You remember those clips of Siegmund's monologue I mentioned?* Just for laughs, let's see what happens if I try to "publish" them

"A sword my father promised me": Stuart Skelton as Siegmund, so starkly alone and defenseless, literally and figuratively in the dark, in Seattle, 2012 (set by Thomas Lynch, photo by Elise Bakketun)

by Ken

Okay, this is maybe actually just possibly working, in a very limited way.*

[*To understand what I'm talking about, you would need to have read my earlier doom-engulfed outpouring. I'm not necessarily recommending it, I'm just saying.]

Much to my surprise, we've got the Walküre clips posted (I'll bet you thought I was making it up, about having them made and ready to go!), and I've successfully -- as far as I can tell -- taken the further step of adding the promised English texts, though typographically I can't help feeling that this is sort of the way Ben Franklin would have cobbled his blog together. Still, if it works, it works! (You'll notice that I've even managed to add images to the previous post and this one.) There's time ahead for contemplating the implications, if any.

So let's go ahead, in pursuit of our listening project, and listen to Siegmund's monologue from Act I of Die Walküre; then we'll rehear Florestan's Act II monologue from Fidelio sung by the same three tenors. The idea is to see whether, and in what ways, we can hear the strong vocal kinship between the roles of Florestan and Siegmund. First off, we're hearing, twice each, probably the two most notable Siegmunds since Melchior, Jon Vickers and James King, and then we'll hear no-sort-of-dramatic-tenor at all but instead that jack-of-all-tenor-trades Plácido Domingo.

The plan then, in the event that we can actually get away with this much madness, is to retrieve from last week's post ("The Minister is coming! The Minister is coming! Don Fernando and the lesson of Fidelio, Part 2) the Vickers, King, and Domingo performances of Florestan's monologue.

NOTE ON THE EDITING OF THE AUDIO CLIPS: This bothered me while I was doing it, and it bothers me now. Normally with multiple clips of a selection, I try to make them start and stop at pretty much the same points. In this case, though, with all six sources containing Siegmund's monologue by itself on a single CD track, in the interest of sanity I just went with the CD track placements; doing otherwise would have involved having, for all six versions, the preceding and following tracks at hand in case it proved necessary to edit in bits from them. I sorta wish I'd done it that way. (On second thought, maybe not. As it turns out, the clips start in pretty much the same place, though the King-Böhm and Domingo-Barenboim go back a bit farther. More importantly, the King-Böhm continues on significantly farther, and if I'd done the editing as per "rule" it might regrettably not have -- see below.)

WAGNER: Die Walküre: Act I, Scene 2, Siegmund's monologue
("Ein Schwert verhiess mir der Vater")

The Minister is coming! The Minister is coming! Don Fernando and the lesson of Fidelio, Part 2

Welcome to what we might call "The Florestan Test"
We should talk about this at some point, but these two points in Florestan's monologue crystallize what separates him from the normal run of humans.

Moment 1
Note especially: the vocal and orchestral explosion on "Ketten" ("chains")
[NOTE: We pick up here in bar 3 and continue just into bar 8.]




Jon Vickers (t), Florestan; Berlin Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan, cond. EMI, recorded 1970

Moment 2
Note especially: Florestan's emphatic repetitions of "Pflicht" ("duty")
[NOTE: Our clip runs from bar 2 to the start of the Poco Allegro.]



Jon Vickers (t), Florestan; Covent Garden Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, cond. Testament, recorded live, Feb. 24, 1961

by Ken

Where we are: Last week we took time off from the inquiry we began the week before into the minister Don Fernando and his literally life-saving arrival in the nick of time in the final scene of Fidelio "The Minister is coming! The Minister is coming! Don Fernando and the lesson of Fidelio, Part 1"): Who is he? What's right and what's wrong with his miraculous arrival? And what does it all mean for us? We paused to take a closer look at the protagonists for whom the Minister's arrival means miraculous rescue, Leonore Florestan and her imprisoned and near-death husband.

We did that by means of reconstituting a 2012 Sunday Classics post, in a preview, "Put these two little orchestral excerpts together, and you'll know the subject of this week's main post," and main post, "Meet the Florestans, Beethoven's supercouple." Which was okay as far as it went; it just didn't go far enough. Notably we looked, as we did in 2012, at Florestan's Act II-opening dungeon monologue, breaking it into several parts and hearing an assortment of tenors tackle them. What I really wanted to do, and had wanted to back in 2012, was to look at the monologue almost word by word, musical emphasis by musical emphasis, and that's what I aimed to do today.

It hasn't worked out, so for now the two examples will have to serve. I'm not going to go so far as to say that Florestan's monologue,definitely including the spiritually as well as physically gloom-and-doom-ridden orchestral introduction, is the most remarkable music ever written. I will say that I don't know of any more remarkable music.


SO HERE'S WHAT I PROPOSE --