These four variously special singers -- Margaret Price (s), Yvonne Minton (ms), Alexander Young (t), and Justino Díaz (bs-b) -- share a particular connection

MONDAY EVENING UPDATE: The post still needs some filling in and filling out, even now that all the texts and our always-intended Yvonne Minton Wagner excerpt are in place. However, as noted below there's still a bunch of other stuff of Minton's we should really hear, now while we're listening -- and so too, at least to some extent, with the others. It has occurred to me, I'm afraid to say, that we may be facing an overtime situation, by which I have in mind, over the next few days, going into one or more overflow, or "bonus," posts. Uh-oh! -- Ken

The young Margaret Price amd Yvonne Minton

MOZART: Così fan tutte, K. 588: Act I, Duet, Fiordiligi and Dorabella, "Ah guarda, sorella"

[A garden by the seashore. FIORDILIGI and DORABELLA are both gazing at miniatures hanging round their necks.]

FIORDILIGI: Ah tell me, sister,
If one could ever find
A nobler face,
A sweeter mouth.
DORABELLA: Just look,
See what fire
Is in his eye,
If flames and darts
Do not seem to flash forth!
FIORDILIGI: This is the face
Of a soldier and a lover.
DORABELLA: This is a face
both charming and alarming.
FIORDILIGI and DORABELLA: How happy I am!
If ever my heart
changes its affection,
may love make me
live in pain.

Margaret Price (s), Fiordiligi; Yvonne Minton (ms), Dorabella; New Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, cond. EMI, recorded Jan.-Feb. 1971

by Ken

No, we're not finished with Salome. I've just gotten sidetracked. Hey, as occasional visitors know, it happens. (Frequent visitors know that it happens, um, frequently.) What caused it this time was an unscheduled encounter with a composer who shares with Richard Strauss a particular gift of imagination: the ability to conjure a startling range of musics, which really is what our Salome explorations have been about. I've usually thought of it, especially in an operatic composer, as a remarkable range of empathy -- the ability to imagine all his characters from the inside. But what good is identifying with those characters if you don't have the ability to create them in arrestingly individual musical ways?

We're not going to get to our mystery composer this week, because I thought we needed to fix in our heads the musical identities of the singers who were featured in this unexpected encounter: the SATB quartet (as noted in the post title) of soprano Margaret Price, mezzo Yvonne Minton, tenor Alexander Young, and bass-baritone Justino Díaz. So that's really all we're going to do this week, hear some vocal samples. And I thought we'd do it in voice-range order, high to low. In fact, we've already heard today from our "S" and "A," both of whom, in further fact, have made frequent Sunday Classics appearances.

MARGARET PRICE, soprano
(1941-2011),
born in Blackwood,
Monmouthshire, South Wales

Boy, have we heard a lot of Dame Margaret! The retrospective series that followed her passing in 2011 extended to at least a ninth part, with at least one more promised therein, to be devoted to Price as song-singer; neither my memory nor the archives provide conclusive evidence as to whether this ever happened. (If it did, I can't trace it.)

It's hard not to keep returning to her Fiordiligi in Otto Klemperer's 1971 recording of Così fan tutte, and I haven't tried very hard to resist. It was that recoding that made her an international sensation, and it's this earlier part of the Welsh soprano's career that's going to matter most for our present purposes. Not the very earliest part, which stretches back to 1962, when she made her operatic debut with Welsh National Opera as Cherubino in Mozart's Marriage of Figaro. The following year, at the ripe old age of 23, she made an unscheduled debut at Covent Garden, as a late replacement for Teresa Berganza, whom she was understudying. Then-Covent Garden music director Georg Solti apparently didn't want her in the company, saying she "lacks charm," and she was specifically contracted only for understudying.

Price continued to work on the voice, and kept at it after the period we're looking at. Evidence of her versatility is in a Mozart-aria LP she recorded, I believe after the Così with Klemperer, where she sings all three principal female roles from The Marriage of Figaro. Taking the arias in dramatic order, we start in Act II with her first operatic role, Cherubino (a notably earnest, un-cutesy one), and proceed through her eventual role, the Countess, in Act III to Susanna in Act IV.

Salome the opera has a built-in perv-o-meter for Salome the character -- his name is Herod

Cheryl Barker as Salome and John Pickering
as Herod in Opera Australia's new Salome

HEROD: Salome, come, drink wine with me!
An exquisite wine! Caesar himself sent it to me.
Moisten your red lips with it; then I will empty the cup.

Jon Vickers (t), Herod; Orchestre National de France, Rudolf Kempe, cond. Live performance from the Orange Festival, July 14, 1974

Karl Liebl (t), Herod; Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Karl Böhm, cond. Live performance, Mar. 13, 1965

Kenneth Riegel (t), Herod; Hamburg State Opera Orchestra, Karl Böhm, cond. DG, recorded live, Nov. 4, 1970

Ramón Vinay (t), Herod; Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Dimitri Mitropoulos, cond. Live performance, Jan. 8, 1955

Gerhard Stolze (t), Herod; Vienna Philharmonic, Georg Solti, cond. Decca, recorded October 1961

Set Svanholm (t), Herod; Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Fritz Reiner, cond. Live performance, Jan. 19, 1952

by Ken

With last week's posts ("Strauss's operatic beginnings: We don't need an excuse to listen to Till Eulenspiegel -- but the Symphonia domestica, maybe so?" and "The start of something: Here's the promised follow-up to the post spotlighting Till Eulenspiegel and the Symphonia domestica -- focusing now on the already-heard openings of six Strauss operas") stretching on and on in both time and blogspace, we have not much of a post this week, though it involved a heap of audio editing, which is at least better than having to think.


OUR QUESTION: HOW DOES HEROD GET FROM THE
CLIP ABOVE TO THE ONE WE'RE GOING TO HEAR?

The start of something: Here's the promised follow-up to the post spotlighting Till Eulenspiegel and the Symphonia domestica -- focusing now on the already-heard openings of six Strauss operas

Sure, literally speaking Guntram (with, we might note, a libretto by the composer, Wagner-style, something Strauss would attempt again only once more, still perhaps problematically but, I think, a lot more successfully, with the sort-of-autobiographical Intermezzo) was the start of something, but could anyone have guessed "of what"? (We can also note at the very top that Strauss's first opera was "Dedicated to my dear parents.")

by Ken

To recap, our subject is still Salome, Richard Strauss's third opera, focusing here on the powerful anecdotal evidence from these snatches of the operas that preceded and followed Salome of the startling transformation that took place, all at once, in Strauss's ability to make the operatic medium work for him. In the main portion of this week's post, "Strauss's operatic beginnings: We don't need an excuse to listen to Till Eulenspiegel -- but the Symphonia domestica, maybe so?" we heard these same operatic clips, in this same order, with no identification of either the operas or the performers. In this concluding portion of the post we have all those identifications available, as well as English texts for most of the sung portions of these excerpts.

As I'm sure you guessed, Operas X and Y were Strauss's pre-Salome operatic endeavors, the turgid late Romantic stinker Guntram (first performed in 1894) and its "satirical" successor, Feuersnot (first performed in 1901). Perhaps surprisingly, given how adept Strauss would become at devising operatic openings that plunge us directly into the action, he began his operatic career with a full-fledged overture. Oy, is it full-fledged; it just fledges on and on -- and on. (Note that it's not entirely free-standing, as we might expect an "overture" to be in one frequently proposed distinction between an "overture" and a "prelude," which not only tends to be shorter but normally flows directly into the opening scene. The Guntram whatever-you-want-to-call-it flows directly into the equally nondescript music of the opening scene.

[AFTERTHOUGHT: I have to say that rather unexpectedly the Guntram Overture has started to grow on me -- hey, this is not some no-talented musical hack we're dealing with. But it still seems to meander hopelessly, stretching this thin material many long, long minutes beyond the breaking point. -- Ken]

[X] R. STRAUSS: Guntram, Op. 25: Overture


BBC Symphony Orchestra, John Pritchard, cond. Gala, broadcast performance, 1981

Hungarian State Orchestra, Eve Queler, cond. CBS-Hungaroton, recorded 1984


MOVING ON TO "OPERA Y": FEUERSNOT

Strauss's operatic beginnings: We don't need an excuse to listen to Till Eulenspiegel -- but the Symphonia domestica, maybe so?

MONDAY NIGHT UPDATE: I think we've finally gotten this post to where it wanted to go. Thanks for your patience. [OK, maybe not "finally" -- ]
TUESDAY-THURSDAY UPDATES: I've added another performance of Till Eulenspiegel, fiddled a fair amount with the opera clips (and added English texts), and as explained below finally spun off the section of fully identified Strauss-opera audio clips into a separate follow-up post. -- Ken


In Munich's Herkulessaal, Lorin Maazel leads the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in a beautifully relaxed performance of Till Eulenspiegel.

by Ken

In listening to and thinking about Richard Strauss's Salome, as we've been doing for a number of weeks ("Some out-of-this-world sounds from a singer who proves mistress of a surprising role" [11/18], "After all, the Page in Salome does warn that horrible things are going to happen" [11/25], and "Word is that "Today we are not shocked by Salome." Really?" [12/2]), it's hard not to be aware that when the first performance of the composer's unmistakable breakthrough opera took place, on December 9, 1905, he was already 41½. With regard to Salome's "breakthrough" standing, as Wikipedia notes, "Within two years, it had been given in 50 other opera houses."

It's not that Strauss was a "late starter." After all, by the time of Salome, his Op. 54, he was already world-famous, as the composer of a stream of music that quickly joined and remains firmly ensconced in the standard repertory -- the likes of Aus Italien (From Italy, Op. 16, 1886), Don Juan (Op. 20, 1888), Macbeth (Op. 23, 1886-88), Death and Transfiguration (Op. 24, 1889), Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche (Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks, Op. 28, 1894-95), Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spake Zarathustra, Op. 30), Don Quixote (Op. 35, 1896-97), Ein Heldenleben (A Hero's Life, Op. 40, 1898), and the Symphonia domestica (Op. 53, 1902-03). There were also assortments of chamber music and solo-piano works, concertos for piano (the Burleske, 1886), violin (Op. 8, 1881-82), and horn (Op. 11, 1882-83; there would be another horn concerto, but not till 1942) -- and, oh yes, nearly 150 songs.


AND THERE'D BEEN TWO OPERAS BEFORE SALOME
(AND WE'RE GOING TO HEAR SNATCHES OF BOTH!)

To return to Caballé for a moment (a moment of love-death) --

How softly and gently
he smiles,
how sweetly
his eyes open -
can you see, my friends,
do you not see it?
How he glows
ever brighter,
raising himself high
amidst the stars?
Do you not see it?
How his heart
swells with courage,
gushing full and majestic
in his breast?
How in tender bliss
sweet breath
gently wafts
from his lips -
Friends! Look!
Do you not feel and see it?
Do I alone hear
this melody
so wondrously
and gently
sounding from within him,
in bliss lamenting,
all-expressing,
gently reconciling,
piercing me,
soaring aloft,
its sweet echoes
resounding about me?
Are they gentle
aerial waves
ringing out clearly,
surging around me?
Are they billows
of blissful fragrance?
As they seethe
and roar about me,
shall I breathe,
shall I give ear?
Shall I drink of them,
plunge beneath them?
Breathe my life away
in sweet scents?
In the heaving swell,
in the resounding echoes,
in the universal stream
of the world-breath -
to drown,
to founder -
unconscious -
utmost rapture!

Montserrat Caballé (s), Isolde; Strasbourg Philharmonic Orchestra, Alain Lombard, cond. Erato, recorded September 1977

by Ken

We're in I-forget-how-many-levels of digression from our serial remembrance of Montserrat Caballé. As of last week's post ("Word is that 'Today we are not shocked by Salome.' Really?") we've been drawn in -- by way of Caballé's (in my experience) unique recording of Salome -- to what seems to me the inescapable shockfulness of the 40-year-old Richard Strauss's breakthrough opera, which even when we're done we're going to have to pursue, without a Caballé connection, into the equally inescapable shockfulness of the Strauss opera that followed it, Elektra.

So this week I thought we'd pause that and return for a moment to just-plain-Caballé, and a recording I'd been saving for the final installment of this series, whatever and whenever that happens. Which, actually, we've now just heard: that Erato studio recording of Isolde's "Liebestod," which for me shows beautifully what Caballé could do when the big, beautiful voice was really well controlled technically and interpretively. It is, I think, just a gorgeous performance, and gorgeous in the ways that were specifically hers.


SO, AS LONG AS WE'RE HERE --

I thought we might as well bring back Liebestod performances we've already heard (I'm now enmeshed in what turns out to be the monumental job of technically rehabilitating the 2000 post that was the source for a number of them) and adding a couple more. We've got an assortment here: a couple of the all-time great Isoldes (Flagstad heard in her shimmering prime, Nilsson in what's still my favorite Tristan recording of hers), some singers who sensibly never essayed the complete role plus some who didn't but you wish had.

WAGNER: Tristan und Isolde: Act III, Isolde, "Mild und leise wie er lächelt" (Liebestod)

Word is that "Today we are not shocked by Salome." Really?

LATE SUNDAY UPDATE: Those who've visited earlier know that this post has been a construction zone. Now, though, apart from incidental fixes (if I find the courage to look at the thing), we've got our four performances of the "Dance for me, Salome" excerpt (with performance notes) and this week's four performances of the Final Scene. -- Ken

Salomé by Gustave Moreau (1876)

Salome's Dance (aka "Dance of the Seven Veils"): The musicians begin to play a wild dance. SALOME, at first motionless, reaches up high and gives the musicians a sign. At once the wild rhythm is succeeded by a gentle, rocking melody. SALOME then dances the Dance of the Seven Veils. After a moment of apparent exhaustion she leaps up, as if newly elated. For a moment she lingers in a trance-like state by the cistern in which JOCHANAAN is held prisoner; then she rushes forward and lands at HEROD's feet.

Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, Heinz Rögner, cond. Berlin Classics, recorded Feb.-Mar. 1977

Vienna Philharmonic, André Previn, cond. DG, recorded October 1992

New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, cond. CBS-Sony, recorded Oct. 12, 1965

Vienna Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan, cond. Decca, recorded 1960

by Ken

I see that I didn't actually identify the music we heard above. As I'm pretty sure you figured out, it's "Salome's Dance" (aka the "Dance of the Seven Veils") from Richard Strauss's Salome. Actually, we've already heard an assortment of performances of the "Dance" -- two weeks ago, as "a Salome bonus" to the post "Some out-of-this-world sounds from a singer who proves mistress of a surprising role," part of our still-ongoing remembrance of Montserrat Caballé, whom we were encountering as a (to me) surprisingly remarkable exponent of the title role, at least in the RCA recording conducted pretty remarkably by Erich Leinsdorf.

(I've been listening to two other Caballé Salome performances, one earlier and one later than the recoding, as well as the still-later recording of the Final Scene, and while some of the qualities I find so remarkable in the RCA performance can be glimpsed in other performances, none of them seem really in the same class.)

In the course of playing with some of my Salome materials I happened to glance, apparently for the first time, at the background essay on the opera which Michael Kennedy wrote for the booklet of the 1985 CD issue of the classic 1961 Nilsson-Solti-Decca recording, which looks to be quite an interesting piece, but in which my eyes lit on a string of words that kind of made my blood run cold. After writing at length about the shock that the opera had caused in its early years, he writes:

"Today we are not shocked by Salome . . ."

Huh??? We're not shocked by Salome??? Huh???


"DANCE FOR ME, SALOME"