We should talk about this at some point, but these two points in Florestan's monologue crystallize what separates him from the normal run of humans.
Moment 1
Note especially: the vocal and orchestral explosion on "Ketten" ("chains")
[NOTE: We pick up here in bar 3 and continue just into bar 8.]
Jon Vickers (t), Florestan; Berlin Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan, cond. EMI, recorded 1970
Moment 2
Note especially: Florestan's emphatic repetitions of "Pflicht" ("duty")
[NOTE: Our clip runs from bar 2 to the start of the Poco Allegro.]
Jon Vickers (t), Florestan; Covent Garden Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, cond. Testament, recorded live, Feb. 24, 1961
by Ken
Where we are: Last week we took time off from the inquiry we began the week before into the minister Don Fernando and his literally life-saving arrival in the nick of time in the final scene of Fidelio "The Minister is coming! The Minister is coming! Don Fernando and the lesson of Fidelio, Part 1"): Who is he? What's right and what's wrong with his miraculous arrival? And what does it all mean for us? We paused to take a closer look at the protagonists for whom the Minister's arrival means miraculous rescue, Leonore Florestan and her imprisoned and near-death husband.
We did that by means of reconstituting a 2012 Sunday Classics post, in a preview, "Put these two little orchestral excerpts together, and you'll know the subject of this week's main post," and main post, "Meet the Florestans, Beethoven's supercouple." Which was okay as far as it went; it just didn't go far enough. Notably we looked, as we did in 2012, at Florestan's Act II-opening dungeon monologue, breaking it into several parts and hearing an assortment of tenors tackle them. What I really wanted to do, and had wanted to back in 2012, was to look at the monologue almost word by word, musical emphasis by musical emphasis, and that's what I aimed to do today.
It hasn't worked out, so for now the two examples will have to serve. I'm not going to go so far as to say that Florestan's monologue,definitely including the spiritually as well as physically gloom-and-doom-ridden orchestral introduction, is the most remarkable music ever written. I will say that I don't know of any more remarkable music.
SO HERE'S WHAT I PROPOSE --
I've got a whole bunch of clips of the complete monologue stacked up:
• the five Jon Vickers performances we've been tracking
• a passel of non-Vickers performances, including four conducted by Karl Böhm
• and some others I plan to add.
For starters, I've imported the texts we've been using, broken into three parts, and eventually I can add some notes of things to listen for in each of those "parts," and also add some notes about the performances. UPDATE: We've now added the previously hypothesized pair of performances by lyric tenor Jan Peerce, heard not just 17 years apart but with a pair of conductors about as different as different can be, plus what will be "another" Florestan from James King as soon as we have the performance with Böhm in place. I'm still eyeballing some others.
This might actually turn into something, or then again, it might wind up, you know, just this. Which at least is something, give or take. So, to business!
BEETHOVEN: Fidelio: Act II,
Orchestral introduction and Florestan's monologue
Florestan's monologue, part 1:"Gott! Welch' Dunkel hier!" ("God! What darkness here!")
A dark underground dungeon. FLORESTAN is sitting on a stone. Around his body he has a long chain, whose end is fastened to the wall.
Florestan's monologue, part 2:"In des Lebens Frühlingstagen" ("In the spring days of life")
Florestan's monologue, part 3:"Und spür' ich nicht" ("And do I not feel")
Our five performances with Jon Vickers as Florestan
["Gott! Welch' Dunkel hier!" at 3:00] Jon Vickers (t), Florestan; Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Karl Böhm, cond. Live performance, Feb. 13, 1960
["Gott! Welch' Dunkel hier!" at 3:33] Jon Vickers (t), Florestan; Covent Garden Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, cond. Testament, recorded live, Feb. 24, 1961
["Gott! Welch' Dunkel hier!" at 3:25] Jon Vickers (t), Florestan; Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, cond. EMI, recorded Feb.-Mar. 1962
["Gott! Welch' Dunkel hier!" at 3:17] Jon Vickers (t), Florestan; Vienna State Opera Orchestra, Herbert von Karajan, cond. DG, recorded live, May 25, 1962
["Gott! Welch' Dunkel hier!" at 3:42] Jon Vickers (t), Florestan; Berlin Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan, cond. EMI, recorded 1970
We should remember that our tenor has been idling all through Act I, with no opportunity beyond what vocal warmups he can manage to prepare himself for that long-held high G with which he begins the line "Gott! Welch' Dunkel hier!," not to mention the grueling workout that follows.
Of our five Vickers performances, the 1960 Met broadcast presents him on one of those days when the voice simply seems capable of absolutely anything and everything within its range of possibilities. My jaw just keeps dropping. By contrast, the 1962 Vienna performance with Karajan seems to be one of those days when that huge voice -- and the big voices are a lot harder to keep balanced and under control -- isn't quite so obedient. The EMI studio recording from the same year is fine, but I like the live Covent Garden performance he'd done with Klemperer better; despite the EMI recording's legendary status, I can't help feeling that the performance to a fair degree has been hijacked by producer Walter Legge and kind of "conventionalized." (And I can't help thinking that Klemperer thought so too -- when it came to recording The Magic Flute, he wouldn't allow Legge to be present at rehearsals, and Legge huffily passed the project, and all of Klemperer's subsequent opera recordings, to other EMI producers.)
Sometimes, though, everything seems to go right in a studio recording, which is what seems to me to have happened with the 1970 Karajan-EMI Fidelio -- one of the best things Karajan did, with the whole cast contributing splendid work and Vickers (and Karl Ridderbusch as Rocco) in absolutely peak form.
Our(eventual) four performances conducted by Karl Böhm
[NOTES: (1) I've plugged the 1960 Met performance with Vickers in here too. (2)My copy of the c1968 Böhm-DG studio recording, from which we heard the young Martti Talvela's stunning turn as Don Fernando, is at this moment in hiding; it's here somewhere, and when it turns up I'll plug that in. -- Done!]
["Gott! Welch' Dunkel hier!" at 3:55] Torsten Ralf (t), Florestan; Vienna State Opera Orchestra, Karl Böhm, cond. Live performance, February 1944
["Gott! Welch' Dunkel hier!" at 3:21] Anton Dermota (t), Florestan; Vienna State Opera Orchestra, Karl Böhm, cond. Live performance, Nov. 5, 1955
["Gott! Welch' Dunkel hier!" at 3:00] Jon Vickers (t), Florestan; Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Karl Böhm, cond. Live performance, Feb. 13, 1960
["Gott! Welch' Dunkel hier!" at 3:01] James King (t), Florestan; Staatskapelle Dresden, Karl Böhm, cond. DG, recorded c1968
The Swede Torsten Ralf, who had sung Stolzing with Böhm in his 1938 EMI recording of Act III of Die Meistersinger, isn't comfortable with the relentlessly high-lying climax of the monologue, but then, who is? And the rest is pretty solid. James King, like Vickers, reminds us of the vocal kinship between the roles of Florestan and Siegmund -- he too sang them both well. UPDATE: In previous versions of this post, while my copy of the Böhm-DG Fidelio was at large, I noted that we would nevertheless have "another" King performance: the 1970 Vienna one with Leonard Bernstein. The wait turns out to have been worthwhile -- King sings a whole lot better and more characterfully here. This is for me one of the really fine recordings of the monologue.
The reality of Florestan is that, of necessity, the role is often sung by less heavyweight, baritonal tenors, which lends some interest to the 1955 Böhm performance from the long-awaited gala reopening of the bombed-out Vienna State Opera, with the always-conscientious (and often more effective than is generally noticed) Anton Dermota doing quite well as a lyric-tenor-weight Florestan.
Would you note, by the way, how potently Böhm conjures that extraordinary Act II orchestral introduction? Some readers may regret that I've included it with all of our complete performances of Florestan's monologue, and as an afterthought I've inserted time cues for the start of the monologue proper. Still, for me the scene doesn't seem complete without that brooding, almost suffocatingly oppressive orchestral place-setter. When it's done with this much sense of purpose (or that of Leonard Bernstein and Hans Knappertsbusch in the performances of theirs we're going to hear momentarily), I like to think no apologies are required for inclusion of those prefatory three minutes. (I'm not going to name names, but there's a Met video Fidelio in which you can witness this crucial span of music simply stick-waved-through. Nothing about Act I had seemed like my kind of Fidelio. This really startled me. It had never occurred to me that the point could be this completely missed.)
Jan Peerce at ages 40 and 57 -- and at timings 8:58 and 11:21!
["Gott! Welch' Dunkel hier!" at 2:54] Jan Peerce (t), Florestan; NBC Symphony Orchestra, Arturo Toscanini, cond. RCA, broadcast performance, Dec. 17, 1944
["Gott! Welch' Dunkel hier!" at 3:42] Jan Peerce (t), Florestan; Bavarian State Orchestra, Hans Knappertsbusch, cond. Westminster, recorded December 1961
Let me say, what a pleasant surprise it was listening to both of these performances for the first time in a while, for the singing (yes, as much in 1961 as in 1944, maybe more!) and the conducting, by a pair of conductors who could hardly be more unlike, except in the degree of intensity and commitment they bring to the project at hand. (The pair of highly atmospheric orchestral cliplets, totaling five minutes of the opera, that we heard in last week's preview post were from the Knappertsbusch-Westminster Fidelio.)
As to our "other" King Florestan: good news and bad
["Gott! Welch' Dunkel hier!" at 3:47] James King (t), Florestan; Vienna State Opera Orchestra, Leonard Bernstein, cond. Live performance, June 1970
I've never been that fond of Lenny B's commercial Fidelio, which was recorded almost eight years later (also live at the Staatsoper), with a more problematic cast. Here Act II gets off to a great start, with a gloriously grim performance of the orchestral intro, but King's head seems somewhere else. Would you ever guess that just a couple of years earlier he had sung the monologue so beautifully and impactfully in the Böhm-Dresden-DG recording?
Two tenors reinventing themselves as dramatic tenors
Here we have two tenors, Peter Anders (1908-1954) and Gösta Winbergh (1943-2002) who'd had long-established careers as lyric tenors but by the time of their untimely deaths -- Anders at 46 in a car accident, Winbergh at 58 from a heart attack -- had reinvented themselves, or believed they had, as full-fledged dramatic tenors.
Wikipedia notes of Anders: "Beginning in 1949, Anders undertook such heavier roles as Florestan, Max, Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, Walther, Siegmund, Radamès, Otello with equal success." Anders was in fact meant to record Florestan for DG with his frequent musical collaborator Ferenc Fricsay; eventually the recording was made with the no-questions-lyric tenor Ernst Häfliger.
And Winbergh's bio on the Bach Cantatas Website, as edited by opera specialist Bruce Duffy on his blog, recounts: "In later seasons Winbergh appeared with great success in heavier tenor roles such as the title parts of Lohengrin (Berlin, Paris, Ravenna) and Parsifal (Zurich, Berlin, Stockholm, Chicago), Walther in Die Meistersinger (Berlin, Vienna, Chicago, Covent Garden), Bacchus in Ariadne auf Naxos (Zurich), Florestan in Fidelio (Nice, Zurich, Vienna), and a highly praised Tristan in Tristan und Isolde (Zurich). At the time of his death, the tenor was contracted to sing the role of Siegmund in Die Walküre, the title role in Siegfried and Tristan for the Vienna State Opera, Zurich Opera and the Royal Opera in Stockholm." Yikes! Tristan, Siegmund, and the Young Siegfried? That's not kidding around.
["Gott! Welch' Dunkel hier!" at 3:12] Peter Anders (t), Florestan; Orchestre de la Suisse romande, Ferenc Fricsay, cond. Broadcast performance, Nov. 6, 1951
["Gott! Welch' Dunkel hier!" at 3:39] Gösta Winbergh (t), Florestan; Nicolaus Esterházy Sinfonia, Michael Nalász, cond. Naxos, recorded Nov. 7-10 and 14-18, 1998
I don't know that the aural evidence suggests a true dramatic tenor in either case, but both Anders and Winbergh manage Florestan well enough from the "lighter" side, especially in Winbergh's case -- he doesn't get off to the rock-steadiest start, going all wobbly trying to sustain that long initial G on "Gott!," and indeed as much of the monologue as can be so managed is offered in confidentially lyric tones. That said, there's a Stockholm-made 1995 Sony CD that samples Winbergh as Rienzi, Lohengrin (including the full Bridal Chamber scene with Helena Döse as Elsa), Walther von Stolzing, and Parsifal which suggests real suitability, if not for Tristan and Siegmund and Siegfried, then at least for the less full-out Wagner tenor roles: Lohengrin, Walther von Stolzing, maybe even Parsifal (what we might call "the Sándor Kónya-weight" roles). One thing I definitely enjoy is the lovely orchestral accompanying provided by Siegfried Köhler (1923-2017), chief conductor of the Royal Swedish Opera from 1992 until his retirement in 2005.
Lohengrin: Act III, "In fernem Land"
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg: Act I, "Am stillen Herd"
Parsifal: Act III, "Nur eine Waffe taugt"
Gösta Winbergh, tenor; Orchestra of the Royal Swedish Opera, Siegfried Köhler, cond. Sony, recorded Sept. 19-22, 1995
ONE LAST THING: IT'S MUSIC FOR TENOR. DON'T
WE WANT TO KNOW, "WHATWOULD DID PLÁCIDO DO?"
Well, sure, and we can do that.
["Gott! Welch' Dunkel hier!" at 3:43] Plácido Domingo (t), Florestan; Staatskapelle Berlin, Daniel Barenboim, cond. Teldec, recorded May-June 1999
Not by nature a "Florestan voice," but wasn't this true of some of Domingo's signature roles? It's certainly very nicely song (nicely conducted too), and plainly understood. It does seem perhaps overly unimpaired -- an awfully healthy-sounding Florestan, singing through the obstacles Beethoven so carefully wrote into the music. Good to hear, though, no?
STILL TO COME?
I think that's pretty much it as regards performances of the monologue. I'm thinking some more sign-pointing along its way may yet come, and maybe some more directed thoughts on some of the performances.
["Gott! Welch' Dunkel hier!" at 3:00] Jon Vickers (t), Florestan; Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Karl Böhm, cond. Live performance, Feb. 13, 1960
["Gott! Welch' Dunkel hier!" at 3:33] Jon Vickers (t), Florestan; Covent Garden Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, cond. Testament, recorded live, Feb. 24, 1961
["Gott! Welch' Dunkel hier!" at 3:25] Jon Vickers (t), Florestan; Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, cond. EMI, recorded Feb.-Mar. 1962
["Gott! Welch' Dunkel hier!" at 3:17] Jon Vickers (t), Florestan; Vienna State Opera Orchestra, Herbert von Karajan, cond. DG, recorded live, May 25, 1962
["Gott! Welch' Dunkel hier!" at 3:42] Jon Vickers (t), Florestan; Berlin Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan, cond. EMI, recorded 1970
We should remember that our tenor has been idling all through Act I, with no opportunity beyond what vocal warmups he can manage to prepare himself for that long-held high G with which he begins the line "Gott! Welch' Dunkel hier!," not to mention the grueling workout that follows.
Of our five Vickers performances, the 1960 Met broadcast presents him on one of those days when the voice simply seems capable of absolutely anything and everything within its range of possibilities. My jaw just keeps dropping. By contrast, the 1962 Vienna performance with Karajan seems to be one of those days when that huge voice -- and the big voices are a lot harder to keep balanced and under control -- isn't quite so obedient. The EMI studio recording from the same year is fine, but I like the live Covent Garden performance he'd done with Klemperer better; despite the EMI recording's legendary status, I can't help feeling that the performance to a fair degree has been hijacked by producer Walter Legge and kind of "conventionalized." (And I can't help thinking that Klemperer thought so too -- when it came to recording The Magic Flute, he wouldn't allow Legge to be present at rehearsals, and Legge huffily passed the project, and all of Klemperer's subsequent opera recordings, to other EMI producers.)
Sometimes, though, everything seems to go right in a studio recording, which is what seems to me to have happened with the 1970 Karajan-EMI Fidelio -- one of the best things Karajan did, with the whole cast contributing splendid work and Vickers (and Karl Ridderbusch as Rocco) in absolutely peak form.
Our
[NOTES: (1) I've plugged the 1960 Met performance with Vickers in here too. (2)
["Gott! Welch' Dunkel hier!" at 3:55] Torsten Ralf (t), Florestan; Vienna State Opera Orchestra, Karl Böhm, cond. Live performance, February 1944
["Gott! Welch' Dunkel hier!" at 3:21] Anton Dermota (t), Florestan; Vienna State Opera Orchestra, Karl Böhm, cond. Live performance, Nov. 5, 1955
["Gott! Welch' Dunkel hier!" at 3:00] Jon Vickers (t), Florestan; Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Karl Böhm, cond. Live performance, Feb. 13, 1960
["Gott! Welch' Dunkel hier!" at 3:01] James King (t), Florestan; Staatskapelle Dresden, Karl Böhm, cond. DG, recorded c1968
The Swede Torsten Ralf, who had sung Stolzing with Böhm in his 1938 EMI recording of Act III of Die Meistersinger, isn't comfortable with the relentlessly high-lying climax of the monologue, but then, who is? And the rest is pretty solid. James King, like Vickers, reminds us of the vocal kinship between the roles of Florestan and Siegmund -- he too sang them both well. UPDATE: In previous versions of this post, while my copy of the Böhm-DG Fidelio was at large, I noted that we would nevertheless have "another" King performance: the 1970 Vienna one with Leonard Bernstein. The wait turns out to have been worthwhile -- King sings a whole lot better and more characterfully here. This is for me one of the really fine recordings of the monologue.
The reality of Florestan is that, of necessity, the role is often sung by less heavyweight, baritonal tenors, which lends some interest to the 1955 Böhm performance from the long-awaited gala reopening of the bombed-out Vienna State Opera, with the always-conscientious (and often more effective than is generally noticed) Anton Dermota doing quite well as a lyric-tenor-weight Florestan.
Would you note, by the way, how potently Böhm conjures that extraordinary Act II orchestral introduction? Some readers may regret that I've included it with all of our complete performances of Florestan's monologue, and as an afterthought I've inserted time cues for the start of the monologue proper. Still, for me the scene doesn't seem complete without that brooding, almost suffocatingly oppressive orchestral place-setter. When it's done with this much sense of purpose (or that of Leonard Bernstein and Hans Knappertsbusch in the performances of theirs we're going to hear momentarily), I like to think no apologies are required for inclusion of those prefatory three minutes. (I'm not going to name names, but there's a Met video Fidelio in which you can witness this crucial span of music simply stick-waved-through. Nothing about Act I had seemed like my kind of Fidelio. This really startled me. It had never occurred to me that the point could be this completely missed.)
Jan Peerce at ages 40 and 57 -- and at timings 8:58 and 11:21!
["Gott! Welch' Dunkel hier!" at 2:54] Jan Peerce (t), Florestan; NBC Symphony Orchestra, Arturo Toscanini, cond. RCA, broadcast performance, Dec. 17, 1944
["Gott! Welch' Dunkel hier!" at 3:42] Jan Peerce (t), Florestan; Bavarian State Orchestra, Hans Knappertsbusch, cond. Westminster, recorded December 1961
Let me say, what a pleasant surprise it was listening to both of these performances for the first time in a while, for the singing (yes, as much in 1961 as in 1944, maybe more!) and the conducting, by a pair of conductors who could hardly be more unlike, except in the degree of intensity and commitment they bring to the project at hand. (The pair of highly atmospheric orchestral cliplets, totaling five minutes of the opera, that we heard in last week's preview post were from the Knappertsbusch-Westminster Fidelio.)
As to our "other" King Florestan: good news and bad
["Gott! Welch' Dunkel hier!" at 3:47] James King (t), Florestan; Vienna State Opera Orchestra, Leonard Bernstein, cond. Live performance, June 1970
I've never been that fond of Lenny B's commercial Fidelio, which was recorded almost eight years later (also live at the Staatsoper), with a more problematic cast. Here Act II gets off to a great start, with a gloriously grim performance of the orchestral intro, but King's head seems somewhere else. Would you ever guess that just a couple of years earlier he had sung the monologue so beautifully and impactfully in the Böhm-Dresden-DG recording?
Two tenors reinventing themselves as dramatic tenors
Here we have two tenors, Peter Anders (1908-1954) and Gösta Winbergh (1943-2002) who'd had long-established careers as lyric tenors but by the time of their untimely deaths -- Anders at 46 in a car accident, Winbergh at 58 from a heart attack -- had reinvented themselves, or believed they had, as full-fledged dramatic tenors.
Wikipedia notes of Anders: "Beginning in 1949, Anders undertook such heavier roles as Florestan, Max, Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, Walther, Siegmund, Radamès, Otello with equal success." Anders was in fact meant to record Florestan for DG with his frequent musical collaborator Ferenc Fricsay; eventually the recording was made with the no-questions-lyric tenor Ernst Häfliger.
And Winbergh's bio on the Bach Cantatas Website, as edited by opera specialist Bruce Duffy on his blog, recounts: "In later seasons Winbergh appeared with great success in heavier tenor roles such as the title parts of Lohengrin (Berlin, Paris, Ravenna) and Parsifal (Zurich, Berlin, Stockholm, Chicago), Walther in Die Meistersinger (Berlin, Vienna, Chicago, Covent Garden), Bacchus in Ariadne auf Naxos (Zurich), Florestan in Fidelio (Nice, Zurich, Vienna), and a highly praised Tristan in Tristan und Isolde (Zurich). At the time of his death, the tenor was contracted to sing the role of Siegmund in Die Walküre, the title role in Siegfried and Tristan for the Vienna State Opera, Zurich Opera and the Royal Opera in Stockholm." Yikes! Tristan, Siegmund, and the Young Siegfried? That's not kidding around.
["Gott! Welch' Dunkel hier!" at 3:12] Peter Anders (t), Florestan; Orchestre de la Suisse romande, Ferenc Fricsay, cond. Broadcast performance, Nov. 6, 1951
["Gott! Welch' Dunkel hier!" at 3:39] Gösta Winbergh (t), Florestan; Nicolaus Esterházy Sinfonia, Michael Nalász, cond. Naxos, recorded Nov. 7-10 and 14-18, 1998
I don't know that the aural evidence suggests a true dramatic tenor in either case, but both Anders and Winbergh manage Florestan well enough from the "lighter" side, especially in Winbergh's case -- he doesn't get off to the rock-steadiest start, going all wobbly trying to sustain that long initial G on "Gott!," and indeed as much of the monologue as can be so managed is offered in confidentially lyric tones. That said, there's a Stockholm-made 1995 Sony CD that samples Winbergh as Rienzi, Lohengrin (including the full Bridal Chamber scene with Helena Döse as Elsa), Walther von Stolzing, and Parsifal which suggests real suitability, if not for Tristan and Siegmund and Siegfried, then at least for the less full-out Wagner tenor roles: Lohengrin, Walther von Stolzing, maybe even Parsifal (what we might call "the Sándor Kónya-weight" roles). One thing I definitely enjoy is the lovely orchestral accompanying provided by Siegfried Köhler (1923-2017), chief conductor of the Royal Swedish Opera from 1992 until his retirement in 2005.
Lohengrin: Act III, "In fernem Land"
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg: Act I, "Am stillen Herd"
Parsifal: Act III, "Nur eine Waffe taugt"
Gösta Winbergh, tenor; Orchestra of the Royal Swedish Opera, Siegfried Köhler, cond. Sony, recorded Sept. 19-22, 1995
ONE LAST THING: IT'S MUSIC FOR TENOR. DON'T
WE WANT TO KNOW, "WHAT
Well, sure, and we can do that.
["Gott! Welch' Dunkel hier!" at 3:43] Plácido Domingo (t), Florestan; Staatskapelle Berlin, Daniel Barenboim, cond. Teldec, recorded May-June 1999
Not by nature a "Florestan voice," but wasn't this true of some of Domingo's signature roles? It's certainly very nicely song (nicely conducted too), and plainly understood. It does seem perhaps overly unimpaired -- an awfully healthy-sounding Florestan, singing through the obstacles Beethoven so carefully wrote into the music. Good to hear, though, no?
STILL TO COME?
I think that's pretty much it as regards performances of the monologue. I'm thinking some more sign-pointing along its way may yet come, and maybe some more directed thoughts on some of the performances.
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