A Belated "Leb Wohl" to Hildegard Behrens

During our vacation in Spain, the dramatic soprano Hildegard Behrens died unexpectedly from an aortic aneurysm.

Behrens wasn’t merely one of the most fearless-yet-expressive Brunnhildes — you’ll  find links to  her other roles below. But she’ll always be the “home” Brunnhilde for me.  I was in the upper reaches of the Met audience on the opening night of the Otto Schenck Goetterdammerung in 1989. In a typical “youth is wasted on the young” scenario, I had no idea at the time how fortunate I was (the cast also featured Matti Salminen at his frightening finest and Christa Ludwig in one of her last Waltrautes). I was a music major in my last year of college, but hadn’t gotten around to Wagner yet. (I was buried in Prokofiev’s War and Peace, racing to complete my senior thesis on that work somewhere near on time.) I had only listened once to the just-out-on-CD Solti Ring with some other students in preparation for the college trip that landed me in the audience that night. The friend sitting next to me (also a Wanger newbit) commented approvingly “Brunnhilde is being sung by a lady named Hildegard — that’s promising.”

This was a few years before the Met finally caved to supertitles, so that single preparatory hearing was my only guide. It was up to Hildegard Behrens to communicate the range of human experience Brunnhilde encompasses in those three heartbreaking acts. I’ve seen and heard Brunnhildes who are better, in various moments and in various ways, but the moral authority and raw vulnerability of Behrens remains unmatched for me. In Act Two I was “lost” in terms of the libretto, but riveted on her presence in the middle of the stage. It’s not just her visuals, either — it’s there on the Levine recording on DG, where the vocally friendlier studio conditions highlight her expressive phrasing and (yes, I’m saying it) beautiful, sometimes radiant voice. (Note to the Hildegard hatas: just how hoarse would YOU be at the end of a four-night Ring?)

Germaine Greer says it better:

There is no chance that I will see a Brünnhilde so utterly destroyed, so uncompromisingly tragic ever again. I would have thought it impossible to show such a depth of devastation and helplessness in music, but Behrens did it. How she did it – whether by her utter absorption, her rapt earnestness or her lack of self-consciousness – I shall never know. Never to have seen her do it would be never to have understood how a preposterous musical drama, with absurdly affected DIY verse for a libretto, could be transmuted into the highest of high art.

Behrens is well represented on YouTube as Tosca, Isolde, Fidelio, Elektra (and Elettra), Elisabeth (Tannhauser), the Kaiserin (from Frau), etc.

The Met has a photo gallery tribute. But let’s give the last word to James Morris’s Wotan. This clip begins as Brunnhilde is silenced forever — at least to the ears of this “unhappy immortal.”

Today’s post is by Bonnie Gibbons.

My Ring Cycle Dream Cast

This is a response to the audience question in the past few Met Opera quizzes. Audiences were asked to cast their dream Ring and came up with pretty secure choices: Furtwängler, Melchior, Nilsson…

The Met quiz required that the cast be assembled from artists no longer active. I’m going to reserve the right to choose current/recent artists as well. In those cases where I’ve implemented the cop-out of multiple choices, I’ve forced myself to asterisk the artist I would choose if I had to.

I hope I can get John to weigh in but in the meantime, here’s what I’d do if someone died and made me Wolfgang (and gave me a time machine):

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YouTube Symphony Mashup

The “Global Mashup” is ready for your viewing pleasure right now. This part of the YouTube Symphony project is a video performance of Tan Dun’s “Eroica” (composed for this project) spliced together from the audition videos.

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Good Friday, April 10, 1868

Starting from an unused funeral march he’d written years before, Brahms began his requiem after the death of his mother in 1865, an event that added timely weight to his longstanding desire to memorialize his friend and mentor Robert Schumann. It all tied together, at least for writers, when Brahms bumped into Clara Schumann (widow to Robert and friend to Brahms’s mother — and around when Brahms had thought up the funeral march while trying to write piano music) outside the Bremen cathedral on the way into that first performance.

Written on a personal impetus during the romantic period (virtually defined by the concept of personal narrative), the Requiem is not liturgical. Its full title translates as “A German Requiem, after words of the Holy Scriptures.” There are only two soloists: a soprano singing of consolation on behalf of Brahms’s mother, and a baritone whose “Behold, I tell you a mystery” solo anchors a movement so searching, emotional and yet historically learned that it simply must be a musical conversation with Schumann.

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Prokofiev, Bartok Interviews

(Via Jessica Duchen, British music writer and Korngold biographer.)

In this 1944 radio interview in English, Bela Bartok discusses the pieces in an upcoming recital by his wife. At this time, he was suffering from leukemia and had a little over a year to live. Bartok’s English is fluent, but his accent charmingly has a little Peter Lorre flavor (make that “Peter Lorre impersonator” flavor, since the real Lorre had an additional Viennese sound that Mel Blanc et al. missed.) Bartok speaks in some detail about forms and folk influences of these pieces.

And here’s a short video of Sergei Prokofiev playing the piano and talking about what he’s composing. The excerpt is from Scene 5 of his opera War and Peace, which had just had a partial concert performance in Leningrad. At that moment (the middle section of the waltz), Anatole Kuragin has been going after the engage Natasha, and he gets her alone to kiss her and hand her a love letter. The entire scene IS the waltz, except for Natasha’s interjections in her own musical style, which wane in strength as the scene goes on.

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New Production Boo-ed at Met; Links on Audience Etiquette

Opera director Mary Zimmerman and her creative team were recently booed by a Met audience for their new production of Bellini’s La Somnambula. The Wall Street Journal’s Terry Teachout provides an audio recording of the curtain calls, and muses on why boos are rare in New York, while common in Italy and sometimes elsewhere (google “Roberto Alagna La Scala,” or “Chereau ring brawl” for some celebrated examples). 

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Finally Hear Hindemith's "The Long Christmas Dinner"

Paul HindemithThornton WilderI love to mark anniversaries of musical rarities and today we have one of the rarest. On this day in 1963, Paul Hindemith conducted the first English performance of his final opera, The Long Christmas Dinner at Julliard. With an English libretto adapted by Thornton Wilder from his own 1931 play, this opera is known of by fans of both men, but almost completely unknown. For proof, scroll down this post for the YouTube clip or free audio sample from Rhapsody that I customarily provide. Sorry, I don’t have one. Unless you caught one of its rare performances, you could only learn it from the score.

That’s because this opera went scandalously unrecorded until December 2008, when the music publisher Schott released a recording on their WENGO label under the direction of Marek Janowski. Unfortunately for Wilder fans, this recording employs Hindemith’s German translation (as Das Lange Weihnachtsmahl) from a Mannheim production in the 1960s. (View recording on Amazon. | View libretto on Amazon.) I just ordered it, so I shouldn’t even be talking about it myself! But today’s the opera’s birthday and we’re working on other great topics (for those who may have noticed the relative slowdown of our posting frequency lately), so I wanted to sneak this one in. It was either that, or a roundup of unlucky musical moments in honor of Friday the 13th.

So to sample the work, all I’ve got for you is this 3-minute excerpt on the Schott site.

The Long Christmas Dinner has the kind of  gimicky-but-eloquent premise Wilder liked. “The” Christmas dinner is actually a succession of 90 Christmas dinners spanning four generations in the life of the Bayard family. Here’s what the Thornton Wilder Society has to say about the play:

As with his later play, Our Town, Wilder uses the small details of family life to represent its essence. Repetition, telescoped time, the use of similar names over the generations all show family life at its core. Time is a second key theme. Time goes on, but slowly. Little changes. Three generations of Bayard mothers, all of whom lose a child, comment that, “Only the passing of time can help these things.” The family’s rebellious sons complain about the slowness and dullness of small town life. Their observations are in sharp contrast to the short length of the play: events pass in stage time. Family life encompasses generations of families; a brief play can sharpen our perception of this truth by the speed of its pacing. The minimalist set design and meager props also remind the audience that it is witnessing theater, but that theater can represent life at its most universal.

I’ll follow up after I actuall hear the thing. In the meantime:

Review of the recording on The Toynbee Convector.

ArkivMusic Creates PRINT Classical Music Magazine

LISTEN magazine’s debut cover featuring Isabe BayrakdarianAs many print publications find themselves in a business model crisis, and the blogosphere, as I write this, buzzing with the latest “Can Classical Music Be Saved?” debate, the online classical music retailer ArkivMusic (now owned by Steinway) is starting a bimonthly print magazine. (Read press release.)

LISTEN: Life with Classical Music will be published every other month for $14.85 per year plus shipping. Per the press release, the magazine will be editorially independent from the retailing business, but the retailing customer base will be used as a marketing channel for the magazine.

Can LISTEN make money?

“Millions of people across North America have an interest in, even a passion for, classical music, and yet the genre has all but disappeared from the mainstream media,” stated ArkivMusic President Eric Feidner. “Just because the large corporations that control what we are exposed to on TV, radio and in print can’t find a way to make money in the genre doesn’t mean there isn’t any interest. There is considerable demand for a publication that caters to and cultivates the interest of this significant population.”

Feidner is confident that a print magazine is viable even in today’s challenged economic marketplace. “We’ve been running online companies since 1995 and know full well how it has revolutionized our lives in countless ways. However, there is still a place for quality print publications and, in our specific circumstance, we are servicing a population that has been starved for many years.

That’s obviously a) all true and b) marketing “blah-blah-blah” that should be taken with a grain of salt.

It’s unclear how much of the magazine will be available online, since only the debut issue is available and the current website only lets you:

• Browse the promising-looking table of contents
• Subscribe to the print magazine
• Email a letter to the editor
• Buy recordings discussed in the magazine through convenient links back to the ArkiveMusic.com store.

Maybe it’s better to view this as a marketing channel for the retail store rather than an exercise in journalism business models. In terms of content, LISTEN is clearly going to be a combination of classical music, lifestyle and product promotion similar to British classical magazines like Gramaphone and BBC Music — albeit with an emphasis on the magazine’s own sister retailing channel.

New LA Ring Cycle & a Boito/Scotto Birthday

A 2-headed Wotan in LA’s Rheingold. View this Lawrence K. Ho photo at LA Times.It’s always exciting when there’s a new Ring Cycle — especially a “directed” one (by which I mean not exactly Viking helmets).  Over the weekend, LA Opera raised the curtain on its new Ring. You can see video of LA Opera’s Das Rheingold (conducted by James Conlon) at the company’s very good website, and access podcasts, articles and other helpful information.

Even in the short video, the images come fast and furious and since I haven’t actually seen it, it would be unfair to “review” it. I did notice that the “rainbow bridge” looks something like some of the historic airplanes we’ve got hanging in Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry, Loge has four arms, and the Nibelungs look like the Elephant Man. Read a review of Rheingold at the LA Times.

Die Walkure is next months, followed by Conlon’s latest Recovered Voices effort, which will be The Birds by Walter Braunfels, based on the play by Aristophanes. This series celebrates composers who were silenced during the Third Reich — Braunfels was half Jewish and fortunately survived but was unable to participate publicly in musical life between 1933 and 1945. This opera is available on CD, conducted by Lothar Zagrosek:

Braunfels - Die Vogel
by Walter Braunfels, Lothar Zagrosek, Hellen Kwon, Matthias Görne, Deutsche Sinfonie-Orchester Berlin, Hans Braun, Siegfried Hausmann, Dirk Schmidt Thomas Kober, Iris Vermillion, Endrik Wodrich, Wolfgang Holzmair, Martin Petzold Michael Kraus

Musical Birthdays

Today happens to be the birthday of both Arrigo Boito and Renata Scotto, so I dug up a YouTube clip of Scotto singing “L`altra notte in fondo al mare” from Act 3 of Boito’s Mefistofele.

John Cage "As Slow As Possible" - 7th Note Reached

On the church organ in Halberstadt, Germany, a performance of John Cage’s As Slow As Possible has been underway since 2001. BBC’s Steven Rosenberg was there for a rare chord change. He probably won’t make the conclusion of the work, in 2640 A.D. (Thanks to Jacque Harper of the Chicago Bass Ensemble for the tip!)

In other news, take a look at this very candid interview with John Adams on the role of government in the arts.