Wagner: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg: Entry of the Masters

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.

These stereo recordings date from sessions on 16 and 17 September 1959 for Pye. (The Tannhäuser Overture was recorded at an earlier session in April 1959). The Meistersinger Overture and Act 3 Suite was popular with Barbirolli, having recorded it for HMV in 1944 and other Wagner works he recorded included the Lohengrin Preludes (HMV 1946, now released on SJB1004), the Rienzi Overture (HMV 1944). A unique opportunity to hear an all-Wagner concert from Barbirolli comes in a ‘live’ broadcast with the New York Philharmonic in November 1938 which includes the Siegfried Idyll, which he never recorded commercially (Barbirolli Society SJB1035).

Whatever qualms Wagner himself might have had about performing extracts from his operas in the concert hall, he was, as a professional musician, able to suppress them. They brought in revenue, of course, but this was not the main consideration; more important was that his work should be known and understood. He therefore sanctioned, even encouraged, the performance of excerpts from his operas, either with vocalists or, as in the present recording, in purely orchestral form.

Although John Barbirolli made several commercial recordings during his seven years as conductor of the Philharmonic- Symphony Orchestra of New York (as the New York Philharmonic was then formally known), the Barbirolli Society offers us a unique oportunity with this issue of an off-the-air recording of a Wagner concert, performed in Carnegie Hall in November 1938. It comes as a valuable reminder of an important period of his career, one moreover which has come to be regarded, superficially and misleadingly, as a failure. The orchestra was immediately won over by Barbirolli’s personality and remained devoted to him. If these tough players – once known as ‘Murder Incorporated’ – had not liked him and respected his musicianship, it would have been impossible for the manager Arthur Judson, within five days of JB’s first concert, to have begun to mention a permanent appointment. On 7 December 1936, after five weeks’ work with the orchestra, the board offered him a three-year contract and this was renewed in 1940 for a further two years, by which time the war was a complicating factor. JB himself was overwhelmed and wrote to his future wife Evelyn Rothwell on 11 December 1936: ‘The orchestra played tonight as something I have dreamed of. . . The emotion of the orchestra at my appointment is something too touching for words. I can’t believe I am worthy of all this.’ The orchestra’s first horn player spoke of ‘the joy’ of making music with Barbirolli.

This collection sees Otto Klemperer lead the Philharmonia and New Philharmonia orchestras in compelling performances of works by Wagner and Richard Strauss. The set features highlights from each of Wagner’s most acclaimed operas, as well as Strauss’s Don Juan and a 1962 account of Tod und Verklärung that was hailed as one of Klemperer’s finest late recordings.

Ambivalent is the word which best describes Klemperer’s feelings about Germany’s two great musical Richards, Wagner and Strauss. During his early years as an opera conductor in Germany, Klemperer conducted a modicum of Strauss and a good deal of Wagner, though from the outset it was clear that he was never going to be an unthinking fan of either. The music of both composers did, nonetheless, cast its spell. Recording Act 1 of Wagner’s Die Walküre in London in 1969 was, he said, like meeting a woman he had loved 40 years ago and discovering that she was much as she had always been. He went on: ‘I find the music thrilling. Thrilling! One can say this or that about Wagner, but no one else could have written that music. No one! It’s as stupid to underestimate Wagner as it is to overestimate him. He doesn’t need either’.

Klemperer’s attitude to the operas of Richard Strauss was no less mixed. He thrilled to Salome, which even as an old man he considered to be one of the twentieth century’s most original scores, revered Elektra, and took great delight in Ariadne auf Naxos. On the other hand, he found too much ‘sugar-water’ in Der Rosenkavalier and was baffled by Die Frau ohne Schatten of which he conducted a handful of performances in Cologne in 1919.

The Strauss work which had first impressed Klemperer – he was 15 at the time – was Tod und Verklärung. What struck the young enthusiast was the quality of the orchestration and the remorselessness of the build-up of the thematic material, qualities Klemperer would later bring to his own reading of a work which does indeed advance implacably towards its sought-for goal: the soul’s transfiguration as memories of childhood visions and unattained artistic ideals grandly mingle.

Knowing the man as he did, Klemperer experienced few difficulties in coming to terms with Strauss’s equivocations during the Nazi era. As the Second World War drew towards its close Strauss began working on Metamorphosen, a threnody for 23 solo strings born of the trauma of wartime cultural loss: the Goethe house destroyed, Dresden, Munich, Weimar all in ruins. ‘Basically quite nice’ was Klemperer’s laconic

comment on the piece, yet no one was more eager to conduct it, an ambition he realised in Budapest in March 1948. Klemperer’s coupling of Metamorphosen with Tod und Verklärung on an LP first released in 1962 was widely welcomed as one of the finest of all his late recordings.