Gurre-Lieder in piano-vocal score -- the piano version prepared, note,
by Alban Berg! (As I'll explain, this isn't the image I'd have liked to use.)
by Alban Berg! (As I'll explain, this isn't the image I'd have liked to use.)
TO REMIND US WHERE WE'RE COMING FROM, HERE ARE
4 "NEW" CLIPS OF OUR CLIMACTIC MAGIC FLUTE MOMENT
SARASTRO: The rays of the sun drive away the night,[Performance A]
destroy the dissemblers' ill-gotten might.
[Performance B]
[Performance C]
[Performance D]
by Ken
If you've been here before, you've no doubt figured out there's a reason why the performers of Performances A–D have been withheld, and you know all will be revealed. We are, in fact, going to hear this microbit of the final episode of The Magic Flute still unidentified in fuller form -- somewhat fuller, in fact, than we've heard before. (See the immediately preceding installment in this series, "While I toil away at this week's Inaugural-themed post, let's hear the end of The Magic Flute in our five performances -- plus a couple of 'new' ones.")
BEFORE WE GET TO GURRE-LIEDER, LET'S HEAR THE
(NEW) FULLER VERSION OF PERFORMANCES A–D!
As I mentioned, for now the performances are going to remain anonymous, but now I think it's legit for me to say that I love three of the four, and I emphatically don't love the other, despite certain surface attractions -- and this despite a sincere effort to give the performance the fairest possible hearing. (It comes from a recording that left me ice cold when I first acquired it, and I think that before now I hadn't relistened to any of it since then.)
As to "the (new) fuller version," we're reverting here to the natural start of this excerpt: the entrance of our insurrectionists, the Queen of the Night and her entourage, which we should note now includes Monostatos, who has "gone over to the other side." This is also a reminder that this spirit of darkness was formerly a denizen of Sarastro's supposedly immaculate temple of purity. I'll have a little more to say about this, because to me it represents a whole layer of fascination about The Magic Flute which is almost always overlooked -- much too large a subject for us to get into seriously today.)
In our earlier "fuller" version of this scenelet we began about a minute and a half later, at a carefully chosen "start" point that cost me hours of laborious editing effort, basically because I felt that the actual operatic context took us farther away from our Inaugural reality.
Let's listen to our four "new" performances in context, in our new fuller version of this concluding stretch of The Magic Flute:
Before Sarastro's Temple of Wisdom. The QUEEN OF THE NIGHT and her THREE LADIES appear with MONOSTATOS.[Performance A]
MONOSTATOS: Now quiet, quiet, quiet, quiet!
Soon we will break into the Temple.
THE QUEEN and her THREE LADIES: Now quiet, quiet, quiet, quiet!
Soon we will break into the Temple.
MONOSTATOS: But Princess, keep your word!
Fulfill that your child must be my wife.
THE QUEEN: I'll keep my word; it is my will,
my child will be your wife!
THE LADIES and THE QUEEN:
Her/my child will be your wife!
[NOTE: This is where we picked up in the earlier clip versions.]
[Thunder, and the sound of water]
MONOSTATOS: But hush, I hear a terrible rushing
like rolling thunder and a waterfall.
THE QUEEN and THE LADIES: Yes, fearful is this rushing,
like the distant echo of thunder!
MONOSTATOS: Now they are in the hall of the temple.
ALL [variously]: There we will fall upon them,
exterminate the pious ones from the earth
with glowing fire and mighty sword.
[There is loud thunder and lightning, followed by streaming holiness.]
THE THREE LADIES and MONOSTATOS:
To you, great Queen of the Night,
let our revenge be brought as a sacrifice.
[There is loud thunder and lightning, followed by streaming holiness.]
THE QUEEN, THE THREE LADIES, and MONOSTATOS:
Shattered, destroyed is our might!
We are all plunged into eternal night!
[They sink into the ground.]
Change of scene (without curtain): The Temple of the Sun. SARASTRO stands elevated on an altar, TAMINO and PAMINA in front of him, both in priestly clothing. Beside them the priests of Egypt on both sides. THE THREE BOYS hold flowers.
SARASTRO: The rays of the sun drive away the night,
destroy the dissemblers' ill-gotten might.
CHORUS: Hail to you initiates!
You penetrate the night.
Thanks, thanks, thanks be to you, Osiris!
Thanks brought to you, Osiris!
[Allegro]
Strength conquers and crowns as reward
Beauty and Wisdom with an eternal crown!
[Performance B]
[Performance C]
[Performance D]
AS I'M SURE YOU NOTICED, "A," "B," AND "C" FEATURE
THE SAME SARASTRO -- OVER A NINE-YEAR TIMESPAN
Gottlob Frick (1906-1994)
SARASTRO: The rays of the sun drive away the night,[Performance A]
destroy the dissemblers' ill-gotten might.
Gottlob Frick (bs), Sarastro; from a 1955 broadcast performance
[Performance B]
Gottlob Frick (bs), Sarastro; from a 1960 live performance
[Performance C]
Gottlob Frick (bs), Sarastro; from a 1964 studio recording
[Performance D]
Not Gottlob Frick (bs); from a 2005 studio recording
Those of you who were here last time will recall that we heard samples of Kurt Moll's Sarastro over a whopping 18-year timespan -- at, roughly, ages 34,46, and 52. I'm afraid I can't match that for Gottlob Frick, who was already 49-ish at the time of Performance A, and then roughly 54 and 58 at the times of Performances B and C -- I don't think there's any question that we can hear the effects of time in C (more so, of course, if we were hearing him in Sarastro's arias), especially considering that smoothness and evenness of sound were never the most prized qualities of his vocal delivery. I have to confess to a particular fondness here for Performance B, thanks in part to the generous-spaced contribution of its conductor (whose identity may not be wildly surprising once his identity is revealed).
Which may give you a clue as to why for me Performance D is the outlier here -- not, or not just, because it's so much faster, but because for me not just the tempo but the mode of delivery doesn't allow for the performers to reallyl register the moments and events, despite the participation of perhaps the most gifted bass of his time. It's all clean and professional and logical, and yet for me fundamentally, um, unconsidered.
We are going to hear this set of clips again, this time with full identifications. But now I think we're ready to make the leap to the final minutes of Gurre-Lieder, about which I'm not going to say much.
IF YOU DON"T THINK THE END OF THE MAGIC FLUTE
WAS IN SCHOENBERG'S HEAD AS HE WAS IMAGINING . . .
. . . the ending of Gurre-Lieder, I'm going to have to disagree.
To my surprise, I was actually able to locate the May 2010 Sunday Classics post "Amid the wonders of Gurre-Lieder, Schoenberg pushed tonality to its limits," which you can look at but not listen to, because not only has the YouTube clip atop it vanished, which is only to be expected, but generations of intervening format changes have rendered all of my audio clips mute, and I can't explain what a debilitatingly laborious a process it is to rehab one of those clip-filled posts.
ALSO, THERE MUST BE A LATER GURRE-LIEDERPerhaps one of these weeks, or months, I can exhume and resuscitate those old Gurre-Lieder posts so we can re-experience both the gorgeous arc of Part I, with the series of astonishing alternative solos for Waldermar and Tove (five for him, four for her) which collectively constitute, for me, the Greatest Love Story Ever Told in Music, brought to a shattering end by news of the death of Tove at the instigation of the jealous queen -- and then the gibbering madness to which Waldemar is reduced in Part II. We're just going to jump over all of this, and for that matter the earlier parts of Part III, to the miraculous peace of the soul with which the piece concludes.
POST THAT I HAVEN'T TRACKED DOWN YET . . .
In addition, I know there must be a later Gurre-Lieder post. I'm almost sure I remember being able to include Lili Chookasian's October 1964 recording of the devastating culmination of Part I, the "Song of the Wood-Dove," with Erich Leinsdorf and the Boston Symphony, which has powerful resonance for me because of my enduring memories of Lili C pouring forth the devastating climax in Seiji Ozawa's Tanglewood Gurre-Lieder with the Boston Symphony in the joint Schoenberg and Ives centenary year of 1974.
Happily, Seiji was able to get Gurre-Lieder on the BSO docket again in April 1979 (not just in Boston but in a memorable Carnegie Hall performance), with a Philips recording crew on hand to get it on tape, producing what remains for me, despite the veritable flood of Gurre-Lieder recordings we've had in the decades since, unquestionably the best of them -- with James McCracken repeating his remarkable King Waldemar and Jessye Norman singing the solos of the king's cherished mistress, Tove, so gorgeously that it would be hard to improve on her, and the estimable Tatiana Troyanos now providing the Voice of the Wood-Dove. In 1974 Lili C was already 53, and Troyanos, a wonderful singer in her own right, was a worthy successor, but Troyanos's lean, incisively focused mezzo was exactly not the sort of rolling-thunder contralto Lili C had let loose in 1974.
SCHOENBERG: Gurre-Lieder: Part III, Chorus, "Seht die Sonne! Farbenfroh am Himmelssaum" ("Behold the sun! Joyfully colored on the sky's edge")
Tanglewood Festival Chorus, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Seiji Ozawa, cond. Philips, live recording in Symphony Hall, April 1979
New York Choral Artists, New York Philharmonic, Zubin Mehta, cond. Sony, recorded in Avery Fisher Hall, May 23-28, 1991
Edinburgh Royal Choral Union, London Symphony Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski, cond. Live performance from the Edinburgh Festival, Usher Hall, Aug. 20, 1961
Princeton Glee Club, Fortnightly Club, Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia, Philadelphia Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski, cond. RCA-Pearl, recorded live in Philadelphia's Metropolitan Opera House, Apr. 9, 1932 (transferred from the 33-rpm originals by Ward Marston)
We start with the Ozawa-Philips recording, for the obvious reason that -- as I'll be noting farther down -- it's still the best.
Then I thought it would be fun to have the Mehta version, which is also pretty darned good, as we happen to have been taking recent note of Maestro Zubin's career-long affinity, clearly dating back to his formative musical years in Vienna, of all things musically Viennese.
Then, I find it fascinating -- not to mention ever so Stokowski-esque -- that in 1932 Maestro Leopold was not just performing a little-heard work of the size and scope of Gurre-Lieder in Philadelphia but was able to persuade Victor to undertake so monumental and surely expensive a project as a live recording, with so little prospect of even recovering costs. As Ward Marston points out in his booklet note for the Pearl issue, Victor in fact recorded all three performances over those several days in April. While the April 8 one was apparently incomplete and also otherwise unsatisfactory, the April 11 one, recorded on 78-rpm discs, was released in that form at the time and has been reissued periodically by RCA. The April 9 one, intriguingly, was recorded on longer-sided 33 1/3-rpm discs, and was even issued that way way back when, but has remained rare; one advantage it surely has is fewer side-break edits. I figured that as long as we were going to hear the 1932 recording, it would be interesting to hear the maestro returning to Gurre-Lieder three decades later.
FINALLY, LET'S LISTEN ONE LAST TIME TO OUR "NEW"
MAGIC FLUTE CLIPS, NOW PROPERLY IDENTIFIED
I thought we might start by listening again just to Sarastro's solo.
The rays of the sun drive away the night,[Performance A]
destroy the dissemblers' ill-gotten might.
Gottlob Frick (bs), Sarastro; Hessian Radio Orchestra (Frankfurt), Georg Solti, cond. Gala, broadcast performance, 1955
[Performance B]
Gottlob Frick (bs), Sarastro; Vienna Philharmonic, Joseph Keilberth, cond. Andromeda, recorded live at the Salzburg Festival, Aug. 12, 1960
[Performance C]
Gottlob Frick (bs), Sarastro; Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, cond. EMI, recorded Mar.-Apr. 1964
[Performance D]
René Pape (bs), Sarastro; Mahler Chamber Orchestra, Claudio Abbado, cond. DG, recorded in the Teatro Comunale, Modena (Italy), September 2005
Now here's the extended version, from the entrance of the Queen and her entourage to the opera's joyful conclusion.
Before Sarastro's Temple of Wisdom. The QUEEN OF THE NIGHT and her THREE LADIES appear with MONOSTATOS.[Performance A]
MONOSTATOS: Now quiet, quiet, quiet, quiet!
Soon we will break into the Temple.
THE QUEEN and her THREE LADIES: Now quiet, quiet, quiet, quiet!
Soon we will break into the Temple.
MONOSTATOS: But Princess, keep your word!
Fulfill that your child must be my wife.
THE QUEEN: I'll keep my word; it is my will,
my child will be your wife!
THE LADIES and THE QUEEN:
Her/my child will be your wife!
[Again, this is where we picked up in the previous clip versions.]
[Thunder, and the sound of water]
MONOSTATOS: But hush, I hear a terrible rushing
like rolling thunder and a waterfall.
THE QUEEN and THE LADIES: Yes, fearful is this rushing,
like the distant echo of thunder!
MONOSTATOS: Now they are in the hall of the temple.
ALL [variously]: There we will fall upon them,
exterminate the pious ones from the earth
with glowing fire and mighty sword.
[There is loud thunder and lightning, followed by streaming holiness.]
THE THREE LADIES and MONOSTATOS:
To you, great Queen of the Night,
let our revenge be brought as a sacrifice.
[There is loud thunder and lightning, followed by streaming holiness.]
THE QUEEN, THE THREE LADIES, and MONOSTATOS:
Shattered, destroyed is our might!
We are all plunged into eternal night!
[They sink into the ground.]
Change of scene (without curtain): The Temple of the Sun. SARASTRO stands elevated on an altar, TAMINO and PAMINA in front of him, both in priestly clothing. Beside them the priests of Egypt on both sides. THE THREE BOYS hold flowers.
SARASTRO: The rays of the sun drive away the night,
destroy the dissemblers' ill-gotten might.
CHORUS: Hail to you initiates!
You penetrate the night.
Thanks, thanks, thanks be to you, Osiris!
Thanks brought to you, Osiris!
[Allegro]
Strength conquers and crowns as reward
Beauty and Wisdom with an eternal crown!
Gottlob Frick (bs), Sarastro; with Willy Hofmann (t), Monostatos; Erika Köth (s), Queen of the Night; M. Wendels (s), E. Pack (ms), and Rosl Zapf (ms), Three Ladies of the Queen of the Night; Hessian Radio Chorus and Orchestra (Frankfurt), Georg Solti, cond. Gala, broadcast performance, 1955
[Performance B]
Gottlob Frick (bs), Sarastro; with Kurt Marschner (t), Monostatos; Erika Köth (s), Queen of the Night; Lisa Otto (s), Hetty Plümacher (ms), and Sieglinde Wagner (ms), Three Ladies of the Queen of the Night; Vienna State Opera Chorus, Vienna Philharmonic, Joseph Keilberth, cond. Andromeda, recorded live at the Salzburg Festival, Aug. 12, 1960
[Performance C]
Gottlob Frick (bs), Sarastro; with Gerhard Unger (t), Monostatos; Lucia Popp (s), Queen of the Night; Elisabeth Schwarzkopf (s), Christa Ludwig (ms), and Marga Höffgen (c), Three Ladies of the Queen of the Night; Philharmonia Chorus and Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, cond. EMI, recorded Mar.-Apr. 1964
[Performance D]
René Pape (bs), Sarastro; with Kurt Azesberger (t), Monostatos; Erika Milósa (s), Queen of the Night; Caroline Stein (s), Heidi Zehnder (ms), and Anne-Carolyn Schlüter (ms), Three Ladies of the Queen of the Night; Arnold Schoenberg Chorus, Mahler Chamber Orchestra, Claudio Abbado, cond. DG, recorded in in the Teatro Comunale, Modena (Italy), September 2005
STILL TO COME:
Probably further thoughts on the performances,
And then we still have to get to the other musical moment evoked for me by the Inauguration: Pelléas's first gulps of air after emerging from the subterranean vault.
ON 2ND THOUGHT, DO WE REALLY WANNA GET INTO THIS?
One of my enduring life regrets is not having made it my business to find a better way to preserve, through more careful handling and storing one of my lovelier possessions: the large-format (10 3/4" x 14 1/4") full score of Gurre-Lieder I've owned for, I guess, going on 50 years; I just never had any other score or book of any kind this large. It's an edition whose (soft) front cover consisted, in its entirety (without a speck of type), of one of the self-portraits painted by the composer, who took his painting seriously.
In the lower-left corner of the otherwise-blank back cover, which I guess must once have been white, or off-white (it's now way off), there appear just two lines of type:
Arnold Schönberg: GURRE-LIEDER(Note: Though nowadays you'll often see Gurrelieder, Gurre-Lieder is how the work has always been published, back to 1912.)
Cover: Green Self-Portrait (1910)
That's the cover whose image I/d have liked to plunk in the space at the top of this post, and I tried like heck to find a version of it online. Then I searched looked for the Schoenberg "green portrait," but the things I found look hardly anything like the richly colored score cover.
My copy -- bought not second-hand, but brand spanking new -- is now, alas, a wreck. The front cover is completely detached, with a large chunk of the lower-right corner torn off, and with assorted creases elsewhere. And yet, I have somehow still maintained possession of the detached and battered, along with the rest of the score, itself in none-too-felicitous shape.) Probably there exist online images of that cover, but I couldn't find one. I tried searching for the Schoenberg "green self-portrait," and found a couple of hits, but they bear only the slightest resemblance to even my battered version of the score cover. (Of course it's possible that the online images are authentic and it's the published version that was so heavily photo-edited.)
I thought I might try scanning my poor, abused cover, thinking that even in its present edition it might have some visual interest as a relic. It's way too large for my humble scanner, though, and I wasn't up to the job of seeing whether I could position it in such a way as to capture a view-worthy chunk. I thought I might try taking a phone-camera picture of it, but I am, as I've no doubt mentioned, the world's least competent photographer with cameras of any sort.
Surprisingly, this pointless and unnecessary exercise in futility hasn't sent me into a tailspin. It's a failure, sure, yet another one. Still, it kind of is what it is, you know. And that picture I found of the piano-vocal score prepared by Alban Berg -- hey, that's not chopped liver!
Eventually I took one last shot at it, and found this, which looks something like it:
Except this is so washed out, it doesn't really look anything like the score cover. The many shades of brown that make up both most of the score cover's background and significant portions of the foreground are much more, er, vividly colored; the red components seem pretty well gone. Oh sure, in the version I know the image of the composer is kind of scarifying, but in a sort of, I dunno, maybe uplifting kind of way?
THE 2021 "INAUGURAL EDITION"
(SUCH AS IT IS, SO FAR)
No. 1: "Wanna hear in full the marches we heard in part during today's (pitch-perfect, I thought) inauguration?" [1/20]
No. 2: "Post tease: Sarastro sings a mouthful when he sings, 'The rays of the sun drive away the night'" [1/24]
No. 3: "While I toil away at this week's Inaugural-themed post, let's hear the end of The Magic Flute in our five performances -- plus a couple of 'new' ones" [1/27]
No. 4: "It's not just Sarastro who sings to us about the miraculous restorative powers of the sun's rays" [1/29]
No. 5: "Post tease: Has any operatic act begun more beautifully? (Not to mention suggestively?)" [1/31]
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