Post tease 2: Case studies in ignorance -- Siegfried and Parsifal (continued)

Gottlob Frick as Gurnemanz -- in 1960, when he was 54; would
you believe the recording we're about to hear was made in 1971-72?
(Later we're also going to hear him from about the time of the photo.)

GURNEMANZ [to PARSIFAL]:
You could murder, here in this holy forest,
where tranquil peace surrounded you?
Did not the woodland beasts tamely come near
and innocently greet you as friends?
What did the birds sing to you from the branches?
What harm did that faithful swan do you?
Seeking his mate, he flew up
to circle with it over the lake
and gloriously to hallow the both.
This did not impress you? It but tempted you
to a wild, childish shot from your bow?
He was pleasing to us; what is he now to you?
Here -- look! -- here you struck him,
the blood still congealing, the wings drooping lifeless,
the snowy plumage stained dark,
the eyes glazed -- do you see his look?
[PARSIFAL has followed GURNEMANZ with growing emotion; now he breaks his bow and hurls his arrows away.]
Now do you appreciate your misdeed?
[PARSIFAL passes his hand over his eyes.]
Say, boy, do you realize your great guilt?
How could you commit this crime?
PARSIFAL: I didn't know.

-- translation by Lionel Salter

Gottlob Frick (bs), Gurnemanz; René Kollo (t), Parsifal; members of the Vienna State Opera Chorus, Vienna Philharmonic, Georg Solti, cond. Decca, recorded 1971-72

by Ken

In the earlier "tease" for this week's post, I noted the connection I typically feel from the difficult-to-conceptualize ignorance of the young Siegfried and that of his Wagnerian comrade-in-arms Parsifal (even if the "arm" in question in the latter's case is a bow and arrows), but without so much as a note of the latter's music. This follow-up tease aims to set that right.

NOTE: On present schedule, look for the main post tomorrow. (I don't rule out the possibility of additions to, or other tamperings with, one or both of the teases.)


NOW WE HAVE A FULLER VERSION OF THIS EXCERPT

Ladies and gents, meet Hagen[in fullest and final(ish) post form]

TUESDAY MORNING (FINAL) UPDATE: I did finally add some extra thumbs-up versions of our chosen scenelet, but this still leaves loads of stuff undone, as summarized in the note at the end.

Let's eavesdrop -- for now just a bit --
on Hagen, left alone with his thoughts

"Hier sitz' ich zur Wacht": William Wildermann as Hagen

"sits watch" over the Hall of the Gibichungs in Seattle, 1975.

You sons of freedom,

joyful companions,

merrily sail on your way!

Though you may scorn me,

you'll serve me soon,

the Nibelung's son.

-- singing translation by Andrew Porter,

used in our English-language recording

[1]

[Suggestion: Dial back the volume on [1]; my source is loud (and noisy).]
[2]

[3]

[4 (in English)]

Patience, Hagen fans! Credits for the performances will appear in due time.

by Ken

Not a "whistle a happy tune" kind of guy is our Hagen.

One of the above performances is very much not like the others, and I'm not thinking about the difference in language between our first performance and the others. I've intentionally omitted identification of the performances so we can focus on the performances themselves, but be assured that eventually they'll be fully identified, when we'll also clarify another, even more obvious trick embedded in the layout of the performances. For now, I'm just curious whether the difference I have in mind will be as obvious to other listeners.

Now, this isn't literally our meeting with Hagen, as might have been assumed from the post title. That occurred roughly 40 minutes earlier in Götterdämmerung, at the start of Act I -- and we need to remember that Act I isn't the start of Götterdämmerung, inseparably attached as it is to the roughly 40-minute Prologue, counting the extraordinary orchestral bridge known as "Siegfried's Rhine Journey," which takes us from the ecstasies of Brünnhilde's sendoff to her beloved Siegfried, as he sets out on his journey on the Rhine, to the more workaday world of the Gibichungs, specifically the king and queen of the Gibichungs, the brother and sister Gunther and Gutrune, and their half-brother (same mother, different fathers) Hagen.

(According to present plan -- and for those of you who are new to these parts, "plans" hereabouts have a way of, er, mutating -- we are eventually going to hear our initial encounter with Hagen.)

Let's hop on the boat with Siegfried for his "Rhine Journey"!

Ohmygosh, it's turned into Garrulous Old Moneygrubbers' Week here at Sunday Classics --or has it?

NOTE: If the audio clips don't all load, try refreshing the post -- more than once if necessary. They're all ready and waiting.

His chance encounter-at-sea with the mysterious -- and rich as all get-out -- Dutchman (Darren Jeffery) gives Daland (Steven Gallop) ideas about his marriageable daughter's future, in Melbourne's 2019 Flying Dutchman.


CAUTIONARY NOTE ABOUT THIS SET OF AUDIO CLIPS: They're all, er, special, in a particular way, and are here for a reason. (Okay, okay: We might call these "Garrulous Old Moneygrubbers' versions.") If your ears and brain are screaming, "Yuck, I can't stand it!," farther down we've got a heap of clips, of both selections, that are special in a way different way. -- Ed.

BEETHOVEN: Fidelio: Act I, Rocco, "Hat man nicht auch Gold beineben" ("If you don't have money too")

[FOR ENGLISH TEXT, SCROLL DOWN IN POST]


Kurt Böhme (bs), Rocco; Vienna Philharmonic, Lorin Maazel, cond. Decca, recorded March 1964

Herbert Alsen (bs), Rocco; Vienna Philharmonic, Wilhelm Furtwängler, cond. Live performance from the Salzburg Festival, Aug. 3, 1948

WAGNER: The Flying Dutchman: Act II, Daland, "Mein Kind, du siehst mich" ("My child, you see me") . . . "Mögst du, mein Kind" ("Might you, my child")

[FOR ENGLISH TEXT, SCROLL DOWN IN POST]


["Mögst du, mein Kind" at 1:43] Josef Greindl (bs), Daland; Annelies Kupper (s), Senta; RIAS Symphony Orchestra (Berlin), Ferenc Fricsay, cond. DG, recorded 1952

["Mögst du, mein Kind" at 1:45] Josef Greindl (bs), Daland; Anja Silja (s), Senta; Bayreuth Festival Orchestra, Wolfgang Sawallisch, cond. Philips, recorded live, August 1961

by Ken

We've got so many balls hanging precariously in the air that I was really hoping we snatch and ground one or two this week. Instead we're tossing up another.

The obvious follow-up to the "post-taste" I offered earlier today (or maybe it was yesterday -- you know, one of those days in there), which included performances of Beethoven's Creatures of Prometheus Overture, would have been something I've had in mind for several weeks, for some point in the future: a look into the mystery of the master's overture-making skills, as reflected in the four specimens he created over that nine-year period for Fidelio, which include two gems and -- yes, I'm going to use the word -- two duds.

First page of the Fidelio Overture

The mystery becomes a little less mysterious when we factor in that, as I pointed out in the post-taste, while by 1805 the 35-year-old Beethoven had already have produced a large body of music of a high level of mastery in a wide variety of genres, as an overture-writer he was still a novice, whereas by 2014, when he sealed the deal with the fourth and final overture for the opera, the one we know as the Fidelio Overture, he was one of music's all-time master overturists. What may be most amazing is that in his second attempt at an operatic overture, as early as 1806, he gave us what may not be a useful operatic curtain-raiser but nevertheless is one of the great masterpieces of music. And then he produced a real dud. Maybe it just goes to show that by and large "easy" wasn't in Beethoven's working vocabulary.

Again, though, this was a subject for the future -- no way it was going to be doable on the spot, even if I curtailed the plan I'd roughed out, which would have included hearing all of the canonical Beethoven overtures.

Similarly, I didn't see any way of jumping from where we are to the lesson of Fidelio.


WHAT WE'RE DOING, THOUGH, ISN'T UNRELATED

Karl Ridderbusch as the King in "Lohengrin" -- this is what's now called "shouting"???

ELSA has appeared in a very simple white garment and overwhelmed the assembled nobles with the purity and innocence of her bearing. Now KING HEINRICH tries to get, well, anything at all out of her regarding the disappearance of her little brother Gottfired, which she is accused of being responsible for.

KING HEINRICH: Are you she, Elsa of Brabant?
[ELSA nods her head affirmatively.]
Do you recognize me as your judge?
[ELSA turns her head toward the KING, looks him in the eye, and then affirms with a trust-filled gesture.]
Then I ask you further:
Is the charge known to you,
which has been brought so weightily against you?
[ELSA glances at TELRAMUND and ORTRUD, shudders, bows her head sadly, and affirms.]
What do you have to say against the charge?
[ELSA through a gesture: "Nothing!"]
So you acknowledge your guilt?
ELSA [staring sadly for a long time around her]: My poor brother!
ALL THE MEN: How wondrous! What strange behavior!
KING HEINRICH: Speak, Elsa, what do you have to confide to me?

by Ken

Can't somebody get that damned Ridderbusch fellow to stop ferchrissakes shouting? (This is a very tiny joke, which I'll explain in a moment.)

This two-minute-plus extract comes from what is still my favorite Lohengrin recording, the 1971 DG studio version conducted by Sunday Classics stalwart Rafael Kubelik. In it we hear Karl Ridderbusch in his matchless prime as King Heinrich and Gundula Janowitz singing Elsa's single line, one of the most haunting lines in opera, "Mein armer Bruder. (I had thought of doing a collage of maybe ten singers singing it, but do you have any idea how much time editing such a thing would have taken?) If there are two more beautiful, riveting minutes of music anywhere in the recorded annals, I don't know what they are.

Since we last dipped into Lohengrin, this past February in the "Remembering Eugen Jochum" posts that included excerpts from his 1954 Bayreuth performance, I've gotten hold of a CD edition of the Kubelik-DG recording, which I had only on LP and open-reel tape, and my admiration is if anything greater than ever. I think the Act I Prelude is an excellent example.

WAGNER: Lohengrin: Prelude to Act I

Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Rafael Kubelik, cond. DG, recorded April 1971

We've heard some beautiful performances of the Lohengrin Prelude. In that February post, for example, we heard one by Sir Adrian Boult. But I'm not sure I've ever heard a fuller, more pulsing-with-life one than Kubelik's. And this is true of the Lohengrin performance as a whole. I'm not sure people generally appreciate just how difficult an opera this is to make musical and dramatic sense of, and Kubelik's performance has a riveting continuity I've never heard matched in a lifetime that has included a lot of Lohengrin performances. (Curiously, Kubelik's 1967 Bavarian Radio broadcast Meistersinger, which acquired a legend before anyone without archival access was able to hear it, and which to my ears turns out to be crashingly ordinary, is praised to the skies by the online cognoscenti.)


IT WAS, IN FACT, A BIZARRE ONLINE REVIEW OF THIS
RECORDING THAT TRIGGERED THIS SERIES OF POSTS

Father's Day special -- Wagner's Daland usually knows better than to trust in the wind

DALAND: [coming down from the cliff]:
No doubt! Seven miles away
the storm has driven us from safe port.
So near our goal after a long voyage,
this trick was saved up for me!
STEERSMAN [on board, shouting through cupped hands]:
Ho! Captain!
DALAND: On board with you -- how goes it?
STEERSMAN [as before]: Good, captain!
We have firm grounding.
DALAND: It's Sandwike! I know the bay well.
[0:53] Damn! I already saw my house on the shore.
Senta, my child, I imagined myself already embracing.
Then came this blast from the depths of hell.
Who trusts in wind trusts in Satan's mercy.
Who trusts in wind trusts in Satan's mercy,
trusts in Satan's mercy.
[He goes on board the ship.]
There's no help for it! Patience! The storm is abating;
so fierce a storm couldn't last long.
[On board] Hey, lads! Your watch was long --
to rest then! I'm not concerned anymore.
[The sailors go below deck on the ship.]
Now, steersman, will you take the watch for me?
There's no danger, but it's good if you keep watch.
STEERSMAN: Be without worry! Sleep peacefully, captain!
[DALAND goes into his cabin. The STEERSMAN is alone on deck. The storm has abated somewhat and returns only at sporadic intervals. The waves are still rough on the open sea. The STEERSMAN makes his round once more, then sits down near the rudder. He yawns, then rouses himself as sleep comes over him.]

Karl Ridderbusch (bs), Daland; Harald Ek (t), Steersman; Bayreuth Festival Orchestra, Karl Böhm, cond. DG, recorded live, 1971

by Ken

In Friday night's preview we met the Norwegian sea captain Daland in happy homecoming mode, in Act II of The Flying Dutchman -- not just happy to be returning to his home and his beloved daugher Senta from an unusually perilous voyage with life and limbs intact, but returning in the company of a stranger, met under extraordinary circumstances, who is the best son-in-law material fate could have sent his way.

Now we're returning, not quite to Act I curtain rise (we'll get there in a moment), but to the brush with death, for him and his crew, that Daland has just survived thanks to a combination of luck and his own nautical skill. With his ship becalmed but safe just off the coast, not far from home, he berates himself for having, incredibly foolishly, let slip his guard against the vagaries of fate. The section we're especially concerned with here is the highlighted one, where for the first time he indulges in sustained singing, when he recalls that literally within sight of home, already imagining himself there, with Senta in his arms, he was beset by a violent storm outburst that caught him almost tragically unprepared.

This extraordinary little set piece he sings is at once one of the most vivid examples I know of the way music, and in particular vocal music, can be used to create character and dramatic urgency and one of the most challenging but potentially rewarding pieces of vocal writing I know. And I've never heard anyone do it fuller justice than Karl Ridderbusch in this live performance from the 1971 Bayreuth Festival.

He sings high, he sings low; he sings with unmatched power and unrivaled delicacy; he attacks every pitch dead-on while binding phrases with ravishing tone and dramatic sweep. Above all he really does sing every note, filling out each syllable with the ravishing sound of a great bass voice under complete, sculpting phrases with seemingly effortless control.

To be perhaps a little clearer, I though we'd listen to this amazing scene chunk again, in an assortment of performances that I consider admirable in many respects (much better than the average one encounters; it would be too easy to make the case with that sort of performance), and then listen to Ridderbusch's again.

WAGNER: The Flying Dutchman: Act I, Daland, "Kein Zweifel! Sieben Meilen fort" ("No doubt! Seven miles away")

Preview: Father's Day special -- meet the sea captain Daland (with UPDATE: Overture!)

In Act II of Wagner's Flying Dutchman, the sea captain Daland has just walked into his home on the rugged Norwegian coast following a harrowing voyage with a near-fatal landing, as we witnessed in Act I. Here bass Karl Ridderbusch as Daland exhorts his daughter, Senta, to welcome the guest he's brought home with him (from a Rome Radio broadcast performance conducted by Wolfgang Sawallisch, February 15, 1969).

DALAND: Would you, my child, bid this stranger welcome?
A sailor is he, like me; he asks our hospitality.
Long without homeland, always on far, long journeys,
in foreign lands he has gained great wealth.
Banished from his fatherland,
for a home he will pay richly.
Say, Senta, would it displease you
if this stranger stays with us?
[SENTA nods her approval. DALAND turns to the DUTCHMAN.]
Say, did I praise her too much?
You see her yourself -- does she please you?
Should I let my praises yet overflow?
Admit, she is an ornament to her sex.
[The DUTCHMAN makes a gesture of approval.]
Would you, my child, show yourself well-disposed to this man?
He also asks for the beautiful gift of your heart.
If you give him your hand, you are to call him bridegroom.
If you heed your father, tomorrow he'll be your husband.
[SENTA makes a convulsive, painful movement. DALAND produces some jewelry and shows it to his daughter.]
See this ring, see these bracelets!
What he owns makes this meager.
Mustn't you, dear child, long for it?
It's yours if you exchange rings.
[SENTA, without paying any attention to him, doesn't take her eyes off the DUTCHMAN, who likewise, without listening to DALAND, is absorbed in contemplating her. DALAND becomes aware of this; he looks at them both.]
But neither speaks . . . Am I not wanted here?
So it is! I'd best leave them alone.
[To SENTA] May you win this noble man!
Believe me, such look won't happen again.
[To the DUTCHMAN] Stay here alone! I'll go away.
Believe me, however beautiful, she is that faithful.
[He goes out slowly, watching them both with pleased surprise. SENTA and the DUTCHMAN are alone. Long pause.]

by Ken

This week's post has come about in an even more than usually roundabout way, triggered by a comment I was startled to encounter online about a performance by the bass we just heard, Karl Ridderbusch -- a comment so bizarrely off the mark that it made me wonder whether it tells us something about the way at least some latter-day listeners hear singing.

The comment pertained to Ridderbusch's first commercial recording of King Heinrich in Wagner's Lohengrin, but it soon occurred to me that the discussion should be expanded to include his Daland in The Flying Dutchman as well. Then it occurred to me that the discussion might more sensibly begin with The Flying Dutchman, and finally it occurred to me that we could hardly have a more appropriate subject for the Father's Day weekend.

THIS IS ONE OF THOSE PIECES I'VE BEEN KNOWN
TO LISTEN TO OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN