"I don't know if I'm awake or if I'm still dreaming" (Do those poets know how to make an entrance?)

Georges Thill (1897-1984)

With THE BAILIFF and all his children inside the house, as Papa continues to drill the six younger children in their "Noël" (in July!), WERTHER has appeared, led by a young guide, and verified that this is the home of the Bailiff. Alone, he penetrates farther into the courtyard and stops in front of the fountain.

WERTHER: I don't know if I'm awake or if I'm still dreaming.
Everything that surrounds me has the air of a paradise.
The wood sighs like an echoing harp.
A world reveals itself to my blown-away eyes.
O nature full of grace,
queen of time and space,
deign to welcome him who passes
and salutes you, humble mortal!
Mysterious silence! O solemn calm!
Everything attracts me and pleases me!
This wall, and this somber corner,
this limpid spring, and the freshness of the shade.
There's not a hedge, there's not a bush,
where a flower isn't enclosed, where a breeze doesn't pass.
O nature, intoxicate me with perfumes!
Mother eternally young, lovable, and pure!
And you, sun, come flood me with your rays!

Georges Thill (t), Werther; orchestra, Fernand Heurteur, cond. EMI (HMV), published Oct. 5, 1927

César Vezzani (t), Werther; with orchestra. EMI (Columbia), recorded Feb. 27, 1929

by Ken

This is one of the great operatic entrances, which Massenet has devised, and these Werthers -- whom I think we could describe without much fear of contradiction as the greatest French tenors of the 20th century -- sure know how to make that entrance sing. Note, though, what a different thing they make of it. Thill, master of making most everything he sang sound utterly and yet utterly unself-consciously, jaw-droppingly gorgeous and at the same time utterly, actively alive in the moment, is the purest of poets. Vezzani (1888-1951, seen at right) was a tenor of more heroic vocal bent (we should note that he was, properly speaking, Corsican, and though his mother had moved the family -- his father died before he was born -- to the French mainland when he was 12, Wikipedia describes him as, when he made his way to Paris at age 20, "speaking a poor French"), the poetic tingle he creates with his idyllic vision of the Bailiff's home is of a distinctly more energetic, physical sort.

In both cases, note the pleasure the singer enjoys and the communicative intent he shares in the singing of his language. The composers who have written great large-scale vocal works in French -- in addition to Massenet, I think (in no particular order) of Gounod, Saint-Saëns, Berlioz, Bizet, Meyerbeer -- share a skill and delight in showcasing their language, which calls not so much for "French singers" (after all, lots of French singers aren't much good at this either) as singers who have corresponding competence and relish in singing the language.

Werther's disposition to poetic rapture comes straight from his creator, Goethe, and while Massenet's idea of poetic raptures may not be exactly the same as Goethe's, they gave him an easy and darned effective entryway to the character -- everything Massenet's Werther sees is poetic, an elevated but not altogether practical way, as he never manages to understand in his overwrought existence, to go through one. In the last post, ("We're goig to be hearing Kurt Moll in his famously 'Unexpected French Role' -- so curtain up! "), we got as far as raising the curtain and watching the Bailiff -- in the heat of July -- preparing his six youngest children to sing a "Noël" -- before we wound up gulping down the first two-thirds or so (maybe three-fifths?) of Act I in a single swallow, or rather three single swallows, since we heard three performances of it.

If we're going to be sticklers, though, we've actually skipped over Werther's entrance proper. We'll come back to it, but meanwhile we have Georges and César to tide us over. And when we resume, we'll even have Georges with us, thanks to the complete recording of Werther he made just a few years later.

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We're going to be hearing Kurt Moll in his famously "Unexpected French Role" -- so curtain up!

Naturally, we've got a "Prélude"

West German Radio (WDR) Symphony Orchestra, Cologne, Riccardo Chailly, cond. DG, recorded in the Forumhalle, Leverkusen (across the Rhine from Cologne), February 1979

by Ken

As I mentioned in the Kurt Moll-themed posts from Saturday ("Preview: I won't go out on a limb and say this is the most beautiful bass voice I've ever heard, or this the most beautiful minute-and-a-half of singing. Then again --") and Sunday ("Quite right, Sir Georg: We'll need to hear not just Haydn's orchestral depiction of 'pre-Creation' chaos but the 'breathtaking' explosion when suddenly 'there was light!' "), it was a chance hearing of KM in what I've dubbed "an Unexpected French Role" which got me to thinking about him.

There's no other "news" peg for this 1979 recording -- the very recording from which we've just heard, as a curtain-raiser, the Prélude. It's a recording I was pretty sure I had on LP but realized I had no clear recollection of when I spotted a cheap CD copy in my used-CD mart of choice (no mystery: Academy Records on West 18th Street in Manhattan), where periodically, despite knowing that goodness knows I don't more damn records, I allow myself to browse -- especially on the "$1.99 and under" shelves, but also (when I have, or make, time) among the pricier $2.99- and $3.99-per-disc offerings, not to mention the cheap DVDs and Blu-rays. [POSTSCRIPT: Just to be clear, those aren't my CDs. I just borrowed the image to represent a tiny fraction of mine. (I only wish I had shelves like those!) -- Ed.]

At times it seems to me almost a moral issue not to allow tantalizingly underpriced musical items of value to languish unloved, like the time I came upon an irresistibly modest-priced copy of a pristine-looking EMI CD set of the 1953 Furtwängler-RAI Ring, of which my original copy, though I believe all the CDs are still playable, is badly beaten up from the heavy use it continues to get. Notwithstanding that Ring's undeniable limitations, it remains a repository of all manner of in-performance wisdom which makes it almost as essential to me, in its very different way, as the Solti-Decca and Karajan-DG Ring cycles. (Did I mention that I also have two LP editions of the Furtwängler-RAI Ring, the original American one and a later reissue made from supposedly better source material?)

So for the asked $5.98, I added that set to my growing pile. But then at home I never seemed to be in the mood to listen to it it, and it sat for months among a clump of other as-yet-unlistened-to CDs. Until one day I decided I wouldn't mind taking a listen.

And what a difference! I'm guessing that when I first acquired the LPs, which I indeed found neatly in place on my LP shelves, I sampled it and didn't much cotton to it, as I didn't with most of the growing number of recordings of this once-infrequently-recorded opera. Maybe I held its German provenance against it? It was made by Deutsche Grammophon, as German a record company as there is (though of course long since internationalized in its a&r thinking and its audience reach), with a German orchestra and supporting cast, and while most of the vocal principals and the conductor aren't German, they aren't French either, and neither is anybody else involved, in an opera by the most French of composers.


SAY, THIS IS GETTING TO BE AN AWFUL LOT OF
TALK -- HOW 'BOUT WE HAVE SOME MORE MUSIC?

Okay, can do!

Act II: Prélude

Act III: Prélude

Act IV: 1st Tableau, "The Night Before Christmas"

West German Radio (WDR) Symphony Orchestra, Cologne, Riccardo Chailly, cond. DG, recorded in the Forumhalle, Leverkusen (across the Rhine from Cologne), February 1979

Quite right, Sir Georg: We'll need to hear not just Haydn's orchestral depiction of "pre-Creation" chaos but the "breathtaking" explosion when suddenly "there was light!"

[PLUS: Some serial aural remembrances of Kurt Moll]

[MONDAY EVENING UPDATE: Now with various sorts of upgrading, to bring the post a tiny bit closer to what I'd hoped to make -- notably fleshing out the section of Moll archival clips, with English text added, along with minimal comments and some non-Moll performances]

CHORUS: "Und es ward licht!" ("And there was light!")
[from "The First Day," in Part I of Haydn's Creation]

"I can think of no other work by any composer in which a single chord comes as such a surprise." -- Georg Solti (see below)

Bavarian Radio Chorus and Symphony Orchestra, Leonard Bernstein, cond. DG, recorded live in the Herkulessaal of the Residenz, Munich, June 1986

Stockholm Radio Chorus, Stockholm Chamber Chorus, Berlin Philharmonic, James Levine, cond. DG, recorded in the Jesus-Christus-Kirche, December 1987

Chicago Symphony Chorus and Orchestra, Sir Georg Solti, cond. Decca, recorded live in Orchestra Hall, Oct. 29-30 & Nov. 2, 1993

"A personal note by Sir Georg Solti" -- from the CD booklet for his 1993 re-recording of Haydn's Creation

The older I get, the more deeply I love the genius of Haydn, especially his two late oratorio masterpieces, The Creation and The Seasons.

In re-recording The Creation, I was struck by the incredible modernity as well as the startling originiality of so much of the score. To mention just two examples: the opening "Representation of Chaos," with music that so poignantly symbolizes the emptiness and hopelessness before creation; and, immediately thereafter, the breathtaking C major of "Light." I can think of no other work by any composer in which a single chord comes as such a surprise. How completely I can understand the reactions at the first public performance, as my friend Robbins Landon so well describes in his article [a reprint in the CD booklet of a long, wide-ranging background piece by the great Haydn scholar H. C. Robbins Landon].

I was joined in my excitement and passion for this work by all my colleagues, soloists, orchestra and chorus alike. Rarely can I recall such exuberant joy and sheer enchantment as we shared during these Chicago concerts. I hope this will come across to the listener.

[Note: In the first paragraph I've taken the shocking liberty of reversing the order of Sir Georg's reference to the great late-Haydn oratorios, so that The Creation comes before The Seasons, as they did in real life. Is it possible that an editor suggested this to him c1994? I don't think so; I think he'd not only have approved but been grateful. Now I'm afraid it's too late to ask. -- Ed.]

by Ken

I was surprised how moved I was re-encountering this "personal note" from Georg Solti (1912-1997) about his experience re-recording Haydn's Creation -- days after his 81st birthday. In that late period of his life he memorably re-recorded a number of big vocal works that were clearly close to his heart, some of which had gone just fine in his earlier efforts -- I think in particular of Mozart's Così fan tutte and Magic Flute and Verdi's Falstaff; the latter two, notably if possibly coincidentally, are works that as a fledgling conductor in the 1930s he had helped Arturo Toscanini prepare at Salzburg) -- and others, at least to me, not so fine, like Mozart's Don Giovanni, Wagner's Meistersinger, Verdi's Otello -- and The Creation. (Among those happy late-life "big works" recording projects we should note as well Sir Georg's companion recording, this one his first ever, of Haydn's final "big work," The Seasons.)

What's so moving about Solti's Creation note is that it rings so true. "The older I get, the more deeply I love" declarations are so common as to be commonplace as applied to, say, Mozart, but Haydn [seen here as sculpted on the Frieze of Parnassus, encircling the base of London's Albert Memorial -- from the blog London Remembers], not so much. In fact, real imaginative identification with Haydn isn't common at all. A lot of performers you sense approach Haydn's music as kind of like Mozart's only not quite -- an approach that hardly ever works. We can talk about this more after we've heard today's Creation clips.

For those who weren't here for yesterday's preview post ("I won't go out on a limb and say this is the most beautiful bass voice I've ever heard, or this the most beautiful minute-and-a-half of singing. Then again --"), the explosions of light we "heard" above are from the same recordings of The Creation I teased therein, offering their accounts of the remarkable hushed lines uttered by the angel Raphael -- the first singing heard in the oratorio, Haydn's setting of some of the most famous words in the human record, the opening of the Book of Genesis.

The plan for today, in addition to filling in the somehow-missing performer identifications (notably of the bass soloists), was to fill in Haydn's introductory orchestral depiction of the chaos out of which the world would be created. Now in addition, inspired by Sir Georg's personal note, I've realized we also have to continue on a few extra minutes, to hear God conjure up light. I've remade the ready-made audio clips accordingly.

Preview: I won't go out on a limb and say this is the most beautiful bass voice I've ever heard, or this the most beautiful minute-and-a-half of singing. Then again --

Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Leonard Bernstein, cond. DG, recorded live in the Herkulessaal of the Residenz, Munich, June 1986

by Ken

Wait, there seem to be a few bits of information missing from the above credits! Hmm, let's think . . .

Well, one thing we could do is fill in the missing information tomorrow, when we hear a more properly contextual version of this breathtaking musical moment -- anyway, it's been taking my breath away for some 35 years now, especially in video form via an ancient VHS tape -- and I explain (more or less; you know how this trying-to-explain business usually goes) how I happened to settle on this as a topic that might bring us (finally!) to a state of postability.


AS LONG AS WE'RE AT IT, THERE ARE TWO OTHER
PERFORMANCES IT'D BE USEFUL FOR US TO HEAR

They're all different, our three performances -- well, two of them not so much in this excerpt; their differences will become clearer when we hear the fuller-context versions. Even now, though, I think we can agree that one of the performances is more different from the other two -- in more ways than one.

Berlin Philharmonic, James Levine, cond. DG, recorded in the Jesus-Christus-Kirche, December 1987

Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Sir Georg Solti, cond. Decca, recorded live in Orchestra Hall, Oct. 29-30 & Nov. 2, 1993

When we resume, we're also going to have a personal note on The Creation from one of our three conductors, who was making his second recording of the piece. On account of that personal note I've wound up having to redo, in a more expansive direction, the other "expanded-context" clips. (It so happens that one of our other conductors was also making his second recording of The Creation. See how complicated this gets? Maybe I can scrounge up a personal note from him too! Or maybe his re-recording will have to speak for itself.)

UPDATE: Find the main post here, and a follow-up post here pondering the unexpected role recorded by Kurt Moll which set these posts in motion.

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