This box from Warner is a further instalment in the repackaging of
Klemperer’s complete recordings from his Indian summer in the
studios during the last twenty years of his life. The Warner logo
replaces that of EMI Classics but otherwise it’s the same cover
designs and presentation. It provides an interesting conspectus on
his changing views of the interpretation of baroque choral music.
Actually, as Richard Osborne’s informative booklet notes tell
us, Klemperer had been quite a pioneering advocate of the idea of
performing Bach and Handel with smaller forces than usual during his
earlier years, a first tentative step towards the authentic movement
that was beginning to gather real momentum during the period when
the recordings in this box were made. At the same time it must be
acknowledged that Klemperer’s notion of authenticity was extremely
tenuous, and the influence of the more traditionally romantic style
of interpretation lies heavy on his performances.
Nowhere is this truer than of his famous reading of Bach’s St
Matthew Passion made in 1960, the earliest recording in this collection.
In the first place, it is often very slow indeed, sometimes half the
speed to which we have become accustomed in later years. The chorales
are paced very deliberately, with pauses at the end of each line which
sometimes fly in the face of the sense of the words, and with expressive
overlays which hearken back to the days of Mengelberg and beyond.
In other words, this is a ‘period performance’ with a
vengeance, by which I mean a performance that is of the early 1960s
rather than of Bach’s own era. As such it could quite reasonably
be consigned to perdition as a travesty of Bach’s intentions;
but at the same time it lies firmly in a performing tradition that
stems from the Bach revival of the eighteenth century, after the music
had been almost totally neglected for a century or so. It has a real
grandeur of its own which defies musicological criticism; if you are
going to have Bach performed in this romantic style, it would be hard
to imagine it better done. The full forces of the Philharmonia chorus
and orchestra sing and play as if their lives depended on it, and
there are many touches which go right to the heart of the music. Bach
would have been very surprised by the sounds that resulted, but I
cannot think that he would have been totally displeased.
It comes as something of a shock to learn from Richard Osborne’s
notes that Klemperer and Pears disagreed about the treatment of the
gospel narratives, and that Klemperer effectively abdicated responsibility
for the supervision of these passages to Pears - one wonders what
happened to the choral and orchestral interpolations in the narrations.
It is a shock because the performance as a whole seems to be driven
by a unified vision, and indeed no critics at the time even suspected
the division of the direction of the whole work. Sir Peter Pears was
one of the great Evangelists of his day - he recorded the part several
times - and his delivery of the text has plenty of fire and expression.
He is well matched by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau - an echo of their
collaboration during the same period in the première of Britten’s
War Requiem - whose every utterance, but in particular his
Eli, Eli, lama sabbachtani, breaks the heart; Pears takes up
the following translation with even greater pathos. The halo of strings
around the voice of Christ surely displays the touch of Klemperer
rather than Pears. Fischer-Dieskau also recorded this part several
times, but this performance is the only one that brings these two
great lieder singers together. The results are superlative.
Nor does the rest of the solo singing let the side down, with even
the tiny parts of the two Witnesses taken by soloists of the calibre
of Helen Watts and Wilfred Brown; and Sir Geraint Evans takes the
even less significant role of one of the Priests. The four soloists
in the arias are a quite unmatched team: Dame Elisabeth Schwarzkopf,
Christa Ludwig, Nicolai Gedda and Walter Berry constitute a collection
of singers whom it would be heard to imagine bettered anywhere. The
recording sessions were spread over an unprecedentedly lengthy period
of over a year, presumably to accommodate the schedules of this starry
line-up; but the sense of unity remains strong throughout. Despite
being totally inauthentic, this is quite simply a marvellous performance.
Unfortunately when he came to record Handel’s Messiah
three years later Klemperer was let down badly by the team of soloists
he was given to work with. None of them sound remotely comfortable
with the English language. Some ten years earlier Schwarzkopf had
declined to sing the role of Cressida in Walton’s Troilus
and Cressida which the composer had specifically written for her
on stage - although she did manage to record excerpts in the studio
- because she felt that her English was not good enough. Here her
pronunciation never sounds in the slightest degree idiomatic, as is
shown most vividly by her treatment of the “ing” syllable
in a line such as “glad tidings of good things” in How
beautiful are the feet. When, a few minutes later, the American
bass Jerome Hines delivers the line “why do the nations imagine
a vain thing?” his treatment of the same syllable sounds hardly
any more authentic, with the vowel sounds altered in a plummy manner
which suggests strongly that he is trying to cover his natural accent.
Nicolai Gedda comes closer to a natural English pronunciation, but
he improved in later years when he recorded the tenor roles in Elijah
and Gerontius. He still does not sound idiomatic at this stage
of his career as can be heard also in his recording of Anatol in the
première of Barber’s Vanessa recorded a few years
earlier. Best of all surprisingly is Grace Hoffman - who I do not
think ever recorded anything else in English - but her super-refined
accent sounds as though it has been learnt by rote. Her delivery is
sadly lacking in any sense of expression even in Klemperer’s
slow and heartfelt He was despised.
There is nothing here that is quite as objectionable as the weird
contributions of Huguette Tourangeau and Werner Krenn to Bonynge’s
1970 recording of Messiah, whose delivery of the duet O
death, where is thy sting? is one of the great unintentionally
comic turns of all time; but then we don’t get the duet at all
in this recording, since it is one of several items that Klemperer
cuts from the score in the bad old tradition. Middle sections of da
capo arias go missing as well. The Philharmonia chorus, slimmed
down for the occasion, give nicely crisp performances, but the lack
of any ornamentation is a serious drawback even in a reading that
makes no claims to authenticity. One particularly misses any elaboration
of the bald timpani strokes at the end of movements such as Worthy
is the Lamb. Klemperer’s surprisingly fleet-footed treatment
of the final Amen chorus brings the performance to an exciting
conclusion but it does little to make up for the often pedestrian
and unyielding nature of the reading earlier. For a full-scale romantic
version of Messiah, and one that is also complete, Beecham’s
uproarious set from a couple of years earlier certainly consigns this
offering to the rank of also-rans.
Richard Osborne tells us in his booklet note that Walter Legge tried
to persuade Klemperer to make a recording of the Bach Mass in B
minor in 1962 using the full Philharmonia forces. Klemperer abandoned
the attempt after a number of pilot sessions; it might have been interesting
in this context to have heard some of these. When Klemperer finally
did get round to making a recording of the work five years later,
Legge had severed his connections with the Philharmonia and Klemperer
jettisoned the chorus - surely one of the best amateur choirs of all
time - in favour of the smaller BBC Chorus, while retaining a section
of the Philharmonia orchestral players under their new title. The
result is decidedly unbalanced; while the choir sound fine and crisp
in the lighter passages of the score, they recede behind the orchestra
during the more grandiose sections. In the Sanctus, for example,
the floating sopranos lines are unclear and indeed close to the threshold
of inaudibility behind the orchestra. The roles of the soloists in
the Mass are less prominent than in Messiah, but Klemperer’s
often plodding speeds do none of them any favours. Only Dame Janet
Baker sounds at all comfortable, and even she has to wait for a slow
and heartfelt Agnus Dei to demonstrate her voice at its best.
It all sounds rather as though Klemperer has made a conscious attempt
to conform to more modern ideas of Bach style, without any real sense
of what that actually means. Certainly any more revolutionary idea
of Bach with one-to-a-part is very far distant indeed.
In the context of the mixed success of these baroque performances,
the recording of the Beethoven Missa Solemnis - squeezed onto
one very full disc - stands rather apart. Here Klemperer is in his
full Beethovenian element, bringing out both the excitement and grandeur
of the score in the best possible tradition. He is helped by the glorious
singing of the Philharmonia chorus at full strength, managing to deliver
their almost unsingable extended high-flying lines with total certainty
and poise. There are one or two oddities. During the excited ‘battle
sequence’ of the Dona nobis pacem, Klemperer makes a
totally unauthorised and massive ritardando in the final bars
which is so unexpected that it sounds like a completely different
take has been substituted. Oddly enough the effect is dramatically
convincing, and the re-entry of the chorus is a thrilling moment.
More serious is his assignment in the Sanctus of the fugal
passages at Pleni sunt caeli and afterwards to the soloists
rather than chorus. Beethoven’s original score is apparently
ambiguous here; but the vocal score I own specifically marks these
sections “Coro” and the nature of the music surely demands
the fuller sound of the choir. At no other point in the score does
Beethoven assign contrapuntal music to the soloists in this manner.
This rather perverse decision also serves to highlight the main problems
with this recording, which as in the Messiah come in the shape
of the soloists. The young Elisabeth Söderström is fine
and indeed thrilling in places, but the rest are a mixed bunch. The
deep contralto Marga Höffgen shows decided signs of strain in
some of her higher-lying passages. Waldemar Kmentt is strenuous rather
than lyrical. Only the resonant Martti Talvela sounds really at home
in the music. When one compares this recording to the near-contemporaneous
Karajan recording with its superb roster of Gundula Janowitz, Christa
Ludwig, Fritz Wunderlich and Walter Berry one realises immediately
what a difference a really top-flight line-up of soloists can make.
The first interruption of the distant sounds of war in the Agnus
Dei¸ with Ludwig and Wunderlich sounding terrified with
a quivering nervousness that chills the blood, is simply streets ahead
of the effect that Höffgen and Kmentt produce here. Karajan also
scores in correctly assigning the fugal passages of Pleni sunt
caeli to the chorus, but his recording is severely compromised
by the singing of the Vienna Singverein which here and elsewhere is
simply not in the same league as the Philharmonia. One’s ideal
performance would combine Karajan’s soloists with Klemperer’s
chorus and orchestra, but that, of course, is not an option. In the
end it all comes down to the fact that Beethoven’s final choral
masterpiece is one of those works which can never be satisfactorily
encompassed in a single performance or recording. Klemperer, despite
the manifest drawbacks, is still up there among the best.
It does not appear that these discs have been subjected to any further
re-mastering since their original CD reissues. I would suspect that
only Klemperer completists - in particular those interested in his
evolving response to the challenge of period performances, which were
only just beginning to gain momentum at that era - will want to invest
in all of these discs. The box as a whole contains two indubitably
great recordings, those of the St Matthew Passion and the Missa
Solemnis, one interesting if controversial one in the shape of
the B minor Mass and an abridged reading of Messiah
which I am afraid is not a serious contender in any shape or form.
Paul Corfield Godfrey
Masterwork Index: Messiah
Johann Sebastian BACH (1685-1750)
Mass in B minor, BWV 232 [135.45]
Agnes Giebel (soprano), Dame Janet Baker (mezzo), Nicolai Gedda (tenor),
Hermann Prey (baritone), Franz Crass (bass), BBC Chorus, New Philharmonia
Orchestra/Otto Klemperer
rec. Kingsway Hall, London, 18-20, 23-26 and 30-31 October, 6-7 and
9-10 November 1967
St Matthew Passion, BWV 244 [223.52]
Peter Pears (tenor) - Evangelist), Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (baritone)
- Christ, Dame Elisabeth Schwarzkopf (soprano arias, Pilate’s
wife and Maid), Christa Ludwig (mezzo-soprano arias), Nicolai Gedda
(tenor arias), Walter Berry (bass arias and Peter), John Carol Case
(baritone) - Judas), Otakar Kraus (baritone) - Pontius Pilate, High
Priest and Priest), Helen Watts (alto) - Maid and Witness, Wilfred
Brown (tenor) - Witness, Sir Geraint Evans (baritone) - Priest, Boys
of Hampstead Parish Church, Philharmonia Chorus and Orchestra/Otto
Klemperer
rec. Kingsway Hall, London, 21, 25-26 November 1960, 3-4 January,
14-15 April, 10-12 May and 28 November 1961
George Frederick HANDEL (1684-1759)
Messiah, HMV 56 [141.39]
Dame Elisabeth Schwarzkopf (soprano), Grace Hoffman (mezzo), Nicolai
Gedda (tenor), Jerome Hines (bass), Philharmonia Chorus and Orchestra/Otto
Klemperer
rec. Kingsway Hall, London, February and November 1964 (exact dates
not given)
Ludwig van BEETHOVEN (1770-1827)
Missa Solemnis, Op.123 [79.29]
Elisabeth Söderström (soprano), Marga Höffgen (alto),
Waldemar Kmentt (tenor), Martti Talvela (bass), New Philharmonia Chorus
and Orchestra/Otto Klemperer
rec. Kingsway Hall, London, 30 September and 1, 4-6 and 11-13 October
1965
