Wagner in America (4/5)
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Wagner in America (4/5)
Wagner's comeback : the interwar period
Part 4 focuses on the ups and downs of the leading Wagner tradition at the Metropolitan Opera, as well as the American discourse on Wagner, particularly Ernest Newman's monumental biography.
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Author : Jos Hermans
The last performance at the Metropolitan Opera before the Wagner boycott during WWI was "Tristan und Isolde" on April 13, 1917. Wagner's banishment from the Metropolitan Opera stage lasted just under three years. On Feb. 19, 1920, Wagner returned with Parsifal. Only two performers from the 1917 Parsifal, both highly regarded, were back on stage three years later: American bass-baritone Clarence Whitehill in the role of Amfortas and Romanian alto (later soprano) Margarete Matzenauer in the role of Kundry. Continuity in the orchestra pit was also provided by Artur Bodanzky, who had succeeded Alfred Hertz in 1915 after his departure for San Francisco.
Artur Bodanzky (1877-1939) came from Vienna. He assisted Mahler for two years at the Hofoper and, after important internships in Berlin, Prague and Mannheim, was recommended to the Met by Ferruccio Busoni. Bodanzky was responsible for the German program for a quarter of a century and was on the podium a total of 1087 times, including almost all Wagner performances. His conducting credentials are abundant and well documented, as he had many of the leading Wagner singers of his day at his disposal in the 1930s. These recordings show Bodanzky to be a conductor who favored dynamic tempi and guided the singers with feeling. His apprenticeship with Mahler and on important German stages ensured a high degree of continuity in maintaining a Wagner tradition that would once again prove indispensable to the Met's survival.
The difficulties of the new beginning faced by the Met in 1919 were considerable; they were of an economic and personal nature. Wagner was performed 31 times in each of the 1915/16 and 1916/17 seasons, divided among eight of the ten works in the Bayreuth canon. Out of a total of 122 performances per season, that's about a quarter each time. After the three-year boycott, Wagner's operas only slowly regained their former superiority. In the 1919/20 season, only Parsifal was on the program, five times - a work that enjoyed a historically justified special position in New York. In the following two seasons, the number of Wagner performances rose to 16 and 19, limited to the tried-and-true draught horses Lohengrin, Tristan and Parsifal, and from 1921/22 also Die Walküre.
Significant to the changing cultural climate in America was the introduction of English versions of Wagner's operas. Apparently there was a fear that patriotic minds would take offense at the language of the enemy in wartime, "because the ears of loyal Americans still shudder at the sound of Teutonic tongue." Thus the statement of the music editor of the New York Sun, William Henderson. Parsifal was first performed in English in 1920; Henry Krehbiel provided the translation for the occasion. In the following years, Lohengrin and Tristan were also staged in English versions. Only gradually did they return to the original language. The concession to the alleged sensibilities of the Met audience was not approved by everyone. Henderson - Krehbiel's critical sparring partner among New York music critics - said: "Translated opera did not receive a triumphant vindication by yesterday's performance" and found: "It must be confessed that it was easier to understand the text of Parsifal when it was sung in German." Many of the difficulties were perhaps due to the fact that the performers had learned their parts in Wagner's language and the transition to another language presented all sorts of problems.
The stock market crash of 1929 and, in its wake, the Great Depression, which hit the United States particularly hard, affected all cultural institutions, including the Met. It turns out, however, that its Wagner offerings were in fact unaffected. Wagner performances promised full houses, especially if excellent singers were available. And that was largely the case. In addition to such tried-and-true Wagnerian forces as Margarete Matzenauer, Florence Easton, Johannes Sembach and Clarence Whitehill, the Met gradually had at its disposal the elite of European singers, for whom the high exchange value of the American currency exerted an attraction that could not be underestimated.
Year after year, more and more exceptional singers could be attracted to the Met - artists who still have a resounding name in the Wagner profession today. Maria Jeritza, born in Moravia and the prima donna assoluta in Vienna, made her debut at the Met as Marietta in Erich Wolfgang Korngold's "Die tote Stadt" on Nov. 19, 1921. She sang Elisabeth in Tannhäuser, Elsa in Lohengrin and Sieglinde in "Die Walküre." Elisabeth Rethberg, a native of Saxony and raised in Dresden, made her debut as Sieglinde and then appeared as Elsa and Eva in Die Meistersinger. Both possessed tremendous starpower, Jeritza with her spirited stage presence, Rethberg with her flawless voice.
Friedrich Schorr was the leading Wagnerian bass-baritone of those years. His first guest appearance in New York was in 1924, at the Manhattan Opera House, where Gatti-Casazza heard him and engaged him for the following season. Schorr was a member of the Met's ensemble for 18 years, where he performed all the Wagner roles in his vocal profession. As early as 1931, he left the Berlin State Opera and emigrated to New York. It is not known if he was aware of Adolf Hitler's annoyance with him during the 1925 Bayreuth Festival. Hitler expressed his displeasure to Winifred Wagner because he felt that the Festspielhaus was "desecrated" as long as a "Nagod" (i.e. a Jew) sang the Germanic god Wotan here.
A year after Schorr's engagement at the Met, Lauritz Melchior appeared in New York, the Danish Heldentenor "sans pareil"; he remained loyal to the Met until 1947. During those years, Schorr and Melchior were joined by a number of other singers, now legendary. The deep bass Michael Bohnen came to New York as early as 1922. Maria Müller debuted as Sieglinde in 1924/25 and returned to Broadway in ten seasons. In the 1926/27 season, the versatile Heldentenor Walter Kirchhoff was brought to the Met and stayed for four years. Max Lorenz sang Lohengrin at the Met, alongside Walter von Stolzing and Siegmund in the 1931/32 season. From 1932 to 1934, Frida Leider performed her signature roles at the Met, Isolde and Brünnhilde, as well as Kundry. Lotte Lehmann made her debut on Jan. 11, 1934 in the role of Sieglinde and remained with the company until 1946. Along with Lehmann came Emanuel List, the great, versatile bass, who remained until 1950.
Against the background of this regeneration era of the Metropolitan Opera, which shamelessly relied on the cult of stars, it is necessary to evaluate the great significance of a media technological innovation, which opened a new chapter in the popularization of opera in America. Christmas 1931 marked the first time a full opera performance was broadcast live from the Metropolitan Opera by the National Broadcasting Corporation. The first was Engelbert Humperdinck's "Hänsel und Gretel." The first Wagner opera was Lohengrin on Jan. 9, 1932, with Maria Müller and Max Lorenz. Since then, matinee performances have been broadcast on radio every Saturday of the Met season - an arrangement that has continued uninterrupted to this day.
Each opera was knowledgeably and unpretentiously introduced by Milton Cross, an experienced radio man who held this position for four decades. Arriving at this point, it is worth taking a comparative look at the Bayreuth Festival to understand the enormous importance of radio broadcasts from the Met to American musical life. In 1931, radio also arrived in Bayreuth. The first broadcast from the Festspielhaus was "Tristan und Isolde" conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler. As Oswald Georg Bauer reports, no fewer than 200 foreign broadcasters were involved. But because the Festival was suspended in 1932, radio could not broadcast from Bayreuth again until 1933. By then, the medium of radio was already under the control of Joseph Goebbels.
For the Bayreuther Festspiele, broadcasting around the world was a matter of prestige and a new form of advertising for itself, as the international composition of the audience was an important factor for the festival management under Winifred Wagner, who was born in England. However, the intrusion of technology into Wagner's Fest-spielhaus - in a "sacred place" - met with very divided reactions in the German press. For some it was simply sacrilege, for others a further sign of the progressive "Americanization" of the Festival.
Of course, such anti-technology sounds were not to be heard in America. The use of technology was welcomed for its educational potential. Indeed, the Saturday broadcasts of the Met helped spread the medium of opera across the greater North American continent in almost groundbreaking ways. Virtually all major American-born singers of the younger generation, whose presence on world stages is now immense, confess that the Met's broadcasts first introduced them to opera as an art form.
The partnership with NBC and Milton Cross was a win-win for the Metropolitan Opera in two ways. On the one hand, money flowed into the treasury of the permanently cash-hungry house as it cultivated the cult of stars. On the other: because of radio, the stars outside New York became so-called "household names," known even to non-die-hard opera fans in Nebraska or Minnesota. Music lovers soon got used to Saturdays being free for opera during the Met season. So did Thomas Mann, by the way. He came to Princeton, New Jersey, in the fall of 1938, lived there for three years and then in Los Angeles for 11 more. A great lover of music, he rarely neglected to at least listen to the Met's Saturday opera broadcasts.
The Met gained its greatest appeal with the arrival of Norwegian soprano Kirsten Flagstad. She debuted on Feb. 2, 1935 in the role of Sieglinde, scoring one sensational success after another with her youthful appearance (despite her now forty years), but especially with her effortlessly produced, voluminous voice that blossomed even in the highest notes. New York music critics were delighted. Lawrence Gilman in the New York Herald Tribune was laudatory: “The voice itself is both lovely and puissant. In its deeper register it is movingly warm and rich and expressive, and yesterday it recalled to wistful Wagnerites the irrecoverable magic of Olive Fremstad, the immortal”. In the New York Times, Olin Downes asserted: “No Sieglinde of the past ten years has made such an impression here, by her voice, stage business, her intelligence and dramatic sincerity , and by her evident knowledge of Wagner”. Flagstad's arrival gave a decisive boost to Wagner's initially slow comeback at the Met.
In subsequent years, Flagstad and Melchior sang the title roles in "Tristan und Isolde" and, like Gustav Mahler and Arturo Toscanini thirty years earlier, made this work the artistic flagship of the house. On December 21, 1939, Thomas Mann attended one of those legendary Tristan performances. He was unlucky, however, because on that very day Melchior was unwell and "voiceless". His impressions: " Flagstad efficient, Kurwenal [Julius Huehn] weak. Sober performance in the giant house." The reason for his disappointment may have been that he did not like the conducting of Erich Leinsdorf, who was brought to the Met for two years after Bodanzky's death. "The beautiful music in loud and dry clarity," he wrote.
The Flagstad/Melchior phenomenon combined with the radio broadcasts had a remarkable effect in cultural history. As in the Gilded Age before the turn of the century, Wagner became respectable and even popular again. It was hip to have heard Flagstad and Melchior. The successful cult of stars and the media's privileging of performance over reflection on the work's content not only benefited the Metropolitan Opera's always precarious budget but also led to a greater awareness of the artistic nature of opera. Above all, Wagner's reputation benefited. "Wagnerian musical drama," writes John Dizikes in his cultural history of opera in America, "led the way" in transforming the old Met, founded by plutocrats in 1883, into a "different kind of opera house [...], one where art mattered more than money."
This glorious era at the Met was further highlighted by the late hiring of two exceptional Wagnerian artists: Alexander Kipnis and Helen Traubel. The Ukrainian-born bass was an unsurpassed Gurnemanz in Berlin, Bayreuth and Vienna. Kipnis debuted in the role at the Met on Jan. 5, 1940, and immediately rose to the first rank of the house's Wagnerian greats. Helen Traubel, whose reputation for vocal prowess preceded her, appeared for the first time on Dec. 28, 1939, in the role of Sieglinde - a role she had signed on for on her debut at the Met as a Wagner interpreter. Her partners were Flagstad, Melchior and List! She was the first American-born and trained Wagner singer at the Met. When Flagstad returned to Norway in 1941, Traubel followed in her footsteps and was henceforth the Met's biggest Wagnerian star. Traubel was the daughter of a German-born family of pharmacists in St. Louis and grew up bilingual. Her illustrious if relatively brief career at the Met from 1937 to 1953 - later she performed in musicals, radio, television, movies and even a nightclub - once again underscores the importance of German-American heritage to American musical life and Wagner's special place in it.
An echo of Wagner's strong presence in the media in the late 1930s can be seen at the pop culture level in a Warner Brothers Studios "Bugs Bunny" cartoon, shown in U.S. cinemas in 1957 under the title "What's Opera, Doc?" Among the funniest gags of the "cartoon" can be counted Wagner parodies. For most American moviegoers, "What's Opera, Doc?" was their first introduction to Wagner.
Wagner literature of the interwar period
Given the true Wagner boom in the late 1930s, it is notable that it was not accompanied by serious Wagner discussion, unlike the Seidl era, when Henry Krehbiel and Henry Finck emerged as champions of Wagner's cause. The field of Wagner literature was "barren and empty" like the sea in the third act of Tristan. In the years leading up to the discussion initiated by Peter Viereck, no serious work can be recorded in which Wagner's works were being problematized, either from an aesthetic, political or even moral point of view. The annals of the Metropolitan Opera also show no innovative staging of a Wagner opera that would have opened up new aspects, comparable, for example, to the modernity drive of Jürgen Fehling's and Ewald Dülberg's famous 1929 production of Der Fliegende Holländer at the Krolloper in Berlin. Nor has the Wagner boom of the 1930s left any significant mark in contemporary fiction - nothing remotely comparable to the thematization of Wagner in the work of Willa Cather or T.S. Eliot.
Er is een voor de hand liggende verklaring voor dit gebrek aan belangstelling voor zowel kritische als verfijnde literatuur. Wanneer Wagner ter sprake kwam, ging de aandacht van het muzikaal geïnteresseerde publiek vooral uit naar de zangers, d.w.z. de sterren van de Met en van de twee andere grote operahuizen in Chicago en San Francisco. De werken zelf bleven onbetwist. Hun idealistische, moreel verheffende karakter, dat werd benadrukt in de interpretaties van een Krehbiel, Finck en andere auteurs in de eerste fase van de Wagner-receptie, werd beschouwd als vaststaand en onproblematisch. Wat telde was in de eerste plaats niet de inhoud van de werken, maar de prestatie van de kunstenaars die ze uitvoerden.
A remarkable event in the field of Wagner literature in the interwar period was the appearance of Ernest Newman's great biography, "The Life of Richard Wagner," a monumental work in four volumes published successively in 1933, 1937, 1941 and 1947 by Cambridge University Press. Why Hans Rudolf Vaget brings up the British Ernest Newman in his essay on "Wagner in America" is not entirely clear to me. Does he regard the Anglo-Saxon world as one huge communicating vessel? It certainly fits the political reality of the period that spans WW I and WW II.
Newman was the music columnist for the Sunday Times in London from 1921, following his early years in Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham. He was also very familiar with the Wagner scene in Bayreuth and in New York, where he was a guest critic for the New York Evening Post in 1923. His biography expresses a critical spirit independent of Bayreuth and the German Wagner cult, paving the way for a new view of the most influential figure of the 19th century. Newman's biography does not do justice to the importance of Friedrich Nietzsche, Vaget believes. Nor does Nietzsche deserve that at all, as I have demonstrated at length in "The Boulevard of Broken Dreams" series.
Newman's biography has undeniable hagiographical touches but, on the other hand, is very accurate in its assessment of the Bayreuth master's awe-inspiring achievement, something postwar biographers still rarely get around to. This makes it required reading for any Wagnerian. One of my favorite passages goes like this: “Had composers in general been treated with ordinary justice in those days, and been given a royalty on each performance of their works, Wagner would have done so well out of his first operas that he would not only not have been under the necessity of looking to friends for his support but could even have indulged himself in his heart’s desire of a house with a little garden, in which he could work at his music without the distraction of pianos in the adjoining rooms and of noises in the street. There is something peculiarly revolting about a social system that legally made it almost impossible for a composer like Wagner to be anything but a mendicant and then sneered at him for borrowing.” (The Life of Richard Wagner, p.304).
Another typical passage goes like this : “We of today may be unable to comprehend how any man could attribute such significance to the theater as a seminal factor in civilization as Wagner did: but of the fact that he did so, there can be no dispute, nor of the material sacrifices he was always willing to make for his ideal. It was only the sheer necessity of living that made him consent to what he regarded as fundamentally misrepresentative performances of his works; he looked upon almost every sale of them to the commercial theaters as a degradation of himself and of them; and more than once he refused them to the theaters at the cost of his pocket. Verdi held that the box office takings where the “only infallible thermometer” of the success or failure of an opera. There can be no quarrel with that point of you; Verdi like all sensible artists, held that if the public wanted to benefit by the work of his brain it should be prepared to pay for it as it would have to do for any other commodity, and therefore the more it had paid the most ‘successful’ the work must be judged to be.
But this was not Wagner‘s view. He did not look upon himself merely as an ‘opera composer’, turning out operas in order to live, and competing in the open market with other opera composers for the public’s money. He felt that he had a mission - that of regenerating Germany through the theater. Had he possessed an income which would have raised him above material cares he would never have wished for much more than a few performances of his works that should serve as models not only for operatic production but for operatic composition. In the early 1870’s, when the tide had definitely set in his favour, he could have had as many performances as he liked, and on his own terms. Why then, at that very time, when the ball was at last at his feet, did he part company from the King - painful as the separation was for him- and shoulder, at the age of nearly sixty, the colossal burden of creating a theater of his own? Simply because the experiences of the last few years had shown him that even Ludwig and Munich could not be trusted to realise his ideal in all its uncompromising purity.” (The Life of Richard Wagner, vol III, p. 232 )
Newman set forth the principles of his biographical method in the preface to the first volume. Since new documents are constantly being discovered and our knowledge of Wagner is ever-changing, no biographer should claim to hold the truth - "the final truth." The biographer must only ensure that all his statements and conclusions are based not on a selection but on the totality of the evidence at his disposal. This implies a principled criticism of the evil game of controlling the flow of information and selecting, if not falsifying, documents that was played at Bayreuth. Equally indispensable to Newman is that the biographer reconstruct with the utmost accuracy the musical, economic and social context in which Wagner saw himself placed. It is more important to give an accurate account of Wagner's finances than of the women in Wagner's life, for knowledge of his economic situation "is perhaps not as piquant as the others, but decidedly more vital." Of course, the biographer could not take into account that considering the "more unpleasant features of his subject's character" would tarnish the image of his hero. As if to appease his readers, Newman adds that no man, even if he were a saint, would emerge unscathed from a microscopic examination of his life, as required in the case of Wagner.
