Fritz Busch’s hitherto high-profile career never really recovered,
it seems fair to say, from the appalling events of 7 March 1933
that terminated his association with the Dresden Staatskapelle.
On that shameful day in the orchestra’s history, Busch – closely
associated with Dresden since 1920 and its inspirational and
innovative General Music Director since 1922 – found himself
humiliatingly and publicly dismissed from his responsibilities
in the city. Though not a Jew himself, he had earned the enmity
of local Nazis by shunning the swastika and the party salute
and by refusing to discriminate against Jewish singers and musicians.
As a result, a howling mob of S.A. stormtroopers had invaded
the opera house just as he was about to conduct Rigoletto,
successfully intimidating the management into substituting another
conductor. That evening, moreover, Busch was shocked to find
that only two of his musicians were willing to stand openly
at his side. As he later wrote: After the entire Staatskapelle
with the laudable exception of two brave members, the violinists
Tröber and Strelewitz, had held their cowardly, passive silence
before the Rigoletto performance..., to continue working there
was unthinkable to me.
The conductor’s career never subsequently recovered its earlier momentum.
For the next dozen years or so Busch himself seems to have deliberately
opted for lower-profile posts. After all, positions in Buenos
Aires (where he took Argentinean citizenship), Copenhagen and
Glyndebourne were unlikely to involve immensely stressful political
infighting of the sort that had driven him from Germany. And
when, after the end of the Second World War, he tentatively
explored higher profile positions in the USA, he found audiences
and critics in thrall to colourful orchestral showmen of the
likes of Toscanini and Stokowski and so generally unsympathetic
to his low-key, “natural” personality and style of musicianship.
Moreover, Busch’s relatively early death in 1951 occurred just before
the widespread adoption of advanced recording techniques that
might have enabled him to preserve his interpretations in “modern”
sound for posterity. As a result, he joins a sad list of conductors
whose failure to leave a recorded legacy in acceptably modern
sound has seriously militated against widespread appreciation
of their artistry - Koussevitzky, who also died in 1951, is
another obvious case in point.
Of course, Busch’s name has never entirely fallen into oblivion –
his hugely stylish and admired Glyndebourne recordings of Mozart’s
The marriage of Figaro, Così fan tutte and Don
Giovanni would have ensured that that would never be the
case. But the recordings from 1923 to 1931 that are preserved
on these new discs commemorate a time when he was widely considered
one of Europe’s most eminent conductors at the head of one of
its most accomplished orchestras.
Not, admittedly, that one would guess that from the recordings made
acoustically in 1923 – all neatly contained on disc 1. Those
are really just historical curiosities and of negligible artistic
importance. Not only were the chosen works musically unchallenging
potboilers, but the recordings’ sound quality was severely constrained
by primitive technology that required both severely reduced
– and often musically unbalanced - orchestral forces and specially
adapted instruments. The utterly bizarre “Stroh violin”, for
instance, incorporated both its own metal resonator and an attached
horn to amplify its sound.
The booklet notes offer a “listening recommendation”: The gramophone
recordings of the period were played on trumpet gramophones
with a limited range of volume. Accordingly we recommend a
much reduced playback level, which will give realistic period
sound. That may well be so, but the trouble with reducing
the playback level is that it renders many passages, from the
very first bars of the opening track onwards, virtually inaudible.
It is possible, to be fair, to spot some fine musical
qualities through the hiss, crackle and generally murky sound
– crisp articulation in the overtures to The marriage of
Figaro and The nutcracker, some characterful playing
in Die Fledermaus, a beautifully unfolded prelude to
Act 3 of The Mastersingers and attractive woodwinds in
Invitation to the dance and the march from The magic
flute. But those are hugely outweighed by frequently unyielding
tempi (probably necessitated by the need to fit the music
onto 78 rpm discs), an “orchestral” balance that is often unclear
and a crude acoustic that can make Bizet’s flute sound like
a penny whistle.
It might be thought that the situation would have improved with the
Puccini and Verdi tracks recorded in 1926 (disc 2), for Busch
and his Dresden players were eager to exploit the potential
of electrical recording – and to enjoy the opportunity, at last,
for a properly-balanced and complete complement of players to
be recorded by electrical microphones (rather than a simple
horn) in a full-sized auditorium or studio. Nevertheless, at
this very early stage of its development the new technology
was by no means perfect, tending to replace the acoustic process’s
exaggerated woodwinds by its own bias towards the brass and
sounding altogether bass-heavy. In fact, the booklet writer
accurately refers to these 1926 tracks as having “the frequency
range of a telephone connection”. If only Busch had waited
another three months or so he would have benefited from the
introduction of the new much-improved “Polyfar R” process that
finally delivered something approaching “realistic” sound.
But, as it was, the technical deficiencies of these Puccini
and Verdi recordings were so marked that not only did the conductor
refuse to allow his name to be associated with some of them
but the discs were quickly withdrawn from circulation in favour
of newly-recorded versions by another orchestra.
Nevertheless, the
1926 recordings of Turandot are especially interesting.
Puccini’s final opera had only received its world premiere – under
Toscanini’s baton – in April that very year, so Busch, who conducted
the German premiere in Dresden on 3 July, was quick off the mark
when he made these recordings less than three months later. While
no vocal items had been recorded in 1923, even the earliest electrical
recording process rendered voices with far greater accuracy than
had the old acoustic method. That is quite apparent here, especially
in Ping, Pang and Pong’s lengthy terzetto where the three voices
are especially well balanced against each other. Under Busch’s
careful direction, Schöffler,
Tessmer and Sigmund give a charismatic performance that suggests
far greater familiarity with the music than can actually have
been the case. Hungarian soprano Anne Roselle (born Anna Gengye
in 1894) had become an overnight – if, as it turned out, short-lived
- star after Busch had selected her as his first Turandot. She
certainly possessed the necessary strong, powerful voice to hold
her own against the orchestra in In questa reggia –
though she is not quite in the Eva Turner class - and is also
well captured by the microphone. On the basis of her two
tracks here, one can easily imagine her bring the house down on
that summer night in Dresden all those years ago.
The
three 1926 Verdi recordings – reflective of the fact that Busch
had been in the forefront of a revival of interest in the composer
in 1920s Germany – are skilfully played but also fail to pass
muster from the point of view of sound. The overture suffers
from a general lack of clarity and sparkle; the battle music
sounds simply rather dull in an acoustic where we can’t hear
anything approximating to a metallic clash of swords; and, in
exactly the same way, the tarantella lacks the glitter needed
to convey its excitement. [The booklet notes are, by the way,
completely misleading when giving the times of these tracks,
as well as failing to give any at all for the Strauss items
that end the disc.] The recording of the Tannhäuser overture
that follows is actually taken from a film soundtrack and is
generally improved in tonal variety even though it becomes very
congested at musical climaxes. It offers the first aural proof
we have had so far of the true quality of sound that Busch’s
orchestra could produce. The conductor’s careful control of
dynamics makes this a performance of great cumulative power
and one that is said to have greatly impressed Busch’s sometime
successor at Dresden, Giuseppe Sinopoli, when he watched the
original film.
Three
“bonus tracks” of music from Strauss’s Die ägyptische Helena
complete the second disc. Busch had given the June 1928
world premiere and was much admired by the composer, so these
are obviously recordings of great interest. Thankfully, though
no recording date is provided, they must have been made after
the introduction of the “Polyfar R” process, so benefiting from
what the booklet describes as its “unprecedented warmth and breadth”.
Delicate playing – the detail of which would almost certainly
have been lost in the earlier technologies - is certainly captured
impressively, and there is a realistic sense of the overall Dresden
“sound”. The soprano Rose Pauly Dreesen was something of a
Strauss specialist who also recorded extracts from Salome
and Elektra, as well as some of the Strauss Lieder
op.10 and op.33, in the 1920s and 1930s, and she sings both idiomatically
and powerfully.
Busch
was clearly unlucky at Dresden – not only with his politics
but also with recording. Just as his Puccini and Verdi discs
had been fatally compromised by the inadequacies of the earliest
electrical process, his live performance of Brahms’s second
symphony in February 1931 was recorded on the short-lived experimental
“Needle Sound” system which attempted to use the technology
of recording film soundtracks to produce improved sound on disc.
For reasons explained in the fascinating booklet notes, “Needle
Sound” was not a commercial success and, even with modern restoration,
some passages are almost completely inaudible and the overall
sound remains very dull. The re-engineered masters (four 16-inch
diameter 33rpm discs) do, nevertheless, give us the chance of
listening to one of the earliest recordings ever made of a live
concert and our only opportunity to hear Busch and his Dresden
orchestra in a complete symphony. It is a fine interpretation,
and one that one listens to with an awareness at the back of
the mind that one of Busch’s teachers had been Fritz Steinbach,
a conductor well regarded by Brahms himself. Here an urgent
and forceful opening movement giving way to a dreamy and ruminative
adagio non troppo that is especially notable for some
well-balanced interplay among the various sections of the orchestra.
The third movement combines the best qualities of its two predecessors
but the very fast finale is a non-starter from the beginning
because of some horrendously distorted sound (were the engineers
completely unprepared for the sheer forcefulness of Busch’s
opening bars?) In spite, then, of its historical interest,
this is certainly not a version to live with on a regular basis.
That leaves us with the set’s fourth and final disc, a DVD that offers
a great deal of interesting material. As well as the original
film of Busch conducting the Tannhäuser overture in full
in 1932 (the performance that so impressed Sinopoli), there
are short documentaries covering various aspects of Busch’s
life as well as explaining the technical processes of sound
recording at the time (a crucial issue, as we have noted, with
this material). They are uniformly interesting, though let
down by the suspicion that the English subtitles may not be
giving us the full story (there are a few long passages of German
narration or interviews where little or no English appears on
the screen at all!) The booklet, too, though very detailed
and full of fascinating illustrations, is let down by some poor
English and shoddy proof-reading (wrong or missing times of
tracks, as noted above, for instance).
This set is actually Volume 30 of an Edition Staatskapelle Dresden.
In spite of its undoubted historical significance, I suspect
that it has been included primarily for the sake of completeness
and to ensure that the series offered at least some evidence
of the orchestra’s golden age under Busch. But these sonically
compromised recordings actually do the conductor little true
justice.
I note too that, of
the 18 “selected recordings” listed in its entry on Fritz Busch,
the booklet for David Patmore’s excellent A-Z of conductors
(Naxos 8.558087-90) includes only three from before World
War Two – live recordings of Der Rosenkavalier and Lohengrin
both from Buenos Aires in 1936 and a studio recording of Strauss’s
Don Juan with the London Philharmonic Orchestra from the
same year. As with most of his other judgements, the author is,
in this case, absolutely spot-on.
Rob Maynard