TESTAMENT

More documents

Recommendations

Info

on the first night of each production (and at every subsequent cast change) by Bavarian Radio. No officially approved recording of a Bayreuth Ring would appear until 1973 when Philips finally issued DG’s (mostly) 1967 recording of a Karl Böhm-led cycle that was supposed to have been made by EMI, inevitably with few of the 1950s singers still in the cast. EMI’s ‘ban’ on the entire Ring was based on the fact that they had released only Die Walküre Act III (conducted by Herbert von Karajan at the 1951 Festival) under their exclusivity contract. Decca now wanted to make a Rheingold (with Hans Hotter, an EMI artist, as Wotan) and a Götterdämmerung at the 1954 Festival. They enlisted the help of Wolfgang Wagner who initiated a correspondence with Walter Legge in March 1954. Perhaps piqued by Wolfgang’s description of EMI’s Walküre Act III as a recording which ‘does not do honour artistically either to the Festivals or to your firm or to Mr von Karajan’ and to being reminded that it sold less well than rival Festival releases, Legge never replied directly. A second letter from Wolfgang to John Macleod of EMI International, citing the recent appearance of the pirated Allegro Ring (the Keilberth cycle from the 1953 Festival) as proof of the public’s desire for a ‘complete live Ring from Bayreuth’, restated his case against EMI’s Walküre release in stronger terms: ‘the issue of this act impetuously demanded by Mr Legge and Herr von Karajan never had our real approval. We released it only to placate these gentlemen… it will never be, for you or for us, an artistic event’. But EMI dragged its heels, proposing temporary ‘exchanges’ for Hotter that were never realised – recording a young Georg Solti in a Glyndebourne Giovanni that summer, or projects with Rafael Kubelík – and never directly addressing the question of their rights to the Ring. Meanwhile, Telefunken’s supremo Herbert Grenzebach gently lobbied Wolfgang Wagner from Berlin, while taking legal advice about EMI’s exclusivity clause. Finally Grenzebach advised London Decca to accept Der fliegende Holländer alone for 1955 and to wait on events for the Ring. Even while Decca’s team was recording in the Festspielhaus, the chances of a release for the project were receding and the start of the Culshaw/Solti/Vienna studio Ring three years later put an end to it for any immediate future. The first attempt to record in Bayreuth had been made as early as July/August 1904 when G & T (the Gramophone and Typewriter company) sent their ‘recordist’ Will Gaisberg and their ‘studio pianist’, the conductor Bruno Seidler-Winkler, to work with an evidently improvised selection of (mostly) Festival singers in a range of Wagnerian and non-Wagnerian repertoire. Gaisberg and Winkler set up their equipment in the town’s <strong>TESTAMENT</strong> booklet note English (now demolished) Hotel Sonne, making between 52 and 74 recordings of which only 39 (18 of them of Wagner material) were released. Recording of lengthier excerpts from the operas began with the electrical era. In 1927 Columbia defeated their rivals The Gramophone Company in an auction organised by Siegfried Wagner’s British-born wife Winifred and made the first recordings actually inside the Festspielhaus (or, according to some sources, the restaurant space which doubled as the orchestra rehearsal room) – excerpts from Parsifal conducted by Carl Muck and from Rheingold, Walküre and Siegfried under Franz von Hoesslin. The commercial and sonic success of these records made Columbia more ambitious and they returned the following year to make most of Tristan Acts I and II and a heavily cut version of Act III. A crew from an affiliated company, Columbia Films, was also in attendance (this material, including rehearsal excerpts in the theatre and some film shot at the first day of the Tristan sessions, appears now to be lost). Another almost complete opera, Tannhäuser, was recorded in 1930; like the Tristan , it was conducted by Karl Elmendorff. It bore many of the hallmarks of the contemporaneous performances prepared and conducted by Arturo Toscanini in the Festival itself. In 1936 Telefunken became the first German company to record at Bayreuth, concentrating on the German stars of that summer’s performances under the baton of the Festival’s new director of productions Heinz Tietjen – Franz Völker and Maria Müller in Lohengrin Act III (there also exists a contemporary and much pirated radio broadcast of the same cast in this act under Furtwängler), Völker again in Walküre and the forging songs and Forest Murmurs of Max Lorenz’s Siegfried. All other recordings emanating from the Festspielhaus up until its wartime closure in 1944 derive from the radio broadcasts which began (but only with isolated acts of one opera per festival) in 1924. The rivalry between EMI and Decca at the post-war reopening of the Festival led to every production in 1951 being recorded at least once, although not all the material was released. By 1955 the Bayreuth management had tired of the legal and contractual wrangles that seemed inevitably bound up with more than one company sharing the franchise and returned to Winifred Wagner’s pre-war monopoly policy. Decca alone recorded in 1955 (further years were stopped by their change of heart about ‘live’ performances and EMI’s exclusion zone on Meistersinger and the Ring); Philips in 1961 and 1962; DG in 1966-67 and 1970-71. The coming of video (and later DVD) led to another change of policy – selected productions would now be both filmed and recorded at specially arranged sessions before a year’s Festival rehearsals and
performances started. This process began with the ‘centenary’ Ring recorded in 1979/80 by Philips and Unitel and has included all the Festival repertoire (including a further Ring cycle). The last sound-only ‘live’ performance recordings to date were the Lohengrin made by CBS in 1982. and the Solti Ring made (but unreleased and subsequently destroyed) by Decca in 1983. In casting their ‘New’ Bayreuth productions Wieland and Wolfgang Wagner were keen to take advice about younger, newer singers from all countries (such as Varnay, Wolfgang Windgassen and George London), less keen on interested reminders about the old guard (Walter Legge suggested both Maria Müller and Herbert Janssen for roles in 1951 and questioned the experience of ‘young’ Otto Edelmann for Hans Sachs). For his first post-war Ring production that ran from 1951-58 Wieland soon built up a core of major principals – Astrid Varnay was always the Brünnhilde, with Martha Mödl sharing the role from 1953 onwards; Hans Hotter sang Wotan/Wanderer for the production from 1952; Josef Greindl (the only regular member of these casts to appear at Bayreuth before 1951) took over the ‘baddies’ from Ludwig Weber in 1952 and became the production’s regular Fafner, Hunding and Hagen; Gustav Neidlinger was Alberich from 1952-57; Wolfgang Windgassen took over Siegfried and Maria von Ilosvay Erda in 1953; Paul Kuen was Mime and Hermann Uhde Gunther until 1957. Elsewhere Wieland experimented – the eight years of the production saw seven different Sieglindes (including Mödl, Varnay and Birgit Nilsson), six Siegmunds, ranging from the veteran Max Lorenz to the relative newcomer Jon Vickers, and five Gutrunes (including both Mödl and Varnay). The Wälsung twins heard on the 1955 Walküre were the only pair to sing their roles two years in succession. Rhinemaidens and Norns were also changed regularly. The Bayreuth orchestra has always attracted star players, even if their experiences and inclinations were the very opposite of Wagnerian. Both Richard Mühlfeld, the great Meiningen player for whom Brahms wrote his Clarinet Quintet, Trio and Sonatas, and Franz Strauss, the Munich horn player (and father of Richard), were in the pit for the first Festivals. Longevity too has always been a trait. Two of the wind players in the 1955 orchestra – flautist Nicolaus Jung and clarinettist Heinrich Geuser – began their Bayreuth careers at the 1924 reopening after the First World War and played at every subsequent Festival until the late 1960s. But before 1951 the conductors – with the exceptions of Karl Muck, Fritz Busch, Furtwängler and Toscanini – were not such glamorous names. In determining to change that aspect of Bayreuth Wieland and Wolfgang were careful – and this was quite radical at <strong>TESTAMENT</strong> booklet note English the time – to keep an eye out for musical directors who were prepared to collaborate with their staging ideas. Wieland clearly preferred maestros with ideas about Wagnerian tempos (swift) and sonorities (lean) as new as his own staging plans – he called such practitioners ‘Latin’ conductors and included under this banner Joseph Keilberth, Clemens Krauss and Wolfgang Sawallisch in addition to the ‘foreign’ names he brought in – André Cluytens, Igor Markevich, Thomas Schippers. But all conductors in Wieland’s time were carefully rotated and then replaced (some, like Karajan, swiftly). Only Hans Knappertsbusch – a characteristically trenchant critic of Wieland’s productions but hailed by him on at least one occasion as Bayreuth’s ‘chief conductor’ – was spared such treatment. Decca’s stereo recording reveals clearly the unconventional layout of Bayreuth’s covered orchestra pit and may surprise listeners accustomed to previous monaural recordings from the Festival. Indeed, it will also sound strange compared to normal orchestral tradition, where the first violins are usually heard coming from the left and the basses from the right, and initially gives the impression that the left and right channels of the recording have been reversed. But this is not the case. The seating plan for the orchestra was established by Wagner himself in 1875, when preliminary rehearsals were held for the first Festival the following year. The conductor stands or sits at the ‘top’ of the pit in the highest position. The orchestra is seated step by step lower down. The violins come first – to the right and left of the conductor but, contrary to usual practice, the firsts sit on the conductor’s right. On the next level down, spread out across the pit, come the violas and cellos; below them are the woodwind, the bass clarinet normally at the left hand end. The bassists play on the same level (but on special platforms), split into two groups. Either below them (or sometimes on the same level), also split into two groups on platforms, are the harps. Right at the back, at the deepest point of the pit, come the brass, the timpani and the percussion. With minimal variations, this arrangement has survived to the present day (see pictures on pages 11 and 16). Not surprisingly, the special conditions of the Bayreuth pit can cause problems and various conductors have tried to change it, or simply found it unworkable. Before the war Furtwängler attempted to have parts of the cowl (the sloping roof that renders orchestra and conductor invisible to the audience) removed; he said this was for acoustic reasons – to let more sound of the bottom of the orchestra out into the house – but Heinz Tietjen and Winifred Wagner, convinced it was due to his personal vanity,
Page 1 and 2: SBT 2 1390 It is as if a much-treas
Page 3: producer, near the start of his lon
Page 7 and 8: soprano Anna Palo, who was a member
Page 9: Opera chorus from 1950 to 1944, and

TESTAMENT

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?