by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night at 8 p.m. Charles and I watched the other Soli
Dei Gloria DVD I had ordered a while back from arkivmusic.com as part of a
close-out sale including a lot of
interesting items, like an eight-DVD boxed set of Walter Felsenstein’s
productions at the Deutsche Oper in what was then East Berlin (all in German
even though only one of the operas, Beethoven’s Fidelio, was actually in German). This was a 2010
performance of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis at the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon — and it helped that it was in
a real concert hall, not a cramped old church in The Netherlands like the Soli
Dei Gloria (the name means “Only for the Glory of God”) production of Haydn’s The
Creation we watched on Good Friday. The
blurbs on the DVD box include a comment from critic Ian Swafford that the Missa
Solemnis, “which Beethoven considered the
crown of his music, may be the greatest piece most listeners never hear,”
though I remember Carter Harman saying of it in his sketchy one-volume history
of classical music that the Missa
“has a certain uncompromising cragginess about it” that makes it “definitely a
connoisseur’s work.” I had trouble staying awake during the performance and I
suspect it’s partly the fact that I was exhausted after a rough day at work,
partly because of the performance by conductor John Nelson — particularly his
use of a chamber orchestra for a piece which I suspect Beethoven intended for
large forces — and partly the work itself.
The Missa Solemnis is a product of Beethoven’s last decade — also the
period of the Ninth Symphony, the last five piano sonatas and the last string
quartets — that remarkable late flowering of his genius no one would have ever
guessed he’d had in him if he’d died 10 years before he actually did. The
problem is that it’s a glorious piece of music in some respects but it’s just a
little bit of this and a little bit of that, a series of settings of the
traditional Mass text in Latin (our DVD was subtitled but even if it hadn’t
been it’s not that hard to keep
track) that offers some top-drawer Beethoven but not the developmental
“through-line” of the Ninth Symphony or some other liturgical or
quasi-liturgical works by other composers (Bach’s St. Matthew and St. John Passions, Handel’s The Messiah and the Berlioz and Verdi Requiems). It’s the sort
of work that needs a lot of help
from its performers, and my favorite recording of the Missa is a left-field choice, partly because it’s
incomplete (it contains only the first 47 minutes (a little over half the total
length — damn the time limitations of American radio broadcasting!), and partly
because it was recorded in 1937 (and sounds it). It was a radio broadcast from
Cincinnati on May 5, 1937 with Eugene Goossens (a Belgian-born conductor who
lasted into the 1960’s and spent most of his career in Britain) conducting and
a fabulous quartet of soloists: Kirsten Flagstad (at her prime), Kathryn
Meisle, Frederick Jagel and Ezio Pinza. I love this recording (even over
complete ones of similar vintage by Arturo Toscanini and others) partly because
of the sheer dramatic power and force Goossens brings to the piece, and partly
because Flagstad is incomparable as the soprano soloist.
The soprano on John
Nelson’s DVD is Tamara Wilson, who’s hardly in Flagstad’s league but is a
heavy-set blonde woman with long, straight hair and a quite lovely voice —
though it’s not clear whether she could have been heard over a full orchestra
instead of Nelson’s chamber group. The other soloists are alto Elizabeth
DeShong, tenor Nikolai Schukoff (whose voice had a nice “ring” but got a bit
monotonous after a while) and bass Brindley Sherratt, and special kudos are in
order for the lovely tone and phrasing of the orchestra’s first violinist,
Marieke Blankestijn (her name makes her seem like Nelson brought over at least
one musician from the Dutch group with which he filmed The Creation), who really shone in the surprisingly frequent solo
violin passages with which Beethoven studded the later sections of the work.
Overall the Nelson performance of the Missa Solemnis was beautiful and moving but also a bit on the dull
side — I missed the sheer energy Goossens brought to this score 83 years ago —
though the use of a chamber orchestra did make the score more transparent and one heard bits of detail in the
scoring that obviously influenced Wagner (who regarded Bach, Mozart and
Beethoven as a sort of holy trinity of German music) — and as lovely as much of
the Missa is, one can hear why
it’s become a sort of step-child among Beethoven’s late works, more admired
than loved and sufficiently “off the radar” that even many fans of classical
music in general and Beethoven in particular either haven’t heard it or can’t
remember it if they have.
