Never was I a diva

A life for the stage. Martha Mödls autobiography.

Author : Jos Hermans

In 20 chapters, Thomas Voigt, editor-in-chief of Fono Forum, outlined the life and especially the 55-year stage career of Martha Mödl through a series of frank, candid conversations. The account of these found its way to the Berlin publishing house Parthas as a kind of autobiography entitled So war mein Weg.

A key figure of postwar Bayreuth, Martha Mödl profiles herself in these conversations as an improbably honest, modest, collegial - "never was I a diva!" - artist with a heart for opera as an unadulterated theatrical experience. Mödl experienced singing as a form of lust and, with her talent for instinctively sensing theatrical veracity, managed to captivate great directors and equally great conductors to ecstasy. Theater innovators such as Günther Rennert and especially Wieland Wagner took advantage of it. Mödl's intuitive acting skills were used by Wieland Wagner to rid Wagner's works of their mythical ballast and to bring Wagner to the people for the first time.

Mödl experienced her peak years from 1950 to 1955, a bit like Maria Callas. And like Callas, she was a highly evocative stage personality handicapped by an improbable myopia. Like Callas, she was unhappy in love. Both needed the stage as protection from loneliness. But unlike La Divina, Mödl managed to preserve her voice into old age, a feat Callas proved incapable of and which Mödl attributes to her drastic dieting regimen. After the performance, Martha usually left the stage dead unhappy; her private life was an unmitigated fiasco. As a talented actress and highly dramatic celebrity of the opera stage, she always attracted men who left her immediately once they got to know her as a private person. Like Kirsten Flagstad, Martha Mödl was the opposite of a society figure.

Born in 1912 to a Nuremberg grocer's daughter and a Bohemian painter, Martha Mödl is destined by nature to become a singer. It is clear from an early age that she possesses exceptional vocal resources and an apt instinct for the theater. Father Mödl abandoned his family when Martha was barely 12 years old. Entrusted to the company of the mother, who never remarries herself, a lifelong intimate bond develops between the daughter and her mother.

Mödl's singing career starts rather late, at age 30, in the middle of the war years in Remscheid. She had barely sung her debut as Hänsel in Humperdinck's fairy tale opera when the theater was bombed. The performance continues in a gymnasium where the director of Düsseldorf hears her and promptly offers her a contract as first mezzo-soprano. However, this does not succeed until after the war. In the meantime, the newly-minted mezzo has to produce grenades in a munitions factory. Once the war was over she set off on foot for Düsseldorf where she met a new intendant who, to her great joy, ratified the contract of his Nazi predecessor. Here she has her first great success as Carmen. Günther Rennert hears her and then brings her to Hamburg. From 1948 her career takes off here with major dramatic parts for mezzo-soprano such as Carmen, Azucena, Octavian, Eboli and Marie in Wozzeck.

Slavic cathead

In 1950 she first entered the twilight zone between mezzo-soprano and dramatic soprano, singing her first Kundry under Joseph Keilberth in Berlin and under Wilhelm Furtwängler in Milan. With her "slavic cat's head" she considers herself rather unsuitable for the interpretation of Wagner's Germanic heroines. Yet as Kundry she is subsequently brought to Bayreuth by Wieland Wagner for the reopening of the Festival in 1951. Then followed Isolde under Karajan and finally the three Brünnhilde's - her favorite role - marking her peak years as a high-dramatic soprano from 1950 to 1955. For a decade she set benchmarks for the interpretation of Wagner's heroines. Her supremely human interpretations of these characters open up new dimensions of great importance for the survival of Wagner's works after the collapse of the Third Reich. Martha Mödl simultaneously became an ambassador for Wagner throughout the world - in Europe as well as in America.

Her glittering debut in Bayreuth then takes her to Vienna, Stuttgart, Milan and New York. On the legendary November 5th, 1955, she experienced the reopening of the Vienna State Opera as Fidelio. In Milan, which curiously became a kind of haven for Wagner song shortly after the war, she is at Furtwängler's side. Also in Stuttgart, she finds artistic shelter in a house strongly associated with Wieland Wagner and Günther Rennert. Stuttgart is called the "Winterbayreuth" in those years and under intendant Walter Erich Schäfer has been led to the leading artistic theater of Germany.

Also at the New York MET where her stage persona is not carried by the congenial direction of Wieland Wagner her singer personality can carry through and she can harvest triumphs as Isolde and Brünnhilde notwithstanding the imperfections of often outdated stagings.

With the reopening of the rebuilt Nationaltheater in Munich in 1963, she takes leave of the high-dramatic profession in favor of character roles. With roles such as the Amme in Die Frau ohne Schatten, the sextoness in Jenufa, Klytemnestra in Elektra, Herodias in Salome, Gräfin Geschwitz in Lulu, Begbick in Mahagonny, the Countess in Pique Dame, she was able to continue to indulge her unbroken vitality as an actress without getting into vocal trouble. With Waltraute in Götterdämmerung she bade farewell to Bayreuth in 1967. At the end of the 70s, when she is already almost 60, her career can peak once more by singing roles in contemporary operas. Thus she participates in the world premieres of Fortner's Bluthochzeit, Zimmermann's Die Soldaten, Gottfried von Einems Besuch der alten Dame, Hans Werner Henze's Elegie für junge Liebende and Melusine, Troades and Gespenstersonate by Aribert Reimann.

Martha Mödl's secret was intuition, spontaneous and total identification with her characters: "I can't go on stage and think, like so many others: so, in two bars this difficult passage will come and then I'd better take this position to get through it in one piece. I have always sung and never thought about how I do it because I have always gone at it with all my senses at once."

Confessions

"The essence of Martha Mödl's rendition can only be indicated and not described: it is the greatness of a style that cannot be separated from the person. Martha Mödl does not simply sing the notes as others do but her singing is involuntary expression; so compelling that one hardly notices small weaknesses of the voice - weaknesses that Martha Mödl does not have to fear because with her they mean nothing." (CARL DAHLHAUS)

"I admired Mödl in the role of Kundry immensely and especially because she was that which I could never be or never wanted to be. She gave herself totally to the stage again and again, she lived through each role with the greatest intensity, without caring about her voice. My position is that one shouldn't really do that.... The desire to be like her always comes into conflict with the sober realization that one should not be like her." (CHRISTA LUDWIG)

"Martha Mödl shows us like no other that artistic self-surrender - and not theatrical exhibitionism - has an even stronger effect on the public today. - has an even stronger effect on the audience today than smooth artistic perfection. With Mödl, singing, personality and interpretation form an absolutely inseparable unity, just as Richard Wagner - as we know from his ecstatic descriptions - experienced with Schröder-Devrient. I readily admit that I like to ask Martha Mödl for advice in cases where I am extremely suspicious, when I want to find out something about singers or conductors: her recommendations are the only watertight tips I have ever received from someone because they stem from an almost intuitive knowledge that you only find in women, from an innate sense of the genial, of the real as well as the unreal." (WIELAND WAGNER)

"Mödl's voice is a veritable magic box. Other voices can sing all they want, you can recognize them immediately. With Mödl, you first recognize only the stage character, so her voice can adapt to any role." (WILHELM FURTWÄNGLER)

Wagner discography

Mödl is among those singers who cannot be fully appreciated by the CD. Besides Fidelio and the Rome-Ring under Furtwängler, she herself counts her Isolde with Ramon Vinay conducted by Herbert von Karajan, a 1952 Wieland Wagner production from Bayreuth, among the highlights of her discography.

As Isolde

- Tristan und Isolde

conducted by Karajan with Vinay,Malaniuk, Hotter, Weber, Uhde. Bayreuth 1952, Myto

- Tristan und Isolde-Szenen

conducted by Rother with Windgassen, Blatter. Oper Berlin 1952/54, Teldec

As Brünnhilde

- Ring des Nibelungen

Keilberth with Windgassen, Hotter, Resnik, Vinay, Neidlinger, Greindl, Malaniuk, Uhde. Bayreuth 1953, Golden Melodram

- Ring des Nibelungen

Furtwängler with Suthaus, Frantz, Konetzni, Windgassen, Neidlinger, Patzak, Greindl, Klose, Jurinac, Grümmer. RAI Roma 1953, EMI

- Die Walküre

Furtwängler with Rysanek, Suthaus, Frantz, Klose, Frick. Vienna Philharmonic 1954, EMI

- The Walküre

Keilberth with Varnay, Vinay, Hotter, Milinkovic, Greindl. Bayreuth 1955, Melodram

As Sieglinde

- The Walkiare

Keilberth with Varnay, Lorenz, Hotter, Milinkovic, Greindl, Nilsson. Bayreuth 1954, Melodram

As Gutrune, Dritte Norn

Götterdämmerung

Keilberth with Varnay, Lorenz, Uhde, Greindl, Neidlinger. Bayreuth 1952, Paragon

As Waltraute

-Götterdämmerung

Böhm with Nilsson, Windgassen, Greindl, Stewart, Dvorakova, Neidlinger. Bayreuth 1967, Philips

As Kundry

- Parsifal

Knappertsbusch with Windgassen, Weber, London, Uhde, Mill. Bayreuth 1951, Teldec

- Parsifal

Krauss with Vinay, Weber, London, Uhde, Greindl. Bayreuth 1953, Arlecchino

- Parsifal

Knappertsbusch with Vinay, Greindl, Fischer-Dieskau, Blankenheim, Hotter. Bayreuth 1956, Hunt

Source : MARTHA MÖDL - "So war mein Weg. Gespräche mit Thomas Voigt" - PARTHAS VERLAG, 1998, ISBN 3-932529-08-1

Originally published in the print edition of Leidmotief, January 1999