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

Preview: What a difference a top-quality bass makes as King Heinrich in "Lohengrin"

WAGNER: Lohengrin: Act I: Royal Herald, "Gott richtet euch nach Recht und Fug" ("God will pass rightful judgment on you") . . . King Heinrich, "Mein Herr und Gott" ("My Lord and God")

ROYAL HERALD [to LOHENGRIN and TELRAMUND]:
God will pass rightful judgment,
so trust in Him, not in your own strength!
LOHENGRIN and TELRAMUND [standing opposite each other, outside the circle]:
God will pass rightful judgment on me,
so I shall trust in Him, not in my own strength!
KING HEINRICH [proceeding to the middle with great ceremony]: My Lord and God, I call upon you
[Everyone bares their head in deepest reverence]
to be present at this fight!
Proclaim through the sword's victory a verdict
that clearly shows what is deceit and what is truth!
May he who is innocent fight with the arm of a hero,
and may he who is false be sapped of strength!
So help us God in this hour,
for our wisdom is but folly!

PERFORMANCE A

PERFORMANCE B

PERFORMANCE C


by Ken

What we have here are three performances of the King's great prayer near the end of Act I of Lohengrin -- performances widely spaced in time, by basses who were all highly regarded in their times, and also widely spaced in quality, ranging from the near-sublime to the near-ridiculous. We'll hear them again in a moment, with proper identifications.

But first I should explain that when we first dipped into Wagner's Flying Dutchman last month ("Preview: Father's Day special -- meet the sea captain Daland" and "Father's Day special -- Wagner's Daland usually knows better than to trust in the wind"), the idea was to focus on the outstanding German bass Karl Ridderbusch in his glorious prime, in two great performances, as Daland in Dutchman and as the King in Lohengrin. Then I got sidetracked into "A little more of The Flying Dutchman -- we hear from the sailors" (preview) and "In The Flying Dutchman Wagner shows there's more than one way to get from Act I to Act II and from Act II to Act III." Well, around here that's always a risk.

This week I want to proceed to Ridderbusch's King Heinrich der Vogler, and we'll get there Sunday, but first I wanted to hit the King's two vocal high points.. We started with the King's stupendous invocation near the end of Act I, initiating the trial by combat between the unknown knight who has fallen from the heavens to defend Elsa of Brabant, accused of causing the disappearance of her little brother, Gottfried, and her accuser, her and Gottfried's guardian, the Brabantine noble Friedrich of Telramund.

NOW LET'S HEAR AND IDENTIFY OUR THREE PERFORMANCES

Sunday Classics chronicles: Remembering Eugen Jochum (4) -- Overtures Plus, part 2 (Wagner's "Lohengin" and "Parsifal")

Is there anyone who doesn't know this music?

As you probably know, the world's best-known wedding march isn't a wedding march at all. Elsa and her unknown knight were married at the end of Act II of Lohengrin. Here, at the start of Act III, they're being escorted to their bridal chamber. The 1954 Bayreuth Festival Chorus and Orchestra are conducted by our man of the hour, Eugen Jochum.

by Ken

We're forging ahead with our remembrance of that wonderful conductor Eugen Jochum (1902-1987) -- wearing his concert hat in Part 1 and Part 2 (devoted to his Haydn and Bruckner) and now his opera conductor's chapeau in Part 3 (snatches of Weber's Der Freiscütz and Beethoven's Fidelio) and today's installment -- and we still haven't gotten to his Mozart, which is where I was trying to get us. I thought maybe we'd throw in a little Boris Godunov too. But not today; we have too much to do. (And as usual it will look like we're doing more than we actually are, because the texts consume so much space relative to the amount of music they cover.)

One of the recordings I acquired recently -- one of the sources of the "archival" recordings we're featuring in these "chronicles" posts -- wasn't actually new to me. I just didn't have it on CD. It's Jochum's 1954 Bayreuth Lohengrin. (He actually made a studio recording of the opera around the same time, but it's not one of his happiest achievements. Perhaps even he, who often coaxed surprisingly successful results from dubious-looking casts, could do much with that one.)

In a late decision, we're not even going to get to our other Wagnerian destination: Jochum's extraordinarily beautiful 1971 Bayreuth Parsifal, which we sampled in the March 2010 post "Good Wagner conductors find what inside the music makes it move." I'd rather do that another time.

I'm calling these posts "Overtures Plus" because we're hearing a number of overtures and preludes that -- like the two we heard Friday night -- are also familiar as concert pieces. And I thought we'd start by hearing the Lohengrin Act I and Act III Preludes performed as concert pieces. While I actually do have Jochum studio versions, they're mono, so I thought we'd bring in some ringers.

We already heard this performance of the exhilarating Act III Prelude -- in the "Good Wagner conductors post.

WAGNER: Lohengrin:
Prelude to Act III

Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, cond. EMI, recorded February-March 1960

That's quite a "wow" piece, but if we go back to the start of the opera, to "the Prelude to Lohengrin, we encounter something even more astonishing, not least for those ethereally shimmering strings. (This is a performance we haven't heard before, from the remarkably beautiful series of Wagner orchestral LPs Sir Adrian Boult recorded in the early '70s. We already heard the Siegfried Idyll from this series in a March 2011 post on the piece.)