most associated with, or no, the musician he was most associated with was Paul Wittgenstein. But I suppose he’d spent a life being in the shadow of others, and when the Nazis came along, there he was, and they made a huge fuss of him.

And they commissioned, they asked him to write a cantata to celebrate the Anschluss, and rather shockingly, he agreed to do this. It was probably good for his posthumous reputation, that he died before it was completed and it was never actually performed. And interestingly, one reason why he never completed it was that he was still busy on commissions for Paul Wittgenstein. I don’t suppose the Nazis would’ve been very happy if they’d known about that, but I think he’s a good composer, a very fine composer. And I’d like to play you an excerpt of his fourth and final symphony, which has a rather Mahlerian flavour to it. The most important institution in Austria then and today is the Staatsoper, what had previously been the Hofoper, the imperial opera. So in Austria, I would say whoever is in charge of the Staatsoper in a way is more prestigious, more important than the chancellor of the country. And certainly internationally people are more likely to know who the director of the Staatsoper is than the chancellor of the country. This is what the Staatsoper looked like before its destruction in the Second World War. And from 1919 to 1924, the direction of the Vienna Staatsoper was under Richard Strauss, you see on the right-hand side here, and the conductor Franz Schalk. So Hofmannsthal, who you see in the middle, he said to Strauss, “Well, why do you want to go to Vienna where the people are so false?” And Strauss answered him, “Yes, I know that, but they’re so elegant about it.” Strauss was very well treated in Vienna. He was given a mini-palace in the grounds of the Belvedere above central Vienna.

This is the apartment of Strauss at the Belvedere. And while he was director, in 1919, just after the end war, the first big premiere of a new opera was “Die Frau ohne Schatten,” a very lavish production with wonderful singers and gorgeous designs by Alfred Roller and the two greatest divas of the interwar period in Vienna, Maria Jeritza and Lotte Lehmann. I don’t how they were at this point when they were rehearsing together for this. Later, of course, they became very bitter enemies as we shall hear in a few minutes. But it was Lotte Lehmann as the the Dyer’s Wife and Maria Jeritza as the Empress, Richard Mayr as Barak, the Dyer, and Karl Ostvig as a beautiful young man who’s conjured up to tend to the Dyer’s Wife. More of these very sumptuous lovely designs by Alfred Roller, and you can see the costume designs. This opera, it was not initially a huge success. I’d say it’s only come into its own in quite recent years, and it’s still not done all that often, partly 'cause it just demands such an expensive cast of many top-ranked singers and a huge orchestra. When they do it at Covent Garden, they have to clear the boxes on either side because the orchestra pit is not big enough to accommodate the orchestra that Strauss demands.

And this opera, I would say is a real test about whether you’re a Straussian or not. A lot of Straussians will tell you it’s their favourite opera. Well, I’m a huge Straussian. He is my favourite composer. I’m not sure I’d say it’s my favourite Strauss opera. It really is seriously over the top, as you’ll hear in this part of the opera’s climax.

• I mean, Strauss throws everything at you, and including the kitchen sink. And it’s also an opera which I think some people might find hard to accept. It has a very anti-feminist message. I mean, Hofmannsthal’s message in the opera is that now the war’s over, women need to get back to where they belong, i.e., in the kitchen and in the bedroom. Now here are the two protagonists in one of the great battles of the culture war of the interwar period in the German-speaking countries, Korngold on the left-hand side, and Ernst Krenek on the right-hand side. And I mentioned this when I talked about Korngold that throughout the German-speaking countries, there were a whole series of head-on confrontations with the premieres of “Das Wunder der Heliane” of Korngold and “Jonny spielt auf” of Krenek. And you can see part of the publicity campaign for both was actually cigarette brands with the names of both. And I’m told that Jonny cigarettes still exist in Germany, but Heliane ones don’t. So first of all, a little bit of the glorious voice of Lotte Lehmann, and I did play you some last time, but this is another bit from “Das Wunder der Heliane.”

• So absolutely luscious and not far away from the sound was, of course, of Richard Strauss. Krenek was much more edgy, more dissonant and jazz influenced and extremely objectionable to the Nazis who, wherever it was performed, they organised demonstrations against it. You can see that this is . “It’s horrible that the our state opera has fallen victim to this horrible Jewish-Black conspiracy.” And shamefully, Julius Korngold, who really should’ve known better, he was the leading music critic, he allied himself with the Nazis and encouraged their demonstrations against “Jonny spielt auf.” Here is a recording from the time with Ludwig Hofmann. I’m not sure if he was in the Vienna premiere, but he was certainly in several of the German-speaking premieres of this opera.

• There’d be, I mean, at the time I think you could say it was “Jonny” that came out victorious, but neither opera entered the repertoire, and I think these days you might have trouble putting on “Jonny spielt auf.” You know, you’ve got a blackface Al Jolson-type hero. And I don’t if your German is up to realising that the rather embarrassing caricature of a Black American speaking German in the recording I just played to you. Now this is a legendary period in the history of the Vienna State Opera, and you know, all the way through my youth, I would meet people who’d been to the opera in Vienna in the 1930s, and they say, “Ah,” you know, “there was Tauber, there was Lehmann, there was Jeritza. There were all these wonderful great singers. There’s nobody like that today.” And to some extent, I would accept that. But I think we might be, if you could have a time machine back to the 1930s, I think you might be shocked at the overall standard of some of the performances. And actually, in a funny way, we do have a time machine because there was a technician backstage at the Vienna opera, a man called Hermann May, and from 1933 onwards, he was recording enormous numbers of excerpts.

Nobody knew he was doing this, certainly the singers didn’t know it, and of course it was absolutely illegal. And luckily these have all survived, and they’ve been published on, I don’t know, 30 or 40 CDs, a huge number of CDs, and they’re quite random little excerpts, but you hear some really fascinating things. Now, the Vienna State Opera at this time worked on a repertory system, not a stagione system. Stagione system is what we have at Covent Garden, what they have at the Met, and what you have in most opera houses, certainly in Paris these days, and that is, you would have a small number of operas in a period of a month or two months, and they’re given several times. And the whole point of that is that the singers have a chance to really get into their roles. Everything is proper, you have plenty of time for rehearsals, and the whole thing can go more smoothly. But in Vienna in the 1930s, they just quite randomly put on a different opera every night, and often things were not rehearsed very well. And very often singers would be parachuted into roles with no rehearsal at all, and the results can be quite bizarre. Very often operas would be put on, the singers would sing in whatever language they knew the role, so there were a lot of bilingual performances even trilingual performances. I’m going to play you excerpts from two performances of “Aida.”

The first one is in 1937 with the great Beniamino Gigli. Of course, he was a world star. So that would’ve been very exciting for Viennese audiences to have a chance, even if he was just going to do one or maybe two performances. And he was actually, this was the year he first took on the role of Radames in “Aida,” and he was singing it everywhere. He sang it in New York, he sang it in London, he sang it in Berlin, and he sang it in various Italian theatres. So you’d think he would know it, but he’s totally discombobulated because the rest of the cast are singing the performance in German, including his Aida, who was the Hungarian soprano Maria Nemeth, who you see on the right-hand side. So there’s a prompter trying to help him, but he goes disastrously wrong at one point, and I can’t resist playing it to you 'cause I just think it’s so hilarious. This is in the Nile duet, and Aida’s trying to persuade Radames to flee with her, and he doesn’t want to. And then she turns on him, angry, and she says, “Well,” in German, she says to him . “You don’t love me.” And Gigli is completely confused by this. And he answers her , “Never did.”

• The previous year, the long suffering Nemeth had to sing “Aida” to the new kid on the block, which was Jussi Bjorling, still in his early 20s, and I think this was the first occasion that he sang in a major centre outside of Sweden. And he didn’t know the role of Radames either in Italian or in German, so this time we get “Aida” with a Swedish Egyptian hero and a Hungarian German heroine.

• That unmistakable timbre. Now, as I said, the two divas of the city were Lotte Lehmann, who you see on the left, and Maria Jeritza, who you see on the right, and they really came to hate each other, and their fans hated each other. It was a bit like Tottenham Hotspurs and Arsenal fans, and the opera house in the '30s had to arrange separate entrances for the Lehmann fans and the Jeritza fans. Here is, they were both favourite singers of both Richard Strauss and Puccini. I think that was part of the rivalry between them. Here you see Jeritza with Strauss on the left, and there you see her with Puccini on the right. And I quoted Korngold talking about the two of them and saying how wonderful they both were, but Korngold finally for his opera “Die tote Stadt” said that he really came down on the side of Lehmann rather than Jeritza. Here’s a little bit of Jeritza who sang the Hamburg premiere of “Die tote Stadt.” Here she is in “Die tote Stadt.”

• Jeritza, she wowed audiences around the world. She really took New York by storm in the 1920s. But her records are generally not considered to do her justice. It was her temperament, her beauty and her temperament. She certainly had an exciting voice. I think you can hear the beauty of the voice, but she’s often all over the place, and you certainly hear that in these live performances. And I’m going to play you a little bit from “Cavalleria Rusticana,” the duet with Turiddu where she curses him. She issues the most terrible curse. She says , “a bad Easter to you!” And you get a sense really of how exciting and how uninhibited she was on the stage. And you can hear in this selection also the audience’s reaction to her.

• So Lehmann, of course, great favourite of Strauss. She was particularly admired in the role of Leonore in “Fidelio.” And she was the great Marschallin, and she’s one of the few singers who sung all three roles, female roles in “Der Rosenkavalier,” Sophie on the left, Octavian in the middle, she was most famous as the Marschallin, and she made a huge impression on Puccini as well. But she sang “Suor Angelica,” you can see on the right-hand side in the Vienna premiere in 1919. Puccini wrote a letter saying, “I don’t want to go, I don’t want to hear, I don’t like German sopranos. I don’t want to hear a German singer singing my favourite, 'Suor Angelica.’” But when he went to Vienna, and he first of all heard her in “Boheme,” and he was reduced to a pulp, and he went round afterwards in tears to tell her how moved he was. And he actually loved her in the role of Suor Angelica. Now there is an overlap. I mean, there they had different roles, Lehmann and Jeritza, but there was also quite an overlap, and they were both very fond of the role of Tosca. And you’ve got programmes here with Lehmann on the left and Jeritza on the right. Here you can see Lehmann on the left, Jeritza on the right. And they were also scrapping over the role of Turandot. Of course, Puccini, he died in 1924, and “Turandot” wasn’t premiered till two years after he died, and then that was at Milan, and then premieres followed around the world. And Jeritza got to sing the New York premiere, and Lehmann got to sing the Vienna premiere. And I’m going to play you a little bit of Lehmann in this, in a bit of music that may not be familiar to you because it’s actually not written by Puccini. It was written by Alfano, and it’s from the last act, the part that, you know, Puccini died before finishing off the last act, and it’s not usually given today, it’s usually cut.

• Oh, yes, now I have to play you this. This is really funny. As I said, Jeritza and Lehmann really detested one another, and Lehmann actually wrote, published an article about singers of her time where she more or less accused Jeritza of being a courtesan. And, well, she actually did. She said, “In the nicest possible way, she was actually a courtesan,” is what she says. But they were brought together for an interval talk at the Metropolitan in 1962, and they were both plied with a lot of champagne. So I think they were actually in quite, quite giggly and in quite a good mood. But you can see Jeritza, she’s really still trying to torment poor Lehmann. Lehmann, she was a very great singer, but she had short, she was short-breathed, she had to take a lot of breaths. And so this is Jeritza talking about when they both sang the role of Ariadne in Strauss’s opera and Jeritza really boasting about the fact that she could do a certain phrase in one breath when Lehmann can’t.

CLIP BEGINS

• [Interviewer] How about the singing of Ariadne? To me, it is one of those great typical Strauss soprano things.

• Beautiful, beautiful.

• That’s Jeritza.

• How about the difficulty?

• [Jeritza] It’s no difficulty at all. It’s very high written, very high composed, and then he make phrases, really, like from here to Brooklyn. You choke death, you choke to death.

• [Interviewer] I suppose so, yes.

• [Jeritza] I said, “Richard, if I should take that in one breath, I choke. He said, "That’s fine. After the performance you can choke, but do the whole performance, you will sing it as I compose it.” And really, and that one phrase, I studied it in three weeks. I didn’t choke today when I sing it in one breath.

• [Lehmann] I should aw well.

• [Jeritza] Aye, and now they changed it and have that .

• [Interviewer] There was no breath originally?

• [Jeritza] Oh, not with me. He would kill us.

• [Lehmann] I said, I breathe.

• [Jeritza] You did. I didn’t.

• No.

• No, it’s very easy.

• [Lehmann] It isn’t.

• Was he very disappointed?

• It wasn’t-

• [Jeritza] You make it I as well. No, I sang it in one breath, maybe you-

• [Lehmann] Wonderful, I couldn’t.

• [Jeritza] About three, it took me three weeks, but you didn’t work three weeks on it.

• [Interviewer] One breath took you three weeks, Madame?

• [Jeritza] No, no, to study with him.

• [Interviewer] Well, this is an interesting question.

• [Jeritza] If you take it a daily, you know, so many times, so many times, every day, longer and longer you did it.

• [Lehmann] It’s a little late that you tell me that.

• [Interviewer] Yes I can watch, thought you might go home and-

• I think that’s the champagne speaking. Now, the most popular tenor in the ‘20s and '30s was actually an Englishman called Alfred Piccaver, but he was dubbed the Viennese Caruso. And there is a similarity. It’s a very rich, velvety, almost baritonal sound as the voice of Caruso had been.

CLIP ENDS

• I’m going to skip this because we’re going to run out of time. Now, between '33 and '38, Vienna was still a haven to great Jewish musicians and singers. Bruno Walter, of course, fled from Berlin in '33, and he takes over the Vienna State Opera and joint control of the Salzburg Festival with Toscanini and great Jewish singers like Friedrich Schorr. He was the leading Wotan and Hans Sachs of the interwar period. He was singing in Vienna as well as New York. And the great Alexander Kipnis, the finest Wagnerian bass on record, in my opinion. Tauber was still a much-loved figure in Vienna, couldn’t sing anymore in Germany. And the Hungarian Rosette Anday, and we’ll talk about her again when I get to Budapest in a couple of weeks’ time. But the one I want to play you is Rose Pauly, ‘cause it’s such an extraordinary story. She’s Hungarian Jewish. She was largely based in Berlin in the '20s, and generally she was considered to be a useful house soprano. When you couldn’t get Frida Leider for “Fidelio,” you had Rose Pauly. When you couldn’t get Lehmann for Strauss roles, you got Rose Pauly. But in one role, she was supremely great, and that was the role of Elektra, it’s extraordinary. I don’t really know another example of this. Everywhere she went singing this role, she took the town by storm. And that was true of Vienna, it was true of London, it was true of Paris, it was true of New York, true of San Francisco and Buenos Aires. But she always got absolute rave reviews. And I remember meeting a very old man once in San Francisco who said he’d never forgotten, you know, going to the opera, not knowing anything about this woman and the incredible impact, the visceral power of her performance in this one role. And here she is singing that role in Vienna in 1938.

• I’m going to get a move on. At Salzburg Festival, there had been festivals, occasional festivals before the First World War. Can you still hear me by the way? I hope you can.

• [Host] Yes, Patrick, we just can’t see the slides anymore, that’s all.

• Oh, you can’t see the slides.

• [Host] Yeah, that’s all that’s changed, but we can hear you.

• Right, well, I’ll just, I’m nearly finished. I just want, you would’ve seen on the screen Bruno Walter, Toscanini, the Salzburg Festival. It’s really set up in the 1920s by Richard Strauss, by Max Reinhardt, and by Hugo von Hofmannsthal on a regular basis every summer. And in the '30s up to the Anschluss, it was run by Bruno Walter and Toscanini. And what was it I’m going to play you, yes. Toscanini, of course, the most influential conductor of the 20th century, a towering figure, and a number of performances have survived complete, conducted by these two, radio broadcasts. I’m going to play you a little bit of the opening of the overture to “The Magic Flute” with Toscanini conducting. This is live in 1937, pretty fierce. I don’t think it would be to everybody’s taste. It’s a very aggressive approach to Mozart. No, it’s gone, I’m afraid. So that is it. Sorry, I was looking forward to the questions and comments. I wonder if I can get back in for that. I think it’s really gone, I’m afraid. Sorry about that.

• [Host] No worries, it was wonderful. Everything that you shared with us was wonderful. Thank you so much, Patrick, as always.

• Thank you.

• Thank you to everyone who was on, and we will see everyone again on Monday. Everyone have a lovely night and a lovely rest of your day. Thank you, Patrick.

• All right, thank you very much, bye-bye.