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Author : Jos Hermans
No account of Max Lorenz fails to point out how important his wife Lotte was to his life and career and how manfully he stood by her during the National Socialist era. But despite her importance to his career and the couple's unbreakable bond, surprisingly little is known about her herself.
After his last performance in Vienna, she called out loudly to him, "Max today you sang like a besotted sow." Whether she meant to insult him or facilitate his farewell in a drastic way remains to be seen: he abruptly got up and left the house. Apparently, it was not always sunshine every day between the couple, at least in their final years together.
It seems that the marriage on both sides was a pure marriage of convenience. Lotte became the wife of the most important heldentenor of his time, not least because of her energetic commitment. She remained his advisor and agent, tolerated his always discreet amorous escapades and, in return, renounced a "normal" married life as long as she remained the "highest authority" in his career. In the early years, this agreement was sufficient for a harmonious coexistence.
Even then, Lorenz considered his Met debut premature; 30 years later, he even called it a mistake. While for Lotte the appointment to the Met was a goal in itself, Lorenz still saw himself as a novice, especially in the heroic field. Even then, in a critical self-assessment not common among tenors, he realized that he lacked stage experience in the required roles. He did not yet feel up to the competition of the "seasoned heroes" Laubenthal and Melchior in such demanding settings. At the same time, he aspired to a higher, sort of "objective" mastery. He wanted to be more than just a "primus inter pares."
Lorenz sought new ways, became independent and eventually became self-sufficient in singing and performing. The guest performance at the Met, which was not productive in itself, was for him - in his own words - his "artistic apprenticeship." He put together an extensive compulsory program for himself. In the ten weeks between his debut on Nov. 12, 1931, and his last concert on Jan. 24, 1932, he allowed himself only one day of rest for each of his 15 performances. On all other nights he attended a Met performance, mainly to learn from the Italian tenors. Lotte's objection that he did not need this because he was now a star himself had the unexpected effect of gathering the courage to approach his admired colleagues "at eye level," so to speak, and ask them for advice.
Years later, he was still grateful to the great role models: the most famous artists, he said, were always the nicest. Each of them had helped where they could. He cited Gigli, Laurie-Volpi, Martinelli and Tokatyan as examples. Independently, they gave him their -according to Lorenz- "unanimous vocal credo: Non chiudere sotto il Passagio" - "do not close under the passagio." With this so simple-sounding advice, Lorenz opened his natural, later practically unlimited height.
In 1932, at the Munich Festival, he met two of his legendary predecessors: with the help of Alois Burgstaller, Bayreuth's former "model pupil," and the indestructible Heinrich Knote, who had just sung his last Götterdämmerung in December 1931 at the age of 61, he acquired the depth of character indispensable for Wagner roles.
Lorenz himself was acutely aware of his shortcomings. He wanted to become independent of the so-called theoretical singing technique in order to be able to concentrate fully on the interpretation. In the process, he outgrew his rather down-to-earth, business-minded wife in the artistic field and increasingly removed himself from her influence. Yet he never forgot what he owed to her.
More than once he showed what is so aptly and indifferently called civic courage. In this respect, Lotte was his equal. In 1934, when an unholy alliance of former Bayreutheans and National Socialists was formed against the "unacceptable, Jew-affiliated Wagner singer," she fearlessly sought out Hitler's company at a reception in Wahnfried. It was said in Berlin that the Führer had a remarkably animated conversation with a mysterious blonde. When his interlocutor was introduced to him as Frau Lorenz, he seems to have been quite amused by the singers problematic racial bond with the attractive Jewess.
Lotte proved to be an energetic partner. Yet Max was the one who was really at risk: while she acted in solidarity with someone who was also persecuted, he plainly risked his exceptional position. This is also how the friendship between Lorenz and Kirsten Flagstad developed, which also involved Lotte. He got to know the Norwegian soprano during his first years in Bayreuth (1933/34) even before she became famous in the U.S. in 1935. During the war year of 1943, they starred together in "Tristan und Isolde" at the June Festival in Zurich. Although her husband Henry Johansen was a reputable businessman with ties to the occupying forces, Flagstad had difficulty obtaining the necessary permits and visas to travel from occupied Norway through occupied Denmark through warring Germany to neutral Switzerland. In her Flagstad Manuscript, published in 1952, she gives a detailed account of Max and Lotte's efforts to secure her return to Oslo. In Europa, Flagstad, famous in the U.S. as Isolde, was only an esteemed partner at the side of the incomparable Max Lorenz in the old world.
At the time, Lauritz Melchior, who was active only in America, was considered her ideal partner - even by herself. However, her confidence in him and her American friends proved to be deceptive. Later, Flagstad even saw parallels between her own career and Frida Leider's. She was aware that in 1935 she had merely filled a gap that had just arisen: according to her, she happened to be there at the right time when Leider had to abandon her international guest appearances in order to obtain permission from the German government to allow her Jewish husband Rudolf Deman to leave for Switzerland. Flagstad also interrupted her international career in 1941 for similar reasons. She left the Metropolitan Opera and returned to Europe to join her husband in Norway, which had just been occupied by Germany. After the end of the war, Johansen was arrested as a collaborator and died in prison.
In Norway, her career seemed over. In France and Italy, she continued her old successes. In the U.S., however, she encountered a wall of politically motivated rejection, in fact cleverly directed by some of her competitors. Her former admirer, Met director Edward Johnson, announced before her first - otherwise immensely successful - post-war concert in New York on April 20, 1947, that he did not see why he would even consider engaging her again. Lauritz Melchior was her greatest disappointment. Not only did he ignore her, but in 1948 he told his associate Leonard Eisner that given the difficult situation he preferred Helen Traubel as a partner; let someone else perform with Flagstad in America.
Kirsten admired Lorenz and enjoyed singing with him. Max and his wife Lotte were among her dearest and best friends during her later years. Still grieving for her husband and disappointed in America, she aroused the protective instinct of the sensitive Lorenz. Added to that was the onstage chemistry between the two Wagner interpreters, who remained the greatest in their craft until the 1950s. Lotte knew that Lorenz lived out his real feelings on stage. In her 1998 book "So war mein Weg," Martha Mödl still saw him as an ideal figure: "Der Lorenz, yes! He sang with a unique dedication. And he was a wonderful person. "
The most dangerous because most intelligent partner in Lotte's eyes was Astrid Varnay. She harmonized with Lorenz beginning in 1947 in Mexico, Buenos Aires and New York in similar ways and for as long as Kirsten Flagstad. Varnay's recollections of Lorenz are a mixture of awe, admiration and affection: "He embodied for me the ideal of the singer-actor, sang without effort and was completely independent of directors and conductors. There was no routine with him: he was different in every performance. Although he came from an old tradition, he felt thoroughly modern. He had what we in America call "reciprocity": a sense of interaction, of being attuned to the other. Acting with him on stage meant constant give and take. In 1952 I was his Brünnhilde in Bayreuth for his last Siegfried in Götterdämmerung. That evening I regretted above all that I had not met him much earlier."
THE PEDAGOGUE
Some maxims of Lorenz the voice pedagogue :
"Projecting the voice freely and loosely to the last row of the house and bringing it back, not forcing a forte and not frenetically suffocating the piano passages - that is room-filling singing."
"Virtuoso singing, dismissed by ignorant people as 'vocal acrobatics,' is more important for the singer-performer than for the vocalist who manifests himself musically alone. What with Bach, Mozart, Rossini or Bellini may be a rarely achieved end goal, is with Wagner or Verdi a basic requirement of the voice as a means of expression. There should be no vocal problem on stage. The natural language of musical drama is singing without special effort. Keep your body in dynamic tension from head to toe, but beware of straining. Pay attention to the looseness of your throat. It is there only to let free air pass through. If you even feel you have a throat, you are doing something wrong. "
"Musical drama thrives on expression and interpretation. All parts must sit 'black' and flow musically and textually unconsciously, as it were. If you have to think about text and tones, you miss the creative moment of what is happening on stage and you cannot create or convey moods. Mastering each part with somnambulistic certainty is the only way to concentrate always and exclusively on the work, the stage and the partner, and to respond to the infinite incalculabilities of the moment."
As a voice pedagogue, Lorenz takes several American tenors under his wing. He criticizes them mainly for their careless handling of the language. Despite intensive efforts, he could not get James King, Claude Heater and Jean Cox - to name only his Bayreuth tenors - out of their American accents. He never understood why Americans enjoyed so much more leniency from the public and the press in this regard than, say, Slavs or Italians. Einhard Luther tells how he met him one day as extremely agitated: a later quite famous American tenor had called him a "stubborn Nazi professor" after repeated speech corrections. The lesson had ended in a loud argument. Lorenz later accepted no apology and has not accepted an American student since.
Lorenz considered Maria del Monaco as suitable for Bayreuth as Ramon Vinay, famous as Otello. Einhard Luther tells how he and Lorenz had heard him as Lohengrin in Milan in 1958. Together they also experienced his first and only performance as Siegmund in Stuttgart in March 1966. Apparently there had been few rehearsals for this somewhat older Wieland-Wagner production. The German-language role debut of the Italian heroic tenor, who came from a different opera world, in a stylized Wagner production, seemed appropriately improvised. Despite stylistic and linguistic flaws, this debut was vocally so impressive that it would have become very worthwhile provided some necessary polishing was to be done. What was striking, however, was how ostentatiously the singers, familiar with the work and the staging, ignored their "latin" partner and passed him by.
Lorenz noticed Wieland Wagner in a box and immediately took him for the author of the icy rejection that befell the foreigner. The second act had hardly ended when Lorenz jumped up to meet del Monaco in his dressing room. After the performance, he awaited me with the "true story." Wieland Wagner had offered del Monaco a role of his choice in Bayreuth after the Lohengrin in Milan. Lohengrin, Tannhäuser, even Rienzi were being considered. This in itself calls into question the seriousness of the planning: Rienzi had never been performed at Bayreuth and was not even up for discussion. After his eight-month compulsory break caused by a car accident in December 1963, del Monaco finally decided on Siegmund. In 1965, he reported to Wieland as sufficiently rehearsed for fine-tuning; after further careful study, he would then try out the role in Stuttgart first. Detailed work schedules were mutually canceled or not even noticed, eventually leaving room for only one rehearsal, two days before the performance. Del Monaco had never seen a partner, struggled valiantly through the evening, practically left alone, and was glad when he finally died the stage death.
In understandable annoyance, he had described his version to Lorenz before leaving Stuttgart without saying goodbye. Apparently unaware of the antecedents, the professional critics were so unanimous in their disapproval that del Monaco subsequently abandoned all Wagnerian ambitions. The only result of his laborious, presumably not even professionally supervised language study were a few fragments of the part, which he recited in adventurous German during concert tours. The recording of the Stuttgart Walküre shows that, purely vocally, he would have been a terrific Siegmund if one had made the same effort with him as with the numerous Americans who had been given sword and harp without hesitation in Bayreuth since 1951.
The Bayreuth mafia, as Lorenz put it, had its reasons for abandoning the Italian tenor. Even after his serious car accident, del Monaco was still able to maintain his baritone sound, ideal for Siegmund, without any lingering in the register, from the sonorous "Busens Berge" to the effortless "Wälsungenblut". After the retirement of German heldentenors Beirer and Hopf, Bayreuth possessed heroes with less powerful voices, first with Wolfgang Windgassen and later - after Wieland's death - with Ticho Parly and Jess Thomas. A Siegmund of del Monaco's vocal power could only disturb. All Siegfrieds of Bayreuth would have stood in his shadow. Lorenz was rightly shocked by del Monaco's manipulated deportation. Thus Einhard Luther.
American singers, however, according to Lorenz, enjoyed a number of advantages over young German singers. They were unhampered by the notion of "hero," which had by now been despised in Germany, and they came to Europe more or less fully trained. Their opportunities for development were rather limited, so German singers could have easily caught up with them - if they had been given the right guidance. This is exactly what was - and still is - lacking in Germany - both in the training centers and on the opera stages.
Lorenz called Bayreuth "symptomatic" of the amateur casting. To him, a good example of this amateurism was Hugh Beresford as Tannhäuser in 1972, who had just risen from baritone to tenor. In casting Wolfgang Wagner is his brother's legitimate successor, Luther says: he knows even less about voices than Wieland.
For Lorenz the purpose of the theater was not to entertain or distract people. For him, the theater was not an entertainment center, but a moral educational institution, a kind of "school of the nation." He did not consider opera to be the appropriate forum for effective self-expression. He called musical drama "the highest form of expressing thoughts and feelings for which the spoken word is inadequate"
VOX ET MENS HEROICA IN CORPORE HEROICO
Expressive singing, carried by a credible interpretation and performed by a compelling stage personality: this is what Lorenz saw as the ideal realization of the music drama. Seen this way, the director and the conductor could only be helpers, to whom he willingly submitted if they managed to convince him. "Dictators in the orchestra pit and animal tamers on the stage" he called the gravediggers of the opera business. He considered stage managers' growing fear of outspoken singer personalities the greatest danger to musical theater. Hence his eternal controversies with Herbert von Karajan and Wagner's grandsons. He blamed them for the decline and death of the heroic profession. In doing so, he put his finger on the wound. Vocal dominance and stage personality were not only secondary in Neu-Bayreuth, but even undesirable. A remark by Wieland Wagner, which I myself heard during a Meistersinger rehearsal, showed how little Wagner's ideas applied, Luther tells us: "Music always disturbs the theatrical performance." In Neu-Bayreuth, the term heldentenor was deliberately labeled as vocal exaggeration.
The "new true Wagner way" was followed by the Salzburg Easter Festival. Karajan reduced the singers, selected according to recording criteria, to their vocal minimum. His real interest was the orchestra; the real hero of each performance was the maestro himself. He ignored the fact that dramatic performers need a certain amount of vocal volume, if only for balance with the orchestral sound wave. A handpicked audience of sworn followers, coordinated marketing through records, radio and a compliant press guaranteed unanimous success. Those who dared to object were vilified in their thinking as a "naive layman" at best, usually as a "perpetually obsolete," and did not belong to the elite of the initiated. Many a singer has gambled away his career by being self-confident.
To what liberties Lorenz was capable of on stage the remarkably candid Erich Zimmermann gives som insight: "In 1937, after Die Walküre, we were in the Eule, Furtwängler, Bockelmann, Manowarda, Lorenz and me. Mecki [Lorenz] was delighted because he had successfully replaced Völker as Siegmund. At that time, conversations were quickly becoming political, even in Bayreuth. Bockelmann, Manowarda and I, I freely admit, were staunch PGs [Parteigenossen] at the time and as a trio we were nicknamed Bo-Zi-Ma. Furtwängler and Lorenz were rather doubters. At one point, the discussion became too serious for Lorenz. To liven things up, he promised to correctly bring the Hitler salute to the stage in the next Siegfried - at a passage in the text "prophetically" intended by Wagner himself and recognizable to all, as he smugly noted. We three Bo-Zi-Mas immediately bet a princely dinner on it. Furtwängler hesitated. He knew Lorenz too well and didn't want to join the bet. He said we should wait and see. And we did.
In the third act, Lorenz looked into the treetops at an imaginary forest bird at the words "Wohin mein Führer mich wies" and raised his right arm to shoulder height, as prescribed. With this gesture he turned to Bockelmann, who was to face him at the same time as Wanderer. The experienced old stage rabbit sang his lines "Wohin, Knabe, weißt dich dein Weg" with difficulty and immediately turned away from the audience. He laughed so hard, especially when he saw me -as dead Mime I was no longer on stage- grinning in the wings. The play-free Manowarda had specially attended the performance and crowed afterwards that even Furtwängler had lost his composure for a moment. Reluctantly, the 'Fu' admitted this - and generously took up the entire bill."
When Furtwängler conducted Die Meistersinger, he made a habit of mingling among the crowd and singing along in the famous "Wach auf" chorus. One day Karajan turned to Tietjen and asked if this was consistent with the production and if so, why Lorenz did not also participate in the chorus in his -Karajan's- performances. Tietjen said that of course he could instruct Lorenz to appear on stage at Karajan's performances, but not to sing as well, because the score did not provide for that. Wouldn't it be more embarrassing if Stolzing was already on stage without singing?
Karajan could not forgive Lorenz for denying him the ability to breathe with the singers, a talent he had attributed to Wilhelm Furtwängler after the 1938 Tristan. Later Lorenz was even more explicit: "It is the secret of his conducting that Furtwängler, a fanatic of accuracy, breathes with the singers, that he carries the singers with the beautiful gradations of his orchestral colors. I don't have to look at him at all; even without it, I am constantly in touch and feel at one with him in the fervor and tenderness of this music-making."
Since the end of his career, Lorenz the pedagogue sought to counteract the glaring lack of education. Concern for the next generation dominated the last years of his life. As early as 1960, he was concerned about the "crisis of Wagner singing," which was already unmistakable by then but still stubbornly hushed up officially. He expressed his opinion with his characteristic uncompromisingness and energy, but did not feel as invincible as Siegfried in his fight with the dragon. Even then he regarded the downward trend as unstoppable and the end of Wagner singing as sealed. He blamed the Wagner strongholds of Bayreuth, Berlin, Vienna and the Salzburg Easter Festival, but also the corrupting influences of the record industry. He saw his predictions confirmed when Bayreuth discarded Hans Beirer and Hans Hopf, for him the "last true heldentenors in operatic history."
His unfulfilled and indeed absolutely unfulfillable life dream was then all the more astonishing: "Wagner himself denied me my heart's desire. Do you know what Tantalus torments are? Every time I lay motionless on stage like a dead Tristan and heard the Liebestod, I suffered. I would have loved to sing this miracle myself with each of the beautiful singers who were my Isolden. Secretly, I often quarreled with the dead master for not letting Tristan end in a duet, as Verdi did with his Aida. Hans von Bülow once called the final duet Verdi's version of the Liebestod. Why can't Tristan and Isolde also die together? After all, she says at his deathbed, "May the light of life go out for both of us!"
With Paula Buchner in Tristan und Isolde, conductor Robert Heger, 1942