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 troubles of Fricka and Wotan, part 3: Golden apples or no, these gods sure have grown older (preliminary version)

Christa Ludwig as Fricka and James Morris as
Wotan in Das Rheingold, at the Met in 1994

Remember these bits, which we heard back in the first installment of our expanded listen to mezzo Yvonne Minton?

FRICKA: (1) Dearest sister, sweetest delight,
are you restored to me?
(2) See how our pure one stands humiliated and ashamed:
her anguished look mutely pleads for release.
Wicked man, to ask this of a loved one!

-- from Scene 4 (the final scene) of Das Rheingold

Yvonne Minton (ms), Fricka; Staatskapelle Dresden, Marek Janowski, cond. Eurodisc-BMG, recorded Dec. 8-11, 1980


Irene Dalis (ms), Fricka; Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Erich Leinsdorf, cond. Live performance, Dec. 16, 1961


Mignon Dunn (ms), Fricka; Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Sixten Ehrling, cond. Live performance, Feb. 15, 1975


Christa Ludwig (ms), Fricka; Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, James Levine, cond. DG, recorded Apr.-May 1988
[To clarify: While we later heard singers besides Ms. Minton sing these bits (in longer clips), this is our first hearing of Dalis, Dunn, and Ludwig in this music.]

by Ken

O course by the end of Das Rheingold Wotan, at the cost of forking over both the Tarnhelm and the Ring, has earned back his sister-in-law, Freia, from the custody of the Giants Fasolt and Fafner, which presumably means that the gods will once again have free access to the golden apples, the golden apples that grow in Freia's garden, which have heretofore kept them perpetually young. And so, once again, they should in theory no longer be aging.

Except that, with the passage of time and the accumulation of life experience, they clearly do age in at least some ways.

Now hear this:

FRICKA [pausing with dignity before WOTAN]:
Here in the mountains where you hide
to escape your wife's view,
here in solitude I seek you out,
that you may promise me help.
WOTAN: What troubles Fricka,
let her announce freely.
FRICKA: I have learned of Hunding's distress;
he called on me for vengeance:
the guardian of wedlock heard him,
promised severely to punish the deed
of the shameless impious pair
who so boldly wronged the husband.

-- Fricka's next appearance, in Act II of Die Walküre

Yvonne Minton (ms), Fricka; Theo Adam (bs-b), Wotan; Staatskapelle Dresden, Marek Janowski, cond. Eurodisc-BMG, recorded Aug. 22-29, 1981

Irene Dalis (ms), Fricka; Otto Edelmann (bs-b), Wotan; Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Erich Leinsdorf, cond. Live performance, Dec. 23, 1961

Mignon Dunn (ms), Fricka; Donald McIntyre (bs-b), Wotan; Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Sixten Ehrling, cond. Live performance, Mar. 1, 1975

Christa Ludwig (ms), Fricka; James Morris (bs-b), Wotan; Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, James Levine, cond. DG, recorded April 1987

Wow, that is one giant leap, for mankind and womankind and every other kind of kind. Though our second Rheingold bit above isn't quite the last thing we hear from Fricka in Das Rheingold, it's close. And the Walküre bit is definitely the first thing we hear from her following the long gap between the operas. In a bit we're going to be more precise about the contexts of all of our bits, which means going back over a stretch of interchange we already heard last week, this time breaking it down a bit, as we ponder the obvious question --


HOW THE HECK DID WE (AND OF COURSE
THEY) GET FROM POINT A TO POINT B?

Most of this is ready to go (at least I think it's most of it; these things rarely work out so easily, though), but for now I have to ask you to check back.

#

The troubles of Fricka and Wotan, part 2: He's always out making a big deal -- big deal!

from Scene 2 of Das Rheingold

FRICKA: A splendid dwelling, beautifully appointed,
might tempt you to tarry here and rest.
But you in building an abode
thought only of defenses and battlements.

Yvonne Minton (ms), Fricka; Staatskapelle Dresden, Marek Janowski, cond. Eurodisc-BMG, recorded Dec. 8-11, 1980

Mignon Dunn (ms), Fricka; Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Sixten Ehrling, cond. Live performance, Feb. 15, 1975

from Scene 4 of Das Rheingold

WOTAN [turning solemnly to FRICKA]:
Follow me, wife:
in Valhalla dwell with me.

Friedrich Schorr (b), Wotan; Berlin State Opera Orchestra, Leo Blech, cond. EMI, recorded June 17, 1927

Ferdinand Frantz (bs-b), Wotan; Vienna Symphony Orchestra, Rudolf Moralt, cond. Broadcast performance, 1948

by Ken

In the "The troubles of Fricka and Wotan, part 1: A tease for this week's post, spotlighting those troubles" (a follow-up to last week's "Yes, we're going to do a bit more Rheingold business, but first we have to solve a Mystery Baritone conundrum"), we heard a bunch of performances of the above snatches from the second and fourth of the four scenes of Das Rheingold, the first two installments in what I think of as a triptych of "Scenes from a Marriage" embedded in Wagner's Ring cycle: the Fricka-Wotan confrontations that reach their blow-out climax in Act II of Die Walküre.

I really tried to present both Fricka and Wotan at their human best, even if, in one of the two cases, that "best" exists mostly in the character's own head. As I mentioned in the "tease," I also tried hard to keep those moments just that, moments, but I promised that we would hear fuller, more contextual versions, and we will. First, however --

SHOULDN'T WE BACKTRACK TO ESTABLISH MORE
CLEARLY HOW WE GOT TO THIS POINT IN SCENE 2?

The troubles of Fricka and Wotan, part 1: A tease for this week's post, spotlighting those troubles

from Scene 2 of Das Rheingold:

FRICKA: A splendid dwelling, beautifully appointed,
might tempt you to tarry here and rest.
But you in building an abode
thought only of defenses and battlements.

Yvonne Minton (ms), Fricka; Staatskapelle Dresden, Marek Janowski, cond. Eurodisc-BMG, recorded Dec. 8-11, 1980

Irene Dalis (ms), Fricka; Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Erich Leinsdorf, cond. Live performance, Dec. 16, 1961

Mignon Dunn (ms), Fricka; Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Sixten Ehrling, cond. Live performance, Feb. 15, 1975

Regina Resnik (ms), Fricka; Bayreuth Festival Orchestra, Rudolf Kempe, cond. Live performance, July 26, 1961

from Scene 4 of Das Rheingold

WOTAN [turning solemnly to FRICKA]:
Follow me, wife:
in Valhalla dwell with me.

Friedrich Schorr (b), Wotan; Berlin State Opera Orchestra, Leo Blech, cond. EMI, recorded June 17, 1927

Rudolf Bockelmann (bs-b), Wotan; Berlin State Opera Orchestra, Franz Alfred Schmidt, cond. Telefunken, recorded Feb. 10, 1933

Ferdinand Frantz (bs-b), Wotan; Vienna Symphony Orchestra, Rudolf Moralt, cond. Broadcast performance, 1948

George London (bs-b), Wotan; Vienna Philharmonic, George Solti, cond. Decca, recorded September 1958

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (b), Wotan; Berlin Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan, cond. DG, recorded December 1967

by Ken

Really, I had enough audio files ready, and a sketchy but sufficiently conscious sense of where they were going to lead us, that I should have been able to put up at least some sort of tease for this week's post bright and early this morning. And yet I didn't. Instead I blew off my schedule for the day and instead spent it playing and weighing, making still more clips and contemplating different paths through them. For once I've kind of had fun doing it. That counts for something.

Even now I can't say for sure where exactly we're going to wind up, not to mention exactly how we're going to get there. Even once I decided on something like the above array of musical excerpts, they've undergone considerable mutation, mostly (perhaps not surprisingly) in the direction of expansion. But in the end I fought the temptation to let the basic clips grow. Though we'll hear longer versions of them, for now I want to limit them to just interestingly diverse iterations of these two very small but very powerful moments.

I'm pretty sure there's going to be a significant-size "main" post yet to come this week, and possibly in more than one installment. For now, however, I'm going with this. Enjoy these morsels.

#

Yes, we're going to do a bit more Rheingold business, but first we have to solve a Mystery Baritone conundrum

Our watchword for the day: Remember the Crams!

Showbiz greats Phil Silvers and Nancy Walker catch their breath during the recording of the cast album of the Styne-Comden-Green musical Do Re Mi -- on Jan. 8, 1961, say my sources, though it's often listed as "1960." (The show opened on Dec. 26, 1960.) Of course, what I'm calling "my sources" is actually the first Web page I found which gave an actual date, so who knows? I just now found a site that says: "First LP release: December 30, 1960." Hmm, that'd make for mighty tight scheduling if the recording didn't happen till Jan. 8.)

From the OBC recording session we're going to have a special little "Sunday Classics Do Re Mi suite," whose connection to our subject will, I hope, be clear. The suite will include this song that we heard Sunday:

STYNE-COMDEN-GREEN: Do Re Mi: "Take a job" (The Crams)

Nancy Walker and Phil Silvers (Kay and Hubie Cram), vocals; OBC recording, Lehman Engel, cond. RCA, recorded Jan. 8, 1961

by Ken

As noted in the post title, in this, the "actual" post for this week, we are going to transact a bit more Das Rheingold business, continuing from Sunday's "tease" post, but maybe not so much as I was thinking when I posted that tease.

I might say that thanks to the stratagem of the tease post, and to your kind indulgence, once I had the tease posted I was able to salvage one out of the two movies I had tickets for today in the Museum of the Moving Image's current "Curators' Choice 2018" series, and better still, it was a humdinger: Paul Dano's first film as director, Wildlife, adapted from the Richard Ford novel by him and his partner, Zoe Kazan, who were both on hand for a post-screening discussion along with two actors from the terrific cast.

As I mentioned we're going to hear a little "suite" of Do Re Mi excerpts, which I think is relevant to our area of food-service inquiry. In addition, though, while I was at my clip-making, I did a couple of additional Do Re Mi numbers, written for a legit baritone. One of these numbers is quite famous; Wikipedia lists 23 performers who have also recorded it.

Act I, "I know about love" (John Henry Wheeler)

Act II, "Make someone happy" (John Henry Wheeler)

Mystery baritone (John Henry Wheeler), vocals; OBC recording, Lehman Engel, cond. RCA, recorded Jan. 8, 1961


SO WHO IS OUR HAPPY-MAKING MYSTERY BARITONE?

A tease for this week's actual post, in which we hear more from Yvonne Minton (plus maybe, uh, some other stuff)

Yvonne Minton as the Rheingold Fricka in a production by . . . no, no, I can't try to pretend that this is one of those don't-mean-no-goddamn-thing modern-style misstagings. Actually, I did find a shot of YM as the Walküre Fricka -- a kind of funny-looking one, at that -- but I thought I'd best save that for the "real" post. No apologies for depicting her as the title character of Der Rosenkavalier, though -- as we heard in last week's post spotlighting "Four variously special singers," she was a radiant Octavian.

Now, speaking of the two Frickas --

"It's very difficult to do very much with Rheingold. One just looks dignified, and you just really do what the text dictates because [Fricka] never has more than two lines at a time. There are one or two really beautiful phrases, but they are very short."

-- Yvonne Minton, in a 1981 interview with Bruce Duffie, asked how
different the roles of Fricka in Das Rheingold and Die Walküre are

And I'd guess these are among those "really beautiful phrases" --

Dearest sister, sweetest delight,
are you restored to me?

See how our pure one stands humiliated and ashamed:
her anguished look mutely pleads for release.
Wicked man, to ask this of a loved one!

Yvonne Minton (ms), Fricka; Staatskapelle Dresden, Marek Janowski, cond. Eurodisc-BMG, recorded Dec. 8-11, 1980

by Ken

Yes, I know, you don't want to hear this week's litany of woes -- you know, all the difficulties and obstructions and whatnot. I think I know how a post of some sort will come together, and the two Frickas will be at the heart of it. So enjoy this hint, and this other maybe-sort-of-hint.

JULE STYNE with BETTY COMDEN and ADOLPH GREEN:
Do Re Mi: "Take a job"


Nancy Walker (Kay) and Phil Silvers (Hubie), vocals; Original Broadway Cast recording, Lehman Engel, cond. RCA, recorded 1961


NOT SERIOUS ENOUGH FOR YOU? OKIE-DOKE --

These four variously special singers -- Margaret Price (s), Yvonne Minton (ms), Alexander Young (t), and Justino Díaz (bs-b) -- share a particular connection

MONDAY EVENING UPDATE: The post still needs some filling in and filling out, even now that all the texts and our always-intended Yvonne Minton Wagner excerpt are in place. However, as noted below there's still a bunch of other stuff of Minton's we should really hear, now while we're listening -- and so too, at least to some extent, with the others. It has occurred to me, I'm afraid to say, that we may be facing an overtime situation, by which I have in mind, over the next few days, going into one or more overflow, or "bonus," posts. Uh-oh! -- Ken

The young Margaret Price amd Yvonne Minton

MOZART: Così fan tutte, K. 588: Act I, Duet, Fiordiligi and Dorabella, "Ah guarda, sorella"

[A garden by the seashore. FIORDILIGI and DORABELLA are both gazing at miniatures hanging round their necks.]

FIORDILIGI: Ah tell me, sister,
If one could ever find
A nobler face,
A sweeter mouth.
DORABELLA: Just look,
See what fire
Is in his eye,
If flames and darts
Do not seem to flash forth!
FIORDILIGI: This is the face
Of a soldier and a lover.
DORABELLA: This is a face
both charming and alarming.
FIORDILIGI and DORABELLA: How happy I am!
If ever my heart
changes its affection,
may love make me
live in pain.

Margaret Price (s), Fiordiligi; Yvonne Minton (ms), Dorabella; New Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, cond. EMI, recorded Jan.-Feb. 1971

by Ken

No, we're not finished with Salome. I've just gotten sidetracked. Hey, as occasional visitors know, it happens. (Frequent visitors know that it happens, um, frequently.) What caused it this time was an unscheduled encounter with a composer who shares with Richard Strauss a particular gift of imagination: the ability to conjure a startling range of musics, which really is what our Salome explorations have been about. I've usually thought of it, especially in an operatic composer, as a remarkable range of empathy -- the ability to imagine all his characters from the inside. But what good is identifying with those characters if you don't have the ability to create them in arrestingly individual musical ways?

We're not going to get to our mystery composer this week, because I thought we needed to fix in our heads the musical identities of the singers who were featured in this unexpected encounter: the SATB quartet (as noted in the post title) of soprano Margaret Price, mezzo Yvonne Minton, tenor Alexander Young, and bass-baritone Justino Díaz. So that's really all we're going to do this week, hear some vocal samples. And I thought we'd do it in voice-range order, high to low. In fact, we've already heard today from our "S" and "A," both of whom, in further fact, have made frequent Sunday Classics appearances.

MARGARET PRICE, soprano
(1941-2011),
born in Blackwood,
Monmouthshire, South Wales

Boy, have we heard a lot of Dame Margaret! The retrospective series that followed her passing in 2011 extended to at least a ninth part, with at least one more promised therein, to be devoted to Price as song-singer; neither my memory nor the archives provide conclusive evidence as to whether this ever happened. (If it did, I can't trace it.)

It's hard not to keep returning to her Fiordiligi in Otto Klemperer's 1971 recording of Così fan tutte, and I haven't tried very hard to resist. It was that recoding that made her an international sensation, and it's this earlier part of the Welsh soprano's career that's going to matter most for our present purposes. Not the very earliest part, which stretches back to 1962, when she made her operatic debut with Welsh National Opera as Cherubino in Mozart's Marriage of Figaro. The following year, at the ripe old age of 23, she made an unscheduled debut at Covent Garden, as a late replacement for Teresa Berganza, whom she was understudying. Then-Covent Garden music director Georg Solti apparently didn't want her in the company, saying she "lacks charm," and she was specifically contracted only for understudying.

Price continued to work on the voice, and kept at it after the period we're looking at. Evidence of her versatility is in a Mozart-aria LP she recorded, I believe after the Così with Klemperer, where she sings all three principal female roles from The Marriage of Figaro. Taking the arias in dramatic order, we start in Act II with her first operatic role, Cherubino (a notably earnest, un-cutesy one), and proceed through her eventual role, the Countess, in Act III to Susanna in Act IV.

The First Symphony sets out the modus operandi for Mahler's symphonic career

MAHLER: Songs of a Wayfarer:
iv. "Die zwei blauen Augen" ("The two blue eyes")

Thomas Allen sings the last of Mahler's Wayfarer Songs, "Die zwei blauen Augen" ("The two blue eyes"), with Václav Neumann conducting the Mahler Youth Orchestra, in Frankfurt's Alte Oper, 1991.

Christa Ludwig, mezzo-soprano; Philharmonia Orchestra, Sir Adrian Boult, cond. EMI, recorded Oct. 18, 1958

Maureen Forrester, contralto; Boston Symphony Orchestra, Charles Munch, cond. RCA-BMG, recorded Dec. 28, 1958

Thomas Quasthoff, baritone; Vienna Philharmonic, Pierre Boulez, cond. DG, recorded June 2003

by Ken

In Friday night's preview, preparing for today's assault on the Mahler First Symphony, we heard, or rather reheard, the transformation Mahler wrought to transform the second of his four Songs of a Wayfarer into the exposition of the symphony's first movement, something we first heard in the March 2012 preview post "From song to symphony -- the journey of Mahler's lonely wayfarer," when we were tackling the Wayfarer Songs. In another preview post a couple of weeks later we listened to the transformation of the second section of the final Wayfarer Song, "Die zwei blauen Augen" ("The two blue eyes"), which we just hear complete, into the haunting central section of the third movement of the First Symphony. As I also mentioned, we've also heard the second movement of the First, meaning that the only thing that will be (mostly) new for us is the Finale.


LET'S DIG RIGHT IN WITH THE FIRST MOVEMENT

Listening back to Otto Klemperer's "Così fan tutte" recording

Klemperer with his Così score at the time of the recording

by Ken

As I indicated in Friday night's preview, today we're going to listen again to a little of the recording that Otto Klemperer made of Mozart's Così fan tutte," in celebration of sorts of this lovely recording's overdue reissue by EMI.

We actually did a more comprehensive listen-through to chunks of this recording in the March 2011 post "Remembering Margaret Price, Part 3 -- as Mozart's Fiordiligi," and I've begun replacing the original audio clips for that post, made from my German-pressed LPs, with clips from the (pretty good) new CD issue. As I've said, it's not among my very favorite recordings of the opera, but as I indicated in writing about it for The Metropolitan Opera Guide to Recorded Opera, in this case most of Klemperer's special insights have been intuited by other conductors on records -- among whom my clear favorite remains Eugen Jochum in his near-miraculous 1962 DG recording.

We're just going to hit some high points today, with a couple of other performances tacked on, and I thought we'd kick off with a perennial favorite excerpt of mine, the Act I farewell trio, as the ladies think their fiancés are going off to war, in a scheme engineered by their cynical old friend Don Alfonso.

Act I, Trio, Fiordiligi-Dorabella-Don Alfonso,
"Soave sia il vento"

Gentle be the breeze,
Calm be the waves,
And every element
Smile in favour
On their wish.

Margaret Price (s), Fiordiligi; Yvonne Minton (ms), Dorabella; Hans Sotin (bs), Don Alfonso; New Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, cond. EMI, recorded Jan. 25-Feb. 18, 1971

Irmgard Seefried (s), Fiordiligi; Nan Merriman (ms), Dorabella; Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (b), Don Alfonso; Berlin Philharmonic, Eugen Jochum, cond. DG, recorded December 1962

[in English] Elizabeth Harwood (s), Fiordiligi; Janet Baker (ms), Dorabella; John Shirley-Quirk (bs-b), Don Alfonso; Scottish National Opera Orchestra, Alexander Gibson, cond. Live performance, May 1969


TO CONTINUE WITH OUR LISTEN-
THROUGH OF THE KLEMPERER COSÌ --