Wagner: Tannhäuser: Overture and Venusberg Music (Overture & Bacchanale)

Themes of love and passion dominate these orchestral excerpts from Wagner’s music dramas. The legend of Tannhäuser contrasts the sensual allure of Venus with the ideals of courtly love and religious devotion. Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg pits an inspired but rash young singer against the traditions of the old masters in a song competition, with a beautiful girl as the prize. Tristan und Isolde, based on one of the world’s great love stories, is considered Wagner’s most revolutionary work, seamlessly blending themes of love and death into a shattering apotheosis. Gerard Schwarz’s other selections of Wagner excerpts can be found on 8572767 and 8572768.

Following on from Mackerras’ critically acclaimed opening night of the Sydney Opera House (ABC4766440), ABC is delighted to present this live performance recorded at Hammer Hall from November 2007.

A stunning Wagner collection including all the major overtures and preludes (including the very rare and very beautiful Die Feen [The Fairies]), this collection is noteworthy for other reasons. For a start, it brings together in a single collection the complete Decca Wagner recordings of Zubin Mehta and the complete Philips Wagner recordings of Edo de Waart. It also features two rarities - Wagner's early Symphony (with the San Francisco Symphony and Edo de Waart) and a tiny choral piece - Kinderkatechismus - an absolute Decca rarity and much sought-after by collectors.

‘It’s Wagner’s opera: let’s present him and not ourselves!’ This remark by Hans Knappertsbusch to Hans Hotter as the singer was about go on stage as Gurnemanz at Bayreuth in 1964 was characteristic of the conductor’s attitude. Singers’ egos, directors’ concepts and designers’ flights of fancy had no place in the Knappertsbusch vision of Wagner’s stage works. Indeed, after his second season at ‘New Bayreuth’, he told Wieland Wagner: ‘As soon as the spirit of Richard Wagner moves back into the Festspielhaus, I shall be the first to return’. And yet it would be hard to find a more flexible and spontaneous exponent of the conductor’s art than Hans Knappertsbusch, or ‘Kna’ as his friends and colleagues called him. No two of his performances were alike, which made him a difficult conductor to ‘capture’ in the clinical environment of the recording studio. He was notoriously averse to rehearsals, preferring to take inspiration from the moment when everything came together in the crucible of a live performance in the theatre or concert hall. Frequently the result was magnificent as this collection is testament to.

This collection brings together the bulk of his Wagner orchestral recordings for Decca (with the Wiener Philharmoniker), with scenes from Parsifal with members of the Wiener Staatsopernchor and the ‘Forest Murmurs’ from Siegfried with Franz Lechleitner in the title role – in all, more than two-and-a-half hours of music recorded for Decca between 1950 and 1959. Australian Wagner scholar Peter Bassett contributes the illuminating notes for this release.

Knappertsbusch died in October 1965 in Munich, following a fall at his home. In a long musical life, he explored the works of the great classical composers with intelligence and imagination; but, as he himself said, it was to Wagner’s music dramas that he devoted ‘his most and his deepest’.

The principal items were recorded on 3rd September 1949.The bonus in this collection is a recording of Toscanini in Lucerne on 7th July 1946, conducting the Orchestra del Teatro alla Scala di Milano. They perform Beethoven’s Egmont Overture and Wagner’s Tanhäuser Overture and Bacchanale.

This double album constitutes one of the most important issues of Toscanini’s recorded legacy in that it combines in these two CDs the first ever broadcast concert the Maestro gave with the NBC Symphony Orchestra, an orchestra founded expressly for him in 1937 in New York, and the last - his final appearance with the Orchestra in April 1954. A great deal of interest therefore attaches to these two events, combined for the first time as a commercially issued package - a true ‘hail and farewell‘ (Ave Atque Vale) to the art of the conductor whom many reagard as the greatest of all.