Singing Isolde is worth all of life's sorrows
Discover more from Leidmotief | Leitmotif
Singing Isolde is worth all of life's sorrows
Concise biographical sketch of GERMAINE LUBIN
Author : Jos Hermans
As much as Max Lorenz was his favorite Siegfried, Germaine Lubin was Adolf Hitlers favorite Isolde. Once liberation came, the great career of the French soprano was over. Arrested five times, she spent months in terrible prisons awaiting various trials. Her Paris apartment and her country home were confiscated, she was fired for life from the Paris Opera, accused of treason and imprisoned and exiled from France for three years. What could she have done to deserve such a cruel punishment ? Germaine Lubin's biography reads like a screenplay that a brave director could turn into a fabulous cultural-historical movie with a great soundtrack. Who is up to the challenge?
Lubin's singing career began, conventionally, at the Paris Conservatory, where, in an unconventional way, she was a favorite of Gabriel Fauré, who was director at the time. Fauré called her "ma belle statue" and told her, "I love your voice, it is like no other." In 1912, she made her debut at the Opéra Comique as Antonia in Les Contes d'Hoffmann. In 1924 she is invited to join the Paris Opera, and for the next 20 years she becomes the company's most admired dramatic soprano. She handles a varied repertoire, singing the French premieres of Ariadne auf Naxos, Der Rosenkavalier and Elektra. She claims that Debussy wrote a Jeanne D'Arc for her, a project that did not materialize due to his untimely death in 1918.
But it is in Wagner's operas that she feels most at home, emotionally and musically. She calls him "le grand des grands." Her Wagner passion begins during a performance of Tristan und Isolde, not long after she leaves the conservatory. It is such a transcendent experience that her biographer, Nicole Casanova, suggests she spent the rest of her life searching for her Tristan. Physically, she was entirely suited to her art. Tall and imposing - statuesque she was often called - with blonde hair and blue eyes, she seemed destined for the roles of Wagner's heroines. After going through the repertoire of romantic works - Senta, Elisabeth, Elsa and Eva - she reaches the Walküre Brünnhilde in 1928 and in 1930 finally, Isolde. This was followed by Kundry with Lauritz Melchior and the Götterdämmerung Brünnhilde in 1933. Her private life is less successful. In 1913 she marries poet and playwright Paul Géraldy. Thirteen years later, she divorces after which she begins a deeply neurotic relationship with Jacques Moreau, a co-director at Larousse, which lasts until 1941. By far her most remarkable relationship is with Philippe Pétain, whom she meets shortly after the 1918 armistice during a singing engagement with a French veterans' group. According to Casanova, the marshal professed his love and asked her to marry him.
Although she turned him down, they remained friends ever after. At their last encounter, in 1939, when he was ambassador to Spain and she was in Madrid to sing, he is said to have told her, "You know that I love you still." To the end of her days, she regarded him a great knight, the savior of France, in whom she professed total confidence and whom she revered as "the greatest man I ever knew." But it was not Pétain who caused her downfall, but Hitler.
A quarter of a century after the war, a plaintive Winifred Wagner was still confessing remorse for setting it in train : "I always tell myself that everything that happened to her after the war was my fault. I am the one who introduced her to Hitler.... But how could I have foreseen it?" The tragedy began in 1938 when Lubin was invited to sing Sieglinde in Berlin at the State Opera. After the performance, the French ambassador, André François-Poncet, went to her dressing room with Hermann Göring in tow. "Sie sind wunderbar," the Reich Marshal told her. Thus began her involvement with the Nazi leadership. It was not only Göring she impressed that night but also the State Opera's director, Heinz Tietjen, who signed her up on the spot to sing Kundry in Bayreuth that summer.
Even before then, she had yet another triumph : in May, Furtwängler and the Berlin State Opera arrived in Paris to put on a great propaganda show of German culture; the opera was Tristan and Lubin was Isolde. Her performance in Parsifal the following summer in Bayreuth, opposite Max Lorenz and conducted by Victor de Sabata, was a huge hit with Hitler and Winifred Wagner, who swore they had never heard the second act so magnificenty sung. Hitler found her personally enchanting as well. At the post-performance reception at Wahnfried, he summoned her to dine on his right hand and was so smitten that he commented, "Madam, you are a seductress". The two of them later retired to the salon and a photograph records a beaming Lubin sitting next to the Führer while other guests look on with delight. Afterwards, she told a German journalist, "I had a marvellous time at Wahnfried and found in Winifred Wagner a marvellous German woman. But my most remarkable meeting was with the first man of your Reich. . . I was amazed to see a man - someone who, through his actions, has left such a strong imprint on the history of the world - yet is so simple and cordial." The Führer sent her a bouquet of red roses and a photograph of himself in a silver frame in a red leather box stamped with an eagle and a swastika. Lubin was snared. After singing Sieglinde and Kundry at the Berlin State Opera in early 1939, she returns to Bayreuth that summer for Tristan.
On this occasion, Hitler went backstage and, taking her hands in his, is said to have exclaimed, "Never in my life have I seen or heard such an Isolde" - a remarkable statement considering that he had attended more than a hundred performances of the work. In her unreliable mémoires, Friedelind Wagner claimed that Tietjen had engaged her for "political reasons" - presumably to please Hitler - and had commented to Winifred, "She is not up to Bayreuth standards, but she is a very beautiful woman." If he did indeed say that, he did Lubin a great injustice, Frederic Spotts says. "She was," in the words of Robert Tuggle, the Metropolitan Opera's historian, "a magnificent singer with a beautiful voice, not quite the powerhouse customary in Wagner, but musical and in a way that only Flagstad was."
Indeed, it was Kirsten Flagstad who, impressed by their performances together in Zurich, had recommend her to the Met. The Opera company took the hint and signed her up for the 1940-41 season. She was to sing in its first-ever performance of Gluck's Alceste, a role for which she was celebrated. Lubin was the most important singer announced for that season and her picture was in all the New York papers. When the Wehrmacht approached Paris in 1940, Lubin escaped to the Auvergne. Shortly after the armistice, she returned to Paris and on 28 october sang in Fidelio.
Early in january, she cancels plans for her debut at the Met, with the implausible claim that she would not receive a passport from Ambassador Abetz. Although America did not appeal to her in an artistic sense, she will admit in Le Quotidien de Paris in 1974 that she deeply regretted it because of the missed publicity and record deals. Throughout the occupation years, she continued to sing and was a big hit with Wehrmacht officers. Her performance of the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier in February 1941 so bedazzled Colonel Hans Speidel that he insisted on meeting her. They developed a friendship that lasted to the end of their lives.
During the occupation years, Winifred Wagner and Lubin continue to correspond. After her son is taken prisoner in 1940, Lubin writes to Winifred, who turns to Hitler to arrange his release. The courier of their letters is a naval captain, Hans Joachim Lange. He was said to have been smitten by Lubin and for the next four years he was apparently her closest friend. It was through Lange that she was introduced to a number of high-ranking Wehrmacht officers, whom she entertained at her château near Tours. She continues to sing (including Isolde in Zurich, June 1941), broadcast on Radio Paris and make recordings.
One of the musical -and propaganda- highlights of the occupation years was a performance of Tristan und Isolde by the Berlin State Opera in May 1941. Setting up that production was a gigantic undertaking, requiring the transfer of all the sets and a complement of 250 from Berlin to Paris. Max Lorenz and Lubin sang, as they had done two years earlier in Bayreuth. A few days before the performance, Hitler reportedly intervened again, this time to free Lubin's Jewish singing teacher, after the soprano had refused to sing while he was in prison. It opened on the anniversary of Wagner's birth and was repeated the next day at a closed performance for the Wehrmacht, again attended by Winifred Wagner. In his mémoires, Speidel described it as "a great success" for German culture - the whole point of the venture, of course. Jean Cocteau writes to her : "Madame, what you have done for Isolde was such a miracle that I do not have the courage to remain silent."
The opening of Arno Breker's sculpture exhibition at the Orangerie in May 1942 - the cultural event of the year - attracts high-ranking Vichy officials as well as many French artists and intellectuals who will later be accused of collaboration. Lubin participates through a short concert, along with pianists Alfred Cortot and Wilhelm Kempff.
Lubin is rehearsing Alceste as the Allies approach Paris in the summer of 1944. On 26 August, the day of the liberation of Paris, at the very time de Gaulle was marching down the Champs-Élysées amid a cheering crowd, Lubin had already under arrest for several hours. According to the terse entry in her diary, "I return home after ten hours of detention. Arrested this morning by several Free French." The arrest can't have come as a surprise, because she took with her a list of persons she had " saved," along with some of their letters. After ten hours, her lawyer arranged for her release and escorted her home. A several days later, the épuration of the Paris Opera began. It put her in mind of the French Revolution and, as her biographer comments, she was as blithely oblivious of the popular mood as any aristocrat in 1793.
"God, how patriotic the Opera has become!" she commented with heavy irony to her diary. "These immaculate artists!" Disgust and outrage were her predominant emotions then and in the months to come. Contempt as well - contempt for the repulsive riffraff who were detaining her. "The whole affair is as usual in the hands of the obsequious servant class and intriguers.... Just a lot of garbage!" What had she done wrong, she wondered. She had not reported anyone to the Gestapo. She owed the Germans neither her fame nor her fortune. No fewer than twenty Frenchmen had been saved thanks to her. Was it not simply that people were jealous? Her ordeal was just beginning. Her diary entry of September 8 reads: "Eight days ago I was arrested for the second time. For ten hours I waited on a leather bench with no back, surrounded by dirty men with weeks-old beards, concierges, laundrywoman, prostitutes. In the corners, garbage was mixed with the hair of women who had their heads shaved the night before. During the course of the day another four were shaved completely bald, except for one on whom, for laughs, they had left a tuft in the middle of her head, which hung down like the mandarin's pogtail - so dreadful as to make one shiver. After the fourth woman was shaved, I began to trembling in uncontrollable fear of being suddenly delivered into the hands of one of these fanatics and ending up bald."
That afternoon was nothing compared to what followed. Pencilled notes written in prison on small scraps of paper record the events of the next two months. They breathe the atmosphere of the Terror. And, in fact, not since the Revolution had Paris prisons been filled with so many celebrities. On arriving, Lubin had spied someone she knew. "I greet her and she introduces me to her daughter, the Duchess of C.B. [Countess Cossé-Brissac], like me not knowing why she was arrested. She wonders whether her friendship with the Countess de C. might have aroused suspicion." And then there was the police van: "The police van - yes! Like criminals. It is impossible to imagine police van! I thought I would suffocate in that small metal box. I arrive at 9. I see Fabre-Luce and call to him. We hug and when he goes on his way he says, "Think of Fidelio!" A woman comes to me, fitted out as though she was going camping. It is the Marquise de P[olignac]. A policeman recognizes me. "Courage, Madame Lubin; we'll soon be applauding you at the Opera, you'll see." Mme. de B., Mme. J. and I are taken to a cell, apparently the last remaining one, 3 meters long and 2 meters wide, with one straw mattress and one blanket for the three of us. There we lived for three days! And in what hygienic conditions! Two of us slept on the floor, while the third tried to sleep on the straw mattress. Horrible!
12 September. Day after day passes and I don't even bother to look at the time. Night, day, everything without shape, without sense, without light, inert, stupid, bleak....
16 Sept. I have not even gone out for six days. I prefer to be a recluse than to have anything to do with this awful bunch, in a courtyard so tiny that it is impossible to take a step - cooped up like sheep."
At some point - she probably did not know the date - she is transferred to Drancy, a prison that had been used as a concentration camp by the Germans. "Ugliness, dirt, selfishness, cruelty, all mingle. I am in my little corner and intend to remain here. It is very cold...As every day, I get up at dawn, exhausted by a bad night. Washing with others in freezing water. The indecency of it. Odious people, nauseating smells, coffee tasting like soup from the night before. I get dressed quickly to escape the putrid sweeping up, the screaming women, the sound of water, the disgusting smells - I run outside over steps covered with filth.... Drancy is an immense material and moral garbage heap. I live in a state of perpetual nausea." And on it went. From time to time it seems as if she is about to be released. "Princess Z. came running to me: 'Quick, quick, dear, they are summoning you, certainly to let you out.'" Instead, she is taken to Frenes. "Frenes! How should I describe the agonizing, the unspeakable impression of this gigantic prison?"
When she has to undress before all the other women and give up everything - watch, papers, face powder - she for the first time breaks down and cries. The final leaves of her prison notes record her humiliation and physical suffering. Three weeks later, on Nov. 3, she is released. Not long afterwards, she reads that Boris Godunov is to be performed at the Opera; in the role that would have been hers, another is to sing. Her greatest anguish off all, according to Casanova, is the deterioration of her voice. Still worse was to come. Legal action was pending in which she was under suspicion of nothing less than treason. On January 3, 1945, that charge is dismissed, leading her to hope she might soon return to the stage. In early March, however, she learns to her shock that she is still under investigation, and at the end of the month receives notice that she is dismissed from the Paris Opera with immediate effect and without compensation. A few weeks later, she is ordered to appear for trial in a civil court before a jury. Although that case is postponed, she finds herself -because of her château in the area- under the jurisdiction of the courts of Tours and Orleans.
Early in 1946, she is arrested again on suspicion of having denounced her gardener to the Germans. Again she finds herself in prison: "The most horrifying prison imaginable. A military prison. A cell of 2 meters by 2.5 meters, a high ceiling, a skylight at the top, bars, filth, dust, foul odours, a toilet never cleaned. Three women in this cell intended for one individual." Her notes go on and on in that vein. There she remains from May 21 to June 6. It is around this time that she reads Friedelind Wagner's comment that she had been hired at Bayreuth to please Hitler, not because of her voice. This may have hurt her more than all those months in prison, Spotts believes. In the face of her disgrace, friends and acquaintances responded as most friends and acquaintances normally do - deserting her, declining to testify on her behalf, refusing to answer her letters. She had never had many friends and was now utterly bereft. Only from her ex-husband, the kindly Paul Géraldy, gave her support. In December 1946, her case finally goes to trial. There were several charges, among them that she had received Lange and other German officers at her château and accepted gifts from them and that she had asked Hitler to release her son from a prison camp.
"Except for having eaten the flesh of children, there was nothing I was not accused of", she complained without overly much exaggeration in an interview years later with Lanfranco Rasponi. Her social skills did not include friendliness with those she considered her inferiors, and at the trial she made her feelings known with a imperious fervour that irritated judge and jury alike. Some jury members are said to have favoured sentencing her to twenty years of hard labor. The judge's decision was only slightly less severe - the loss of her rights of citizenship for the remainder of her life, the seizure of her assets and banishment from France for twenty years. Eventually the sentence was reduced. But when the Geneva Opera invited her to sing in Tannhäuser, the French ambassador mounted such opposition that the offer was withdrawn. It was the end of her opera career. "She wanted to die", according to Casanova. Why was she treated with such wanton cruelty? Interviewed years later she said : "I suffered an enormous injustice. They curtailed my career by ten years - my own people! The fact is that I knew some of the Germans who came to Paris during the occupation. This gave my enemies a chance to satisfy their envy. If I saw Germans in Paris - and they had been more than kind to me - it was to save my compatriots. It was my way of serving my country. . . . No one knows how many prisoners I had released."
Surviving the épuration was as much a matter of luck, connections, location of the court and so on as much as of past actions. Lubin was unfortunate on all counts. The question nonetheless remains why she was punished so draconically compared to almost everyone else in the cultural field, writers apart. Could her being a woman have been a consideration? Was it acceptable for a man like the pianist-Wagnerian Alfred Cortot to have important Nazis as friends, but unacceptable for a woman? Thus Frederic Spotts wonders. And Cortot was not the only important male collaborator in the music world to be treated leniently. Until her death in 1979, Germaine Lubin would continue to work as a voice teacher. One of her best-known students was Régine Crespin.
Jens Malte Fischer considers a 1929 Hallenaria (Tannhäuser) sung in French [EPM] to be the ideal interpretation of this difficult piece. André Tubeuf is even more lyrical in his assessment : "She had everything: voice, volume, pianissimi..., fioritura (the Wiener Philharmoniker applauded after her "Non mi dir" during the rehearsal in Salzburg), clarity in her deep, warm soprano; her friendship with Hofmannsthal, Valéry or with the most intellectual of all singers, Claire Croiza, testify to her exquisite culture. Tietjen described the originality and grandeur of her tragic art, but Max Reinhardt detected wit and humor in it and wanted to make Die Fledermaus with her. And finally there was the noble, radiant beauty of her blue eyes, her fine features."