We need music! Now, I was thinking about Mahler's "Die zwei blauen Augen," the last of the four Wayfarer Songs --

Plus: We have a special musical bonus at the end!

Want a hint? I'll go you one better: Here's an audio tease --



Now could we have a post (of some sort?)


Irmgard Seefried sings Richard Strauss's "Morgen!," Op. 27, No. 4, in the composer's own orchestration, with Piero Bellugi conducting the Orchestre National de l'ORTF in Paris's Salle Pleyel, Jan. 20, 1965. Note -- as the camera does! -- the soloist playing the violin solos around which Strauss built his orchestration of the song. Isn't it interesting that in January 1965 the Orchestre National, at least for this concert, had a female concertmaster?

by Ken

This is a time, it seems to me, when we need more music. So that's pretty much what we're going to do today.

WHERE WE ARE NOW, BLOG-WISE?

Yes, I know we've got a growing tangle of loose threads, and I hope gradually to work our way through them. I'm even adding a couple of more. Last week's two-item "Rita Gorr sings Gluck" mini-compendium led me to want to listen to her performances of those two arias (Orfeo's "Che farò senza Euridice?" and Alceste's "Divinités du Styx") in context with other singers', to get a better sense of why Gorr's mean so much to me. As I've played with this, the project has become more and more intriguing, as to what makes these arias work and not work, so I still want to pursue this.

What's more, the SC vault has a good helping of Gorr as Saint-Saëns's Dalila, and a couple of snatches of her Walküre Fricka, which I want to bring out. And considering that I made particular reference to these roles along with Verdi's Amneris, I'd like to add some samples of that to what shapes up as yet another post.

AS FOR TODAY, WE NEED MUSIC NOW, DON'T WE?

Like it says up top, during the week I found myself thinking about, and hearing in my head, "Die zwei blauen Augen, the last of Mahler's four Songs of a Wayfarer, a song to which we once devoted a good deal of attention, icluding most of a post of its own (see below). I vaguely recalled that I had the Wayfarer Songs on a DVD of some sort, and finally tracked it down to an extremely miscellaneous one that EMI issued in its "Classic Archive" series, which they couldn't find a better way of titling than:

Schwarzkopf    Seefried
Fischer-Dieskau

Which is (let the record show) absolutely accurate. We get soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf in an October 1961 staged-for-TV excerpt from her most famous role, the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier, giving us the final chunk of Act I, starting in the middle of the Marschallin's great monologue, at "Kann ich auch an ein Mädel erinnern"her sudden, haunting recollection of her innocent younger self, "fresh from the convent," with mezzo Hertha Töpper (who died just a week ago Saturday, a few weeks short of her 96th birthday); then soprano Irmgard Seefried is seen in two orchestral song groups via French TV: five by Richard Strauss from January 1965, including the "Morgen!" performance atop this post, and three by Mahler; and Dietrich Fischer Dieskau singing -- yes! -- Mahler's Wayfarer Songs from Japan's NHK, October 1960, with an outstanding Mahlerian, Paul Kletzki conducting. (There's also a Fischer-Dieskau "bonus": four core-repertory Schubert songs from 1959, with the great Gerald Moore at the piano.)


I WOUND UP WATCHING EVERYTHING ON THE DVD

"The secret of life is revealed to them in it," says the Composer of his "Ariadne auf Naxos"

"Das Geheimnis des Lebens tritt an sie heran, nimmt sie bei der Hand" ("The secret of life is revealed to them in it, takes them by the hand")


Sena Jurinac (s), Composer; Vienna Philharmonic, Erich Leinsdorf, cond. RCA-Decca, recorded 1958

Tatiana Troyanos (ms), Composer; San Francisco Opera Orchestra, János Ferencsik, cond. Live performance, Oct. 28, 1977

Irmgard Seefried (s), Composer; Vienna Philharmonic, Karl Böhm, cond. Live performance from the Salzburg Festival, Aug. 7, 1954

Julia Varady (s), Composer; Gewandhaus Orchestra (Leipzig), Kurt Masur, cond. Philips, recorded January 1988

by Ken

This is, in case you hadn't guessed, once again the possibly over-earnest Composer, in the Prologue to Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal's Ariadne auf Naxos, having just heard that a little comedy dance entertainment is to be given following the premiere of his new opera seria, Ariadne on Naxos, here in the home of the richest man in Vienna.

This 10-11 seconds of music is one of those infinitely deep-reaching musical nuggets we've been encountering all through the Prologue to Ariadne -- for that matter, all through the opera as a whole -- which lodge in the most intimate recesses of the mind and don't let go. Lately we've been focusing more on the comic view of life represented in the opera by the grand comedienne Zerbinetta and her quartet of commedia dell'arte players, as against the view embodied in the plight of the abandoned Ariadne as argued by her deeply feeling Composer. Now I think we need to return to the Composer's point of view.


NOW LET'S HEAR OUR NUGGET IN CONTEXT

Richard Strauss: "Music is a holy art," sings Strauss's Composer -- plus Two (out of Four) Last Songs, part 1

"What is music then?"


The question is asked at 0:28 of this concluding clip of the Prologue to Ariadne auf Naxos -- asked and then answered by the composer of the about-to-be-performed "opera seria" (Sena Jurinac), as filmed at the 1965 Salzburg Festival, directed by Günther Rennert and conducted by Karl Böhm (with Paul Schoeffler, nearly 68, as the Music Master; in a moment we'll hear him 21 years earlier).

COMPOSER: What is music then?
[With almost drunken solemnity] Music is a holy art, which brings together all men of courage, like cherubim around a shining throne, and for this reason it is the holiest of the arts. Holy music!
[ZERBINETTA appears at the back and calls her partners onto the stage. HARLEKIN comes hastily out of the room on the right, buckling his belt as he runs onstage.]
What is that? From where?
[SCARAMUCCIO enters, like HARLEKIN finishing his dressing as he comes.]
These creatures!
[TRUFFALDIN and BRIGHELLA enter.]
In my holy sanctuary cutting their capers! Ah!
MUSIC MASTER: You allowed it!
COMPOSER [furious]: I ought not to have allowed it; you shouldn't have allowed me to allow it! Who told you to drag me into this world? Let me freeze, starve, die in my own!
[He runs off in despair. The MUSIC MASTER looks after him, shaking his head.]

-- English translation by Peggie Cochrane

Julia Varady (s), Composer; Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (b), Music Master; Gewandhaus Orchestra (Leipzig), Kurt Masur, cond. Philips, recorded January 1988

Imrgard Seefried (s), Composer; Paul Schoeffler (bs-b), Music Master; Vienna State Opera Orchestra, Karl Böhm, cond. Live performance in honor of Strauss's 80th birthday, June 11, 1944

Tatiana Troyanos (ms), Composer; Paul Schoeffler (bs-b), Music Master; Vienna State Opera Orchestra, Karl Böhm, cond. Live performance, Nov. 29, 1967

[in English] Janet Baker (ms), Composer; Malcolm Donnelly (b), Music Master; Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Norman Del Mar, cond. Live performance from Glasgow's Theater Royal, 1977

by Ken

In last week's post, "Why won't everyone just let poor abandoned Ariadne die in peace?," as we focused on the two-part monologue of the title character of Hugo von Hofmannsthal's Ariadne auf Naxos, one thing I was constantly on the verge of saying was: Just listen to the epic, unrestrained gorgeousness of this music. For sheer unrestrained gorgeousness, I'm not sure I know anything like it in all of music. Somehow, though, I managed to leave it to the music to speak for itself.

Last week we were stressing the "serious" side of Ariadne -- without, I hope, completely losing sight (or sound) of the comic side, because it's the combination of the two that make the opera, in its revised 1916 form, with the Prologue added, such a treasure -- treasured not least by its composer. It wasn't an accident that it was chosen to honor Strauss on his 80th birthday, via the performance from which we heard the whole Prologue in the October 11 post "Meet the composer, Richard Strauss-style."


"MUSIC IS A HOLY ART"

Sunday Classics snapshots: Meet the composer, Richard Strauss-style

The first part of the Prologue to Ariadne auf Naxos, with Paul Schoeffler as the Music Master and Sena Jurinac as the Composer (we're going to hear the radiant Jurinac in her glorious 1958 studio recording, which I've described as the best recorded performance I know of any operatic role, and Schoeffler in a 1944 live performance), staged by Günter Rennert and conducted by Karl Böhm, filmed at Salzburg in 1965 -- the remaining four parts are also on YouTube.

by Ken

It was a long, arduous path from conception to ultimate creation, the strange entertainment concocted by Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, his librettist on two previous, wildly different operas, Elektra and Der Rosenkavalier, in collaboration with the great stage director Max Reinhardt, who had collaborated with them on Rosenkavalier.

The original idea was to provide a half-hour musical entertainment to be inserted in an adaptation (by Hofmannsthal) for Reinhardt of Molière's Le bourgeois gentilhomme. Not surprisingly, the half-hour entertainment grew and grew, until it was a weird one-act opera that -- despite being scored for chamber orchestra -- would tax the vocal resources of the greatest opera houses. And it combined two seemingly uncombinable art forms: a deeply serious opera seria that is observed, commented on, and eventually intruded on by a troupe of commedia dell'arte musical comedians. And of course it was imprisoned inside the play, and constitued too much opera for playgoers and too much play for operagoers.

Long story short: Eventually Hofmannsthal and Strauss liberated Ariadne by creating a Prologue, set backstage in the room of the home of the richest man in Vienna where the evening's entertainment is shortly to be performed. And they created the character of the Composer, the creator of a deeply serious opera seria. The new Prologue not only explains how these two wildly different entertainments came to be scheduled for the same evening's entertainment (and, eventually, how they come to be combined) but creates for us the world of a theatrical backstage. (The always-practical Strauss arranged an orchestral suite from the incidental music he had written for the play, in its German guise as Der Bürger als Edelmann.)

We've already heard the very opening of the Prologue -- still scored for chamber orchestra, as the original opera-intermezzo was.

R. STRAUSS: Ariadne auf Naxos: Prologue: Orchestral introduction


Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Karl Böhm, cond. Live performance, Mar. 28, 1970


AS THE CURTAIN RISES ON THE PROLOGUE --