by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Charles and I watched a recent program from
European TV, the concert at Bayreuth, Germany on May 22, 2013, commemorating
the 200th anniversary of Richard Wagner’s birth. It was held in the
fabled Festspielhaus, but with the orchestra seated on stage because it was a
concert rather than an opera performance, even though it began with the
complete first act of Die Walküre (a
favorite of concert promoters doing Wagner with singers because it only
involves three vocal soloists and no chorus). That was the first set; the
second set was the Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde
(with Eva-Maria Westbroek, the singer who had played Sieglinde in the Walküre act, blessedly returning as Isolde), followed by
three purely orchestral selections: the Rhine Journey and Funeral March from Götterdämmerung and the prelude to Act I of Die
Meistersinger. The version we were watching
had been recorded from French television, and therefore we got the selections
in the original German with French subtitles and, during the intermission and the outro, an on-screen
German announcer with a voiceover translator barking out French as she spoke in
German — creating a cacophony of two
languages we didn’t understand.
The singers in the Walküre Act I were Westbroek as Sieglinde, South African
tenor Johan Botha as Siegmund (I noted the irony that Westbroek is Dutch and
Botha, as a white South African with an Afrikaner name, is therefore also of Dutch
ancestry) and Korean bass Kwangchul Youn as Hunding. The conductor was
Bayreuth’s current musical director, Christian Thielemann, who’s become
controversial for some bizarre quasi-racist statements he’s made to the effect
that German music can only be played well by German conductors — it’s the sort
of thing that was considered unexceptional in Wagner’s time (indeed, Wagner
said similar things himself — at the heart of his attempt to rationalize his
own anti-Jewish prejudices Wagner wrote that because of the diaspora, the Jews had no national culture of their own and
were therefore forced to appropriate the culture of whatever country they ended
up in, but though they could learn to mimic the culture of their countries of
residence they could never truly be a part of it) but now seems altogether
creepy, especially now that Hitler and the Nazis have given racism in general,
and German racism in particular, such a bad name. The odd thing is that
Thielemann talks good
performances but all too often delivers competent run-throughs; I found myself
thinking of him as an Erich Leinsdorf of our time — his performances are always
tight and well organized but almost never emotionally driven, compelling
renditions of the music. This makes him an odd choice indeed to be music
director at Bayreuth, a festival devoted to the music of perhaps the most “out-there” Romantic in the history of
composition; Wagner’s music demands passion, commitment and drive, and from
Thielemann it gets polite accuracy.
Westbroek is a singer I have a particular
affection for; I first saw her in the video of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Anna
Nicole and was amazed at her tour
de force performance in the title role, a
piece that requires her to be onstage almost the entire length of the opera, to
make two wrenching physical changes in the brief interludes she isn’t onstage, to sing in believable Texas-accented
English and to deliver a surprisingly multifaceted look at a character who in
real life was basically written off as a tabloid queen — all of which Westbroek
delivered handsomely. Indeed, after seeing her in Anna Nicole I wondered if she would be able to adjust her
approach to standard repertory — which she did, brilliantly, when she sang
Sieglinde at the Met. Alas, at the Met she had a better Siegmund (Jonas
Kaufmann) than Botha, whom I’d heard before only in a Met broadcast of Aïda that led me to think he might make a good
Tannhäuser, Lohengrin or Walther von Stolzing but did not lead me to believe he’d be able to cope with
Siegmund, Siegfried or Tristan. It didn’t help that he was up against
Westbroek, who (like Maria Callas in her surviving concert films) didn’t let
the fact that she wasn’t doing a stage performance stop her from acting the role both visually and musically. Botha has a
decent lyric-dramatic tenor — a bit too small for Siegmund — but he does
surprisingly little with it; not only is the wrenching vocal power Melchior
brought to this role totally beyond him, but Melchior, though often condemned
as a singer who let the sheer size of his voice do his acting for him, is far
better at portraying the character’s exhaustion, desperation, heartache and
finally (temporary) bliss in the company of his sister/girlfriend. Youn was
uneven, sometimes delivering his lines matter-of-factly and sometimes going
melodramatically over the top — but then Hunding is a small, pretty thankless
role and not that many people do it better. (By chance I’d just listened to
another version of this music — Helen Traubel’s recording from 1945, with
better conducting from Artur Rodzinski than I remembered from first hearing
this in the 1970’s but an even lamer Siegmund, Met character tenor Emery Darcy
— which also featured a Sieglinde
who both musically and dramatically overpowered her Siegmund. Fortunately
Traubel also recorded it in 1941 with a Siegmund, Melchior, and a conductor,
Toscanini, fully worthy of her!)
The orchestral selections were similarly
competent but uninspiring — to the extent they were inspiring it was because Wagner’s genius overcame
Thielemann’s professionally accurate but dramatically only passable conducting;
generally he was better the faster and more obviously “stirring” the music got.
Westbroek was a bit wobbly in the Liebestod but still her presence was welcome
(instrumental-only versions of the Liebestod annoy me and I sometimes find myself humming the
missing soprano line when I hear one), and the final Meistersinger prelude was perhaps Thielemann’s best performance of
the night: one in which his technical assurance and ability to keep all the
contrapuntal lines together served the music and the score didn’t require much
more from him than that. The concert was directed for video in the modern
manner that concentrates on extreme close-ups of the orchestra members most of
the time (and it was nice to see a good number of women in the Bayreuth
orchestra — it doesn’t suffer from the hard-core sexism of the Vienna
Philharmonic), which had the interesting effect of picking Wagner’s scores to
pieces (I mean that as a compliment, actually) and showing how Wagner got some
of his orchestral effects instead of just letting them congeal into a massive
wall of sound. (At least two of the earliest rock ’n’ roll impresarios were
inspired by Wagner; Alan Freed named one of his daughters Sieglinde and Phil
Spector said his famous “wall of
sound” production style was an attempt to duplicate Wagner in the pop idiom.)
