Uneven Operatic Revivals
GUREWITSCH, M. ANATOLE
On Music UNEVEN OPERATIC REVIVALS BY M. ANATOLE GUREWITSCH This fall, Lincoln Center's two resident opera companies launched ambitious seasons, distinguished by adventurous revivals. Among...
...The conceit does not translate into a viable image...
...RCA, having issued many albums of Korngold film scores, also has recorded Die tote Stadt...
...But in the role of his wife, Leonore, who disguises herself as the youth Fidelio to seek him in the prisons, Hildegard Behrens made the part's noble and thrilling music her own...
...All left conflicting impressions...
...Fortunately, the singers gave us the animation and spirit that the pit failed to provide...
...His reports to his correspondent are crowded with incident and observation, their tone by turns exuberant, self-pitying, sarcastic, and savage...
...But for every listener who wants to hear the work, there are hundreds who prefer to see La Boheme, and years can pass without a live performance...
...Corsaro's work is notoriously uneven, though, and he is largely to blame for the fiasco of Die tote Stadt...
...Yet even at such moments, the emotional effects arc ternperate...
...Other splendid portrayals included: Kurt Moll's Rocco, the good jailer...
...Her first recording, in the title role of Richard Strauss' Salome under Herbert von Karajan (Angel SBLX-3848), has just been released, and it offers a very full picture of her intrepid vocalism, her electrifying sense of drama, and her analytical intelligence...
...Here, unfortunately, the orchestral finesse he achieved with Massenet's lesser score eluded him...
...Charlotte, a warm, maternal woman, has promised her dying mother to bring up her little brothers and sisters, and to marry Albert, a good and honest man...
...The tension mounts...
...By contrast, the atmosphere on stage was vibrant...
...A handsome appearance and a stage presence of compelling intensity complement her vocal accomplishments...
...Werther, a romantic and suicidal manic-depressive, develops a desperate attachment to her...
...The first two acts of Massenet's opera take place in the open air, but the passion in them has been, as it were, brought indoors and domesticated...
...The opera is a curiously disunified affair...
...Corsaro's direction dealt the coup de grace...
...Julius Rudel, the director of the New York City Opera, stepped across the plaza to conduct, and he led expertly, with courtesy to the singers and a fine skill for turning instrumental details to dramatic account...
...The invention here is pleasing and mannerly...
...Still, an opera must be seen to be appreciated fully, so in principle, the City Opera's revival is meritorious...
...the symphonic accompaniment to the action was dry and colorless...
...The New York City Opera's band does not equal the Met's and the acoustics of the State Theater do not easily yield the expansive sound that can be heard at the larger house on the happiest occasions...
...An intelligence on this order has probably not been heard in a soprano since the heyday of Astrid Varnay...
...The stage throughout is seen through a neoclassical frame, and the first two sets have the transparency and picturesque composition of an 18th-century aquarelle...
...The production is rightly admired...
...as Pelleas, he for the first time struck me also as a subtle, artistic one...
...Karl Bohm conducted...
...But before coming to Hollywood (with Max Reinhardt), he had proved a composer of such precocity that even Richard Strauss, no late bloomer himself, was unnerved by his acomplishments...
...His finest moments came in the bardic recitation of verses from Ossian...
...and though her voice takes on strangely unmatched colors at the bottom, the middle and the top, she negotiated Leonore's daunting lines with seamlessly integrated registers...
...I felt in uncharted seas...
...Thus, although absent from the Met for several seasons, it returned for a mere seven showings...
...Records fill the gap to some extent...
...The opera's action moves with cinematic fluidity, and the stage directions call for numerous special effects that would seem beyond the means of conventional stagecraft...
...We seem to have stepped into a different opera...
...It was impossible to reconcile what was heard the night 1 attended with his intimidating reputation...
...Alas, only in principle...
...Werther, having dragged himself through many months of torment, at last borrows Albert's pistols and puts himself out of his misery...
...Placido Domingo's robust appearance may be little suited to the overwrought hero (Even in his blood-drenched blouse he looked in the pink of health), but his singing was a strong asset, and he achieved mournfulness without sobbing...
...Massenet weaves instrumental solos around the vocal lines with a misty beauty, and he shows a dramatic aptness, too...
...D uring the same period, Rudel was also busy with his own company, presiding over the revival of Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande (set to Maeterlinck's play...
...The ceiling of Albert's house, however, floats high above the walls, affording a glimpse of bare, storm-tossed branches, and Werther's dwelling seems no more than a lean-to on a blasted heath...
...Alan Titus has long been a likable performer...
...A pity: Its heady postro-mantic luxuriance deserves to be heard...
...What is not evident on disc is thes/a' of her instrument...
...The simple but striking allegory of the fatal interpenetration of love and death is lost in floss and waffle...
...Bohm's tempos in the slow sections of the overture were so attenuated that the ear could distinguish only harmonic intervals unsustained by melody or rhythmic pulse...
...Nonetheless, the performers made a strong case for the stageworthiness of this problematic and largely neglected work...
...Elena Obraztsova, a Russian mezzo who first appeared in this country with the Bolshoi and has been a frequent guest since, was Charlotte...
...Among these were the Metropolitan's Fidelio and Werther and the New York City Opera's Pelleas et Melisande and Die tote Stadt...
...The opera is by Erich Wolfgang Korn-gold, known today chiefly for his film scores from the '30s and '40s...
...Yet its vogue, like that of uncounted other works whose initial acceptance is total and immediate?did not last...
...True, Imre Pallo's fiery leadership drew from the orchestra all the hues and sonorities the players had failed to supply in Pelleas...
...She was excellent in the part, rising to its climaxes with grandeur...
...Korngold's third opera, Die tote Stadt (The Dead City) is the rather hysterical dream vision of a man who has made his existence a monument to his dead wife...
...This crude son et lumiere has been hailed as a breakthrough in operatic production...
...She returns his ardor but conceals this, giving her hand to Albert, as her conscience dictates...
...Elsewhere, he guided his players with the dependable hand of routine...
...She is a lovely woman and a gifted actress -and neither her vocal projection nor her flawless French diction betray her Slavic origin...
...and Sieg-mund Nimsgern's demonic Pizarro...
...Descriptions of nature, both in its benign and violent aspects, fill the book, reflecting the hero's inner turmoil...
...Nothing prepares for the dark, brooding eloquence of the final act?the first scene of which is set in Albert's house, the second, in Werther's chamber...
...Glenys Fowles, completely absorbed in the mysterious role of Melisande, sang with purity, and Michael Devlin made a stalwart Golaud...
...In the final scene of the first act, Werther and Charlotte return from a ball to the serene sounds of a waltz...
...It premiered simultaneously in Hamburg and Cologne in 1920 (when Korngold was all of 23), swept the stages of Europe and came to the Metropolitan...
...Passion, say these expressionistic images, literally blows the lid off-but off what1...
...While Massenet's Werther cannot stand up to Fidelio, the performance itself was more consistent...
...Corsaro's multimedia show, for all the technology of film at its disposal, covers the scrim with imagery at once obtrusive, trite and sleazy, and systematically ignores the creator's wishes...
...Based on The Sorrows of Young Werther, three names and a crude plot outline are essentially all that remain of Goethe's novel...
...As the Spanish nobleman Florestan, languishing in a secret vault on political charges and presumed dead, James King could convey neither the fortitude nor the grace the supple phrases imply...
...On the other hand, B6hm rushed the Prisoners' Chorus, and the choir responded like a heartless glee club...
...In the novel, Werther's story is told chiefly through his delirious letters...
...Charlotte reveals that she is pledged to another and the waltz is heard once more, its carefree mood now bittersweet...
...She set the immense house ringing with sound...
...Arleen Auger's Marzelline, Rocco's daughter, who takes a shine to the new prison hand...
...The orchestra had played Tannhauser the night before, perhaps accounting for some of the frazzled entrances and missed connections, but the main trouble did not lie there...
...In Lloyd Evans' weighty sets, Frank Corsaro's bold direction gave an unusually forceful account of Maeterlinck's shadowy happenings...
...But despite the fact that they sang powerfully and acted vividly, Richard Taylor (as the bereft Paul) and Nancy Shade (in the dual role of Marie, the saintly departed wife, and Marietta, her wriggling-and very much alive-erotic double) allowed hardly a syllable of their text to be understood...
...I would never have believed it possible to hear those heartbreaking strains without deep emotion...
...At the movies, no one would stand for it...
...Rudolf Heinrich's scenic design mirrors this schism...
...Lovers of serious music recognize the excellence of Beethoven's score for Fidelio, his only opera, and give it its due...
Vol. 61 • November 1978 • No. 23
