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.” 

Remembering Carlo Bergonzi

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In our last post, we remembered Licia Albanese, Met soprano for twenty-six years, from 1940 to 1966, a Puccini specialist. Albanese died in the summer of 2014. With this post we remember Carlo Bergonzi, Met tenor for almost as long, 1956 to 1988, and Verdi specialist. He too, died last summer.

Bergonzi was born in 1924 in the town of Vidalenzo. In nearby Parma he began vocal study with a teacher who counted among his remarkable students the soprano Renata Tebaldi. During WWII, Bergonzi was interned in a German camp for three years. At war’s end, he resumed his education in music and eventually made his debut as a baritone in 1948, as Figaro in Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia. For several years, Bergonzi appeared in a variety of baritone parts in Italy’s provincial opera houses. But he would soon realize that he was in fact a tenor. He made his tenor debut as Andrea Chénier in Umberto Giordano’s opera in 1951. Two years later, Bergonzi made his La Scala debut, and in 1955, his US debut at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. His first Met performance took place on November 13, 1956, the seventh season of general manager Rudolf Bing’s tenure in New York.

As we wrote in our recent history of the Metropolitan, Grand Opera: The Story of the Met (University of California Press, 2014), Bing had ushered in what would be an extraordinary Verdi era with Don Carlo on the opening night of his inaugural season, 1950-51. Verdi ruled again on opening nights 1951 and 1952 with Aïda and then La Forza del destino. All this was to be expected. Asked to name his favorite operas, the general manager-designate had ticked off three Verdi titles, and then just one work by each of seven other composers. Between 1950 and 1966, Verdi accounted for 25% of Metropolitan performances, significantly more than the 14% and the 19% of his two immediate predecessors. Under Bing, Verdi pulled far ahead of Wagner, the previous front-runner. Verdi also led the pack in the percentage of new productions, fourteen of fifty-nine. Bing’s predilection would have mattered little had the company not boasted, year after year, a cohort of outstanding singers capable of honoring the master’s melos. Casts that included Zinka Milanov, Leontyne Price, Mario Del Monaco, Richard Tucker, Franco Corelli, Leonard Warren, Robert Merrill, Cesare Siepi, and, of course, Carlo Bergonzi, were arguably the best in the world.

Bergonzi’s first Met engagement was limited to two well-received performances opposite Antonietta Stella, another newcomer, in Aïda and, three days later, in Il Trovatore. He returned the following November to a season-long commitment, a full complement of eight roles that he shared with the company’s array of leading tenors, including well-established stars Tucker and Del Monaco, the recently arrived Daniele Barioni and Giuseppe Campora, and Flaviano Labò and Eugenio Fernandi, making their debuts. He immediately proved himself a model of musical refinement in the repertoire of the Italian dramatic tenor, the tenore di forza. His sweet timbre and shapely phrasing were balm in roles often consigned to singers whose triumphs were measured predominantly in brilliant tone, in the ringing squillo of stentorian high notes.

Although he also excelled in the works of Puccini and others, as amply documented in his extensive discography, Bergonzi defined himself as a Verdi tenor. Late in his career, he committed arias from all of Verdi’s operas to a single album. At the Met, he sang Riccardo in Un Ballo in maschera more often than anyone in the company’s history. In two complete recordings, with Birgit Nilsson, then Leontyne Price, Bergonzi’s mercurial King of Sweden juggles playfulness, passion, and benevolent authority with characteristic finesse. Here, in a 1967 performance from Japan, Riccardo, masquerading as a sailor, asks the fortune-teller to read his future. Master of the aria’s tricky rhythms, Bergonzi shows off both the legato and the brio that made him the tenor of choice in this wonderfully varied role.

Second only to journeyman Kurt Baum, Bergonzi sang the role of Radamès more often than any other Met tenor since the 1940s. In this 1959 recording, cushioned by Herbert Von Karajan’s languorous tempo and the silken texture of the Vienna Philharmonic, he finds a welcome and rarely heard dreamy tone for the warrior’s evocation of his “celeste Aïda.”

The wide-ranging line of “O tu che in seno agli angeli,” from La Forza del destino, is a test of legato and dynamic control. With appropriately dolorous tone, Bergonzi conveys Alvaro’s despair, first in the recitative that recalls the sorrows of his past and the presumed demise of his beloved Leonora, then in the aria, where he wishes for his own death. This clip is from a live performance, thunderously received by the 1965 opening night La Scala audience. Below is a third example of the “covered voice” we heard Bergonzi press insistently, even obsessively, on the young Verdians he coached a decade or so ago in Barcelona during the Concurso Internacional de Canto Francisco Viñas.