Hans Knappertsbusch (1888-1965) is often cited as the greatest of
the post-war Wagner conductors to work at Bayreuth. Although he rarely
appeared outside Germany, he endeared himself to British audiences by his
total refusal to bow to the Nazi regime; he was a favourite with orchestras
too, because he famously hated rehearsing, preferring to depend on mutual
trust and communication during the performance itself.
His Bayreuth
Parsifals are legendary, and we have three
tantalising extracts here. The sound is not great - very thin and squeezed
in the higher registers of strings and woodwind - but the pacing of the
Prelude to Act 1 gives an immediate insight into his qualities. He learned
his craft under Hans Richter at Bayreuth, and this is ‘old
school’ Wagner; majestic, unhurried, yet full of expressive intensity.
The
Parsifal extracts are followed by
Siegfried Idyll,
Wagner’s sublime birthday present to Cosima after the birth of their
son Siegfried. Listening to the opening, which is a kind of prologue to the
main body of the work, I was finding Knappertsbusch’s approach
worryingly indulgent - so free with the
rubato, holding back at the
end of each and every phrase. Then, when the music moved into its true first
section, it began to flow in the most wonderful way, and this blossomed into
a deeply felt and wholly idiomatic reading. When I then listened to it for a
second time, it all simply made sense. A performance to treasure, with the
musicians of the Vienna Philharmonic - the orchestra in all of these
performances - playing with the utmost sensitivity. A passionate and
powerful version of the
Tristan Prelude is followed by a perhaps
rather stolid account of the
Tannhäuser Overture and Venusberg
music to complete CD 1, which contains tracks from 1950 to 1955.
CD 2 begins with a splendid and dramatic rendering of the
Flying
Dutchman overture. I have rarely heard the opening more thrilling,
despite the primitive sound. The music is so evocative; the ghostly ship
breasting the stormy sea, the wind howling through its rigging - all this,
plus the more romantic or ebullient moments, come through superbly. The
Meistersinger Prelude to Act 1 was a surprise -really brisk and
business-like, leading directly into curtain-up and the opening chorale.
The remaining items are true ‘bleeding chunks’, although
the
Ride of the Valkyries has its own perennial blood supply. This is
not really
Forest Murmurs on track 8; the work of that title is a
short purely orchestral piece strung together, quite successfully, from the
music in Act 2 of
Siegfried where Siegfried encounters the Woodbird.
All we have here is a straightforward extract, complete with
Siegfried’s own comments and interpolations - admittedly in the fine
tenor voice of Franz Lechleitner. In the context of the opera, this is fine,
but makes little or no sense as a free-standing item, lovely though the
music is. The two
Götterdämmerung items work much better;
there are rough edges and imprecise ensemble but the music has tremendous
certainty of direction, as well as wonderful individual playing from the
VPO’s woodwind and brass.
All in all, these discs generously repay repeated listening. These
are emphatically not immaculate studio recordings by modern standards; but
music is being made here, at a high emotional and aesthetic level.
Gwyn Parry-Jones
Details
CD 1
Parsifal (1882)
Prelude to Act 1 [14:15]
Transformation Scene [4:21]
Flower maidens’ Scene [9:20]
Siegfried Idyll (1869) [19:01]
Tristan und Isolde (1865)
Prelude to Act 1 [10:07]
Tannhäuser (1861)
Overture and Venusberg Music [21:30]
CD 2
Der fliegende Holländer (1843)
Overture [10:29]
Rienzi (1842)
Overture [12:21]
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (1868)
Prelude to Act 1 [9:08]
Prelude to Act 3 [6:45]
Die Walküre (1870)
The Ride of the Valkyries [5:47]
Siegfried (1870)
Forest Murmurs [9:52]
Götterdämmerung (1872)
Dawn and Siegfried’s Rhine Journey [12:32]
Siegfried’s Funeral March [7:34]
Grosser Saal, Musikverein, Wien, 14-15 and 23-24 June 1950 (Parsifal Prelude
and
Transformation, Rienzi), 11 September 1950 (Parsifal Act 3), 1 April 1955
(Siegfried
Idyll), 6-7 May 1953 (Tannhäuser, Der fliegende Holländer, Die
Walküre),
September 1951 (Die Meistersinger), 24 June 1950 (Siegfried); Sofiensaal,
Vienna,
September 1959 (Tristan und Isolde), 3-6 June 1956
(Götterdämmerung)
