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The Spin Doctor Europadisc's Weekly Column

The Shock of the Old (Part 2)

  29th June 2021

29th June 2021


‘This evening to “Siegfried”. I rate it as highly as “Tristan”. It’s so wonderfully great and youthful. Schmedes was brilliant. Teutonic, boyish. A guest, Lieban, was terrific too. Sedlmair was in top form. The forging scene. The Wotan-Erda dialogue. Forest murmurs. The Magic Fire Music, incomparably finer than in “Die Walküre”. And the closing scene… Yes everything, everything. Every word, every note. A miracle!’

Thus wrote the 20-year-old Alma Schindler (later to be Alma Mahler, Gustav’s wife) in her diary for 6 December 1899. It’s a small peek at the heady atmosphere of fin-de-siècle Vienna through the eyes of a young woman of musical talent, and full of youthful enthusiasm. Among the artists she refers to is the Danish singer Erik Schmedes (1868-1931), who had made his debut at Vienna’s Hofoper (the present-day Staatsoper) as Siegfried only the previous year, having just made the transition from baritone to Heldentenor, and who is a recurring figure in Alma’s diaries of these years. Remarkably, samples of his singing in this role can be heard on the 10-disc set ‘The Cosima Era: The Early Bayreuth Festival Singers 1876-1906’ on Pan Classics. They date from 1907, and the sonic and performance limitations of the era are all too evident: a cramped, dry sound picture, singer to the fore, a much-reduced orchestra with dominant brass (but they do manage to supply an anvil in Siegfried’s ‘Forging Song’). It’s miles away from the sort of experience Alma Schindler would have had in the theatre, yet the voice, in Christian Zwarg’s clean-sounding restoration (originally for the Gebhardt label), has a ringing, heroic quality that many present-day tenors would envy, even if the perfect pitching owes much to the recording conditions, with short takes and concert endings rather than the stamina-stretching conditions and pacing of a live theatrical performance.

The Schmedes recordings highlight both the benefits and the drawbacks of historic recordings. Given the mere existence of performances by a notable Wagnerian who sang not only at Bayreuth during its heyday, but also under Mahler in Vienna, why would anyone interested in this repertoire and period not want to hear them? On the other hand, given the severely compromised recording conditions and their necessarily piecemeal nature, how representative can they truly be, and how much can one learn from them – especially as Schmedes’s contemporary reputation rested more on his acting abilities (an imposing, Nordic physique – ‘Teutonic, boyish’ in Alma’s words) than on his singing per se? Listening to performances from this period of recording history is a constant trade-off between the value of having any sonic documentation whatever of these artists, and the inevitable shortcomings of the medium: the layers of sonic patina (if they have been to some extent removed, what else has been taken out with them?), the drastic loss of orchestral richness and depth, the possibly stilted playing of musicians when confronted with new technologies. However – and this is always something worth bearing in mind – these aural snapshots from the past were judged worthwhile to make and to issue at the time, not just as an aural souvenir for those who had heard these singers in the theatre, but also for those with perhaps no other means to experience such music apart from gathered around the once ubiquitous domestic piano.

Some 14 years after Schmedes set down his Siegfried and Götterdämmerung excerpts, the Swiss baritone Charles Panzéra recorded Debussy’s Trois Ballades de François Villon with the ‘Orchestre du Gramophone’ under Piero Coppola, two of which are among the regrettably few samples of Panzéra’s exquisitely inflected yet expressively honest artistry in the current catalogue. They are included in the Warner boxset Debussy: His First Performers (2018). From a modern perspective, this early electrical recording demonstrates only limited advances over the acoustic process it replaced: more of the orchestra is audible, and there is greater acoustic depth, yet the orchestra in general sounds distant, the balance between instrumental sections lacks finesse, and it’s often difficult to determine whether some of the instrumental vibrato is down to Gallic playing style or studio nerves. Nevertheless, any recording by Panzéra is worth searching out (his Schumann is long overdue a reiisue on CD), not least as his particular artistry formed the central plank of a celebrated article ‘Le grain de la voix’ (1972) by the great French essayist, philosopher and semiotician Roland Barthes (1915-1980), in which he compares the already ubiquitous Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s singing unfavourably with that of his musical idol Panzéra. It’s a fascinating essay for anyone interested in the art of vocal performance, and one that can only be illuminated further by hearing Panzéra’s own recordings, however acoustically compromised they may be.

Two collections that really do need urgent reissue are EMI’s monumental 5-volume ‘The Art of Singing’, which documents a huge range of singers from the dawn of sound recording right up to 2007 (volume 3, covering the years 1926-39, is currently available on Testament, but a bumper omnibus box is surely in order, given the current trend for such things), and the complementary ‘Singers of Imperial Russia’ formerly on the Pearl label. Both these series are for true vocal aficionados, a cornucopia of delights, even if the organisation (groupings of singers, etc.) and selection is sometimes haphazard. But anyone wanting to ‘dip in’ to older vocal and operatic performances is generally well-served, despite the often frustratingly episodic availability of particular performances. Among ‘studio’ recordings that convey the thrill of live performances, a special favourite of ours is Bruno Walter’s blazingly intense 1935 traversal of Act 1 of Wagner’s Die Walküre. Currently available in a fine transfer by Mark Obert-Thorn for Naxos, with Lotte Lehmann in her prime as Sieglinde, and tenor Lauritz Melchior as Siegmund arguably past his, this is a recording in which the collective stage experience of the main singers is palpable, brilliantly underscored by Walter’s urgent conducting, very unlike the genial disposition of the Columbia recordings in his later American years.

Another unmissable recording which, despite its sonic limitations, still stands head-and-shoulders in many ways above its successors is the live 1938 Metropolitan Opera radio broadcast of Verdi’s Otello, featuring the legendary Giovanni Martinelli in the title role, Elizabeth Rethberg as Desdemona and Lawrence Tibbett as Iago. There’s a fiery volaitility to Ettore Panizza’s conducting, and the tremor in Martinelli’s no-longer-youthful voice seems only to add to the intensity. This is admittedly a recording that needs a fair degree of critical tolerance for surface and stage noise, audience applause, as well a restricted recorded sound; but the sense of a great theatrical performance caught ‘on the wing’, and with artists in total sympathy with the late Verdi idiom, for us overwhelmingly trumps such considerations.

To be continued…

The Recordings (click on catalogue number for link):
The Cosima Era: The Early Bayreuth Festival Singers 1876-1906 - PC10288
Debussy: His First Performers – 9029566542
The EMI Record of Singing Volume 3 (1926-39) - SBT0132
Wagner - Die Walkure Acts 1 & 2 (Walter et al.) – 811025051
Verdi - Otello (Martinelli, Panizza et al.) - 811101819

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