Wagner's Last Golden Age at the Met: II, The Heroic Tenor

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In our last post (http://operapost.blogspot.com/2019/03/wagners-last-golden-age-at-met-i.html), we undertook a fleeting review of the dramatic soprano during the fourth and last Wagnerian Golden Age at the Metropolitan Opera. During the first of these, 1884-1891, all opera at the Met was sung in German and Lilli Lehmann was the company’s prima donna assoluta; the second, 1895-1901, was dominated by the leading tenor of his time, Jean de Reszke and sopranos Lehmann and Lillian Nordica. New Yorkers owed the third, 1903-1917, to conductors Gustav Mahler and Arturo Toscanini, and sopranos Olive Fremstad and Johanna Gadski. Our focus here, as it was in our previous post and will be in our next, is on the fourth, the 1930s and 1940s. We devote the present installment to the Heldentenor. We should add that since the middle of the 20^th century, there have, of course, been extraordinary Wagnerian singers (Birgit Nilsson and Jon Vickers to name only two), but there has not been a cohort strong enough to stand side by side with the earlier eras of Wagnerian excellence, the last of which closed circa 1950.

In 1926, just as electrical recording technology began to do justice to the power and refinement of great Wagnerian voices, Lauritz Melchior made his Met debut as Tannhäuser. At first, the young Dane created only a modest impression. The Herald Tribune wrote, “An improved variety of that disheartening species, the Wagner tenor.” In his first two seasons with the company, Melchior appeared a scant seven times, then took a year’s sabbatical. It was not until the 1932-1933 season and the advent of a fabulous partner, soprano Frida Leider, that reviewers recognized his unique instrument and surpassing gifts. Melchior became the leading Wagner tenor of the 1930s and 1940s, and in retrospect, indisputably the greatest Heldentenor of the 20^th century. Kirsten Flagstad, to be sure, was the foremost Hoch Dramatischer, but Leider, Marjorie Lawrence, Helen Traubel, and Astrid Varnay attest to the deep well of ranking sopranos in this period. Melchior had the field to himself: more than 500 performances between that 1926 Tannhäuser and his final Lohengrin in 1950. By a wide margin, he holds the house record for every one of Wagner’s Heldentenor roles.

As we hear in countless commercial recordings and transcriptions of live performances, Melchior’s voice rides above the wave of the composer’s massive orchestration all the while taking the measure of passages of lyric tenderness. With a rock-solid lower octave, a legacy of the first five years of his career when he sang as a baritone, Melchior negotiates the top of the range with unparalleled stamina, brilliant timbre, and clarity of diction. Here, in a live 1941 broadcast conducted by Toscanini, are the final minutes of Act I of Die Walküre. Having at last revealed his identity to Sieglinde, his sister and soon-to-be lover, Siegmund draws the sword his father, the god Wotan, had embedded deep into an ash tree. The titanic feat finds expression in Melchior's unstinting delivery of the high-lying phrases. Traubel is the Sieglinde.



When Melchior and Flagstad starred together in the late 1930s, the Met’s box-office receipts soared. Their most popular draw was Tristan und Isolde. Little wonder that the exacting maestro Toscanini dubbed Melchior “Tristanissimo.” This 1939 recording of the end of the “love duet”lustrates how stunningly matched were Melchior and Flagstad, the quality of their huge, beautiful voices, a breath span that enables both to easily encompass the longest phrases.

We see and hear Melchior live on television in 1951 in Lohengrin's Act III narration. The "Swan Knight" explains the mystery of his name and provenance. At the age of sixty-one, the tenor sustains the long phrases with the bright metal of his voice intact.

p.s. In the mid-1940s, Melchior curtailed his Met performances and began to enjoy success in Hollywood movies as an amiable, avuncular character actor. In Two Sisters from Boston (1946), one of four films he made for M-G-M, he sings Walter’s melodious “Prize Song” from Die Meistersinger, a Wagner opera not in his New York repertoire. The sequence frames a comic reconstruction of an early 1900s acoustical recording session. The two characters who appear at the beginning are played by June Allyson and Jimmy Durante.

Wagner's Last Golden Age at the Met: I, The Dramatic Soprano

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In April and May 2019 the Met will revive Robert Lepage’s clunky and famously derided production of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle. Wagnerites avid for this monumental music-drama have every reason to look forward to Christine Goerke in the lynch-pin role of Brünnhilde. And yet, despite this return of the tetralogy, compared with past eras, the Wagner fare remains sparse. The opening decade of the 21^st century saw an average of fewer than three works by Wagner per season; in each of the four seasons ending with 2017-2018, audiences had to be content with only one. The golden age of Wagner at the Metropolitan is long past.

A golden age of any slice of the repertoire is dependent on the profusion of gifted voices suited to the style and to the commitment of management to their frequent display: at the Met, French opera in the “Gilded Age,” bel canto since the 1961 debut of Joan Sutherland Slavic opera for nearly two decades beginning in 1990. The Met’s dedication to Wagner between 1932 and 1950 was astonishing. In this period, a minimum of seven Wagner operas were programmed most seasons. A Wagnerite could often count on at least one “Ring” cycle, an Easter Parsifal, and Lohengrin, Tannhäuser, Tristan und Isolde, and Meistersinger, a bounty greater than that offered pilgrims to Bayreuth in any given summer. And essential to the profusion of performances, the Met could call upon a deep cadre of singers capable of meeting the gold standard with consistency. At the close of the 1940s, and given inevitable departures, a fabulous Wagnerian era came to an end, ceding center stage to Mozart, Verdi, and Puccini. In a series of posts devoted to specific voice types, we will evoke a remarkable epoch when Wagner ruled at the Met. We begin with the Hoch dramatischer, the dramatic soprano entrusted with Brünnhilde and Isolde.

It all began with the demise of the Chicago Civic Opera. A victim of the Great Depression, the prestigious company released its roster of stars in 1932. Chicago’s loss was New York’s gain. Frida Leider, acknowledged as the foremost Wagnerian dramatic soprano of the day, came to the Met. Here she sings the last minutes of the “Ring,” Brünnhilde’s Immolation Scene, in a 1927 Berlin recording, conducted by Leo Blech. Exceptional are the warmth of Leider’s timbre, the precision of her attacks (fearless at the top of her range), and her moving reading of the text, the climax of Wagner’s fifteen-hour-long narrative.

Leider’s presence in the Met’s Wagnerian Valhalla was alas short-lived, a mere twenty-eight performances in two seasons. In 1934 the company engaged Kirsten Flagstad, a Norwegian Hoch dramatisch. Some twenty-two years into a career almost exclusively confined to Scandinavia, she was nearly unknown on the international circuit. Her sensational debut was the beginning of her reign as the most prodigious Wagner soprano of her generation, indeed of the 20^th century. Her extensive discography offers an embarrassment of riches. We have chosen the “Liebestod” of her iconic Isolde in a live 1939 performance at the San Francisco opera.

Flagstad’s voice is perfectly placed over its full range, caressing a pianissimo, thrilling at fortissimo, at one with the orchestral texture, yet never submerged by Wagner’s massive sound. Unusual with a timbre so refulgent is such crystalline diction and such precise intonation.

Flagstad sang an average of thirty-five times per season between 1935 and 1941. As if this extraordinary commitment were not enough, the Australian Marjorie Lawrence, a diva in her own right, was there for additional Wagner performances. Here is Lawrence’s Brünnhilde, as she pleads for mercy from her father Wotan at the end of Die Walküre. The 1933 recording, made in Paris where Lawrence first became known to the opera world, is in French.

In 1940-1941, the Met had three first-rank Hoch drammatisher sopranos under contract, Flagstad, Lawrence, and a new American, Helen Traubel. In 1941-1942, two of the three were no longer on the roster, Flagstad having returned to Norway, now occupied by the Nazis, Lawrence having succumbed to polio. Traubel and the very young Swedish-American Astrid Varnay shouldered the Wagner repertoire for the remainder of the decade.

We hear Traubel’s creamy timbre and effortless emission in a 1946 recording of Elsa’s “traum (dream),” “Einsam in trüben Tagen (Lonely, in troubled days).” She is accompanied in this excerpt from Lohengrin by the New York Philharmonic conducted by Artur Rodzinski.

Astrid Varnay’s Met debut at twenty-three, with no previous operatic stage experience, came as a last-minute replacement in a December 1941 broadcast of Die Walküre. Varnay’s rapturously received Sieglinde shone in a cast that featured a constellation of Wagnerian luminaries: Traubel in her role debut as Brünnhilde, Lauritz Melchior, Friedrich Schorr, Kerstin Thorborg, and Alexander Kipnis. In the first fifteen years of Varnay’s Met career (she returned in 1974 for dramatic mezzo roles) Varnay sang fourteen of Wagner’s leads, a total far in excess of Flagstad’s or Traubel’s. We hear Varnay in a live transmission from Bayreuth dated 1951, the year of the first post-war Wagner festival. Conducted by Herbert von Karajan, her Brünnhilde in the final scene of Siegfried captures the unique density of her voice as she negotiates both lyric and heroic passages. And then there is her secure and blazing high C, stunning in a voice as dark as Varnay’s.

We should add that the performances of Traubel and Varnay were led by a cluster of legendary conductors: George Szell, Sir Thomas Beecham, Fritz Busch, and Fritz Reiner.

Please look for our next post, “Wagner’s Last Golden Age at the Met: 2. The Heroic Tenor.”