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.” 

Parsifal: Succès de Scandale

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The year was 1903, the inaugural season of the Met’s new general manager. And the flamboyant Heinrich Conried was dead set on making a splash. What better way than to issue an extraordinary prospectus announcing the company premiere of Richard Wagner’s Parsifal (1882)?  And what would set off a bigger firestorm than a Christmas eve opening?  Cries of foul and shame emanated from musical, legal,and religious quarters on both sides of the Atlantic, originating at Wahnfried, the home of Cosima, Wagner’s widow, and finally descending on New York. Cosima’s imprecations, befitting her vocation as keeper of the flame, were fueled by the contention that the Metropolitan’s proposed staging was an outrageous violation of copyright law. Her attorneys went to work, arguing that the Met should be enjoined from producing the opera. The moral argument went like this: that playing Wagner’s Bühnenfestspiel (stage-consecrating festival drama) on an ordinary operatic platform was an act of heresy.

The New York Protestant establishment took the attack further, charging that the work itself was sacrilegious. From influential pulpits clergy held that the flower maidens were nothing other than a “red light legion,” the representation of the “Lord’s Supper” an “amusement for the sake of gain.”

The Parsifal case was ultimately dismissed on this simple legal finding: that the copyright did not extend to the United States. By the time the judge rendered his decision, preparations for Parsifal were well along. Most astounding had been the advance ticket sales, reputedly the greatest ever seen in New York. Weeks before the opening, the American Journal reported melodramatically, “Women Faint amid Crush for Seats to Parsifal. Many of Them Took Places in Line before Daylight and Were Too Weak to Reach the Window When It Was Opened.” Mail orders flooded in so thick and fast that their processing required a room of its own. Against odds of all sorts, Conried had brought off an operatic coup as memorable as any in the Metropolitan annals.

The premiere began at the unlikely hour of five o’clock. The doors were shut at the start of the prelude and, exceptionally, no one arrived late. A hush was reported to envelop the auditorium at the end of the almost two-hour-long act 1, in imitation of Bayreuth’s reverent response to the consecration of the Holy Grail, a practice that persisted at the Met well into the twentieth century.

Many returned in evening clothes for the second act, the flower maidens, Kundry’s attempted seduction of Parsifal, the spear arrested in midair, and the collapse of the castle of Klingsor, the reprobate knight. The audience erupted into a seven-minute ovation at the dramatic climax of Act 2. Similar receptions have greeted productions of Parsifal since. Here, for example, in a clip from a 1993 Berlin performance, is the overwhelming Kundry of Waltraud Meier, with Poul Elming.

Act 3 reverts to the ceremonial timelessness of the opening act. Here are the final minutes of the sublime “Good Friday” scene in which Parsifal, returning from his years of wandering, no longer “the guileless fool,” is baptized by Gurnemanz. The passage is drawn from a Berlin performance conducted by Daniel Barenboim. Gurnemanz is sung by bass John Tomlinson.

Note: We provide a full account of the Met’s 1903 Parsifal in our book, Grand Opera: The Story of the Met. On February 17, 2018, this season’s Met Parsifal can be heard both streaming and on the radio.

World War II and the Met Roster. Those who Did not Come: 2. Germaine Lubin

This post, the second in the series “World War II and the Met Roster,” is centered on the French dramatic soprano Germaine Lubin, whose anticipated Met debut, like that of Tiana Lemnitz, the subject of the last OperaPost, did not come about. This opportunity lost, there would not be another. 

In 1939, Lubin was engaged for the 1940-41 Met season for performances that included the company premiere of Alceste.  Her agent, Erich Simon, wrote to the management on March 8 of that year that his client was prepared to sing several Wagner heroines (Isolde, the Walküre Brünnhilde, Sieglinde, Elsa, Elisabeth, Kundry, but not Sieglinde or the Götterdämmerung Brünnhilde), and a variety of French roles.  The signed contract spanned the period January to April 1941, and guaranteed fifteen performances at $400 per performance. 

Lubin cancelled just a few weeks before she was scheduled to make her debut in the Gluck opera. There is reason to question the sincerity of her apology to general manager Edward Johnson: “I am heartbroken that it is impossible for me for the moment to leave occupied France. Let me hope I will be able to sing at the Metropolitan Opera next season.” In The Shameful Peace: How French Artists and Intellectuals Survived the Nazi Occupation, Frederic Spotts finds implausible Lubin’s claim that the German ambassador in Paris “would not give her a passport.” Lubin may by then have been unwilling to sing in New York. In a 1963 interview, she makes plain her contempt for the United States:  “I have sung everywhere. Except in America where I refused seven invitations. I don’t regret it.”  To the interviewer’s interjection, “Still, the Metropolitan Opera is a highly regarded venue,” she responded, “Yes, for dollars. I wouldn’t exchange Bayreuth for the Metropolitan.”

Just before the war, Lubin had sung in Berlin and Bayreuth. Through her great friend, Wagner’s daughter-in-law Winifred, she established relations with highly placed figures of the Third Reich, including Hitler. He so admired her Isolde that he had her sit by his side at a post-performance dinner. The episode and her enthusiastic response to the Führer would come back to haunt her. And among Lubin’s intimates was Vichy head Maréchal Pétain.  Her post-war destiny was sealed when she sang Isolde in Paris with the troupe from the Berlin Staatsoper, the only French artist in the cast.  On that occasion the swastika hung over the grand staircase of the French national theater.

At the liberation in 1944, Lubin was arrested, and in 1949 she was condemned to “dégradation nationale” (the loss of political, civil, and professional rights) for a period of five years.

Although Lubin’s performances in Tristan und Isolde contributed to her undoing in the reckoning of her collaboration and fraternization with the enemy, at the time they were career triumphs. Hitler’s assertion that he had never heard a better Act II Isolde was no doubt merited. In a recording reported to be from a live performance from Bayreuth in 1939, we discern the qualities that put Lubin in the front rank of dramatic sopranos: a sumptuous voice that blooms at the top, a homogeneous sound throughout her range, total command of dynamics. Her legato and clear articulation of the musical line are marks of a singer equally at home in Wagner and in the exposed 18^th-century style of Gluck. We hear her power as she rides effortlessly over the orchestral surge; she scales her huge voice down to a perfectly poised pianissimo at the climax. Lubin does honor to what she called “le rôle des rôles.”

 

In this French-language recording, Lubin’s dulcet pianissimo caps her reading of “Vissi d’arte,” or, “D’art et d’amour.” Musically accurate, without exaggerated effects, she infuses Tosca’s prayer with credible religious fervor.

There is no doubt that with Lubin, the Met’s 1941 Alceste would have found greater favor with critics and public. The title role fell to Australian soprano Marjorie Lawrence, who had shared roles with Lubin at the Opéra in the 1930s. A tempestuous Wagnerian, Lawrence in Gluck was reviewed with reservations. She was indisposed at the time of the Saturday matinee broadcast; her replacement, American Rose Bampton, acquitted herself admirably, but with signs of strain. Bampton’s commercial recording of one of Alceste’s arias finds her in peak form, equal to the rigors of the high-lying final phrases.

Unfortunately, this track has been removed from Youtube.

 

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