Inaugural Edition, no. 2: Post tease: Sarastro sings a mouthful when he sings, "The rays of the sun drive away the night"

UPDATED WITH AN ALARMING QUANTITY OF POST-POSTING
THOUGHTS ABOUT THE PERFORMANCES WE HEAR HERE

SARASTRO: The rays of the sun drive away the night,
destroy the dissemblers' ill-gotten might.

Martti Talvela (bs), Sarastro; Vienna Philharmonic, Georg Solti, cond. Decca, recorded 1969

Samuel Ramey (bs), Sarastro; Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, Neville Marriner, cond. Philips, recorded July 1989

Kurt Moll (bs), Sarastro; Staatskapelle Dresden, Colin Davis, cond. Philips, recorded January 1984
Franz Crass (bs), Sarastro; Berlin Philharmonic, Karl Böhm, cond. DG, recorded June 1964

Matti Salminen (bs), Sarastro; Zürich Opera House Orchestra, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, cond. Teldec, recorded November 1987

by Ken

As I mentioned in Wednesday's Sunday Classics "Inaugural Edition," I had very powerfully in mind some musical thoughts beyond the two noble marches we listened to, and I mentioned in particular moments from The Magic Flute and Pelléas et Mélisande. Add to that list Schoenberg's Gurre-Lieder, and you've got today's post laid out.


POST-POSTING THOUGHTS ABOUT THE PERFORMANCES
[NOTE (for those who saw my earlier note): The audio clips have now been resequenced to match (I think!) the order of discussion below.]

We're going to be hearing a good deal more of these amazing lines of Sarastro, including hearing them in the context of the surprisingly brief conclusion of The Magic Flute. All the same, now that I've had a chance to listen to these clips just the way you can, as opposed to hearing them individually more or less as I made them (as I've mentioned, perhaps too often, thanks to the genius "upgrade" of my blog-host software, apparently perpetrated by computer whizzes who have never had and likely will never have occasion to use such software, I can no longer do this until I actually post a post), I do have some thoughts prompted by them.

While I may perhaps, in these blogposts, ponder ways of thinking about music for performance, I try to remember that I have no business trying to tell performers how to perform anything. Still, when it comes to this moment, this mere 50 seconds or so, at the climax of one of the most searching creations of the mind of humankind, I have to wonder about any singer and/or conductor who doesn't want to make of these brief lines of Sarastro the grandest statement it's possible to make. It seems such a waste of one of the great performance opportunities of a performing lifetime.

We're hearing here five basses singularly well equipped, though equipped in distinctly various ways, to make a Big Statement here, paired with conductors who have even more various thoughts on the subject. We've had more than one occasion recently to recall what that big, spacious, almost luscious voice of the early-career Martti Talvela could do, and Sarastro is certainly near the top of the list of applications we might think of for such an instrument. Happily, Georg Solti had a mind and soul filled with grand, rich ideas about The Magic Flute, here making the first of what would be two genuinely exceptional recordings of the opera, understood well what a bass of Talvela's gifts could make of this moment.

It's also a great pleasure rehearing Sam Ramey, in such good command of that beautiful, limber, wide-ranging, seemingly can-do-anything bass, make such a full, seemingly effortless statement of these lines, in partnership with a conductor who brought such seemingly effortless but deep understanding to the dizzyingly wide range of music he performed. Hmm, I don't seem to have mentioned Neville Marriner's name, and I think perhaps he might not have minded -- it seems to have mattered more to him that we have a proper Magic Flute experience.

Not surprisingly, there's also great vocal pleasure to be had in even this snippet of Kurt Moll's Sarastro from what is by my quick count the fourth of six commercial recordings (four adio and two video) of the role made between 1972 and 1990 -- not including, of course, his appearance as the Second Armed Man in the 1971 Hamburg State Opera film of the opera. I've got three of the four audio versions (including Solti's Magic Flute remake) on CD, and I think it may be interesting to hear how different they are, and how well they all work. In this case, Sir Colin Davis seems to have had it in mind to make some big statements with the opera, and had a good cast and ochestra to make them with, but just didn't quite know how to make them consistently or make them quite hold together, as I think we can hear in just our minuscule excerpt.

I'm thinking here of the tiny -- three-bar! -- bit of music, marking the transformation from minor to major keys, at the heart of the small quantity of music allotted for whatever scenic transformation the stage team has planned for the change from the musical frenzy of the failed coup attempt by the assault team of the Queen of the Night and her Three Ladies plus the scheming Monostatos to the new world now dawning, a world of possibilities and hope.

In other words, in the above three staves of piano-vocal score, we're talking about the middle stave, bars 2-4, the part marked p (soft) between sections marked f (loud). The first of these three bars consists of two stepwise-descending phrases, the second higher up than the first, three eighth notes each, played in thirds by the first and second violins, followed by two bars consisting of a still-higher stepwise-descending, now stretched out to a full eight notes -- yes, a full-octave descent from the first violins' high E-flat to the E-flat below (en route to a landing, on the downbeat of the next bar, on the D-natural another half-step down), now in quarter rather than eighth notes, with the second violins no longer in sync with the first but syncopating on the half-beats.

Looked at casually (and played unpurposefully), this can sound like stock filler material plucked out of the Transitions Section of the Composer's Catalog of Stock Musical Materials, setting up the great brass-heavy fanfare-like marziale lead-in to Sarastro's "Die Strahlen der Sonne." Davis doesn't slough it off exactly; he just has those excellent Dresden fiddlers play it crisply and quickly, not dallying to look left or right, seemingly hoping to get through it and on to the meatier material of the big fanfare. As a result, it may not sound as if those three bars are being given the bum's rush; it may sound like an interpretive decision has been decided and executed, but there's unmistakably a hole, and it can sound as if Mozart was nodding. Probably, even if Sir Colin didn't have any ideas about those three bars, the Dresden fiddlers would have been only too happy to show him four or five ways they might do it. I suppose this would have been thought an unaccountable waste of precious recording-session time.

By contrast, listen to how masterfully Karl Böhm handles this passage, and just about every other in his enduringly masterful and joyful DG Magic Flute. He doesn't even have to try to make a Big Moment here, because he's got all the moments resonating and flowing. Nor does he need a special moment from his Sarastro. Franz Crass's flexible, wide-ranging, beautiful bass isn't the show-off kind of instrument of some of his better-endowed rivals, but it's a pretty terrific voice to listen to, and in the role's huge challenges, the two great arias and the assorted ensemble contributions, he has done everything his conductor could have asked for. Maybe at this point Sarastro doesn't need to make a Grand Statement; he is who and what he is, and in the imperfect realm of humans, maybe that's going to have to be good enough.

Which doesn't mean that some of us, at least, wouldn't welcome a Grand Statement here, and when it comes to bass Grand Statements, it's hard not to take note of the presence of Matti Salminen in a cast list. Salminen wasn't the can-do-it-all kind of bass; there were parts of the voice and kinds of handling at which he was more adept than others. But there was always that huge powerhouse he had in reserve, and his alertness to musical and dramatic situations and his ever-readiness to give everything he had. Kind of an odd match with a conductor like Nikolaus Harnoncourt, and when we hear these lines of Sarastro's in the context of the opera's final scene, you may be struck, as I am, by the conductor's seeming determination that there aren't going to be any Big Moments on his watch. Surprisingly, at least to me, Harnoncourt does allow Matti to fill out these important lines, but there doesn't seem to be room for anything more -- and some of us listeners are left wondering what unexplored possibilities he carried away from the recording studio that day, packed away in his toolbag.


A NOTE OF CAUTION RE. THE SCHEDULING OF THE MAIN POST

So much time went into the added portion of this "post tease" as to put in jeopardy the realization of the post it's supposed to be teasing. It was already a massively labor-intensive undertaking -- notably a massive amount of incredibly tedious editing relative to the quantity of actual music that results! I'm hoping the Pelléas and Gurre-Lieder clips will go faster (though hoping usually doesn't have much effect on the actual time it takes) and maybe I can keep the verbiage limited, though there's still the question of texts. I'll do my best. Sorry about that!

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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