Bruch: Die Loreley. Michaela Kaune, Magdalena
Hinterdobler, Danae Kontora, Thomas Mohr, Benedikt Eder, Jan-Hendrik Rootering,
Thomas Hamberger, Sebastian Campione; Prager Philharmonischer Chor and Münchner
Rundfunkorchester conducted by Stefan Blunier. CPO. $33.99 (3 CDs).
Alfred Cellier: Dorothy. Majella Cullagh, Lucy
Vallis, Stephanie Maitland, Matt Mears, John Ieuan Jones, Edward Robinson,
Patrick Relph, Michael Vincent Jones, Sebastian Maclaine; Victorian Opera
Chorus and Victorian Opera Orchestra conducted by Richard Bonynge. Naxos.
$12.99.
Louise Reichardt: Songs. Amy Pfrimmer, soprano;
Dreux Montegut, piano. MSR Classics. $12.95.
The aged Max Bruch (1838-1920), like the
aged Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921), has often been criticized for never
moving beyond the musical forms, styles and approaches of his youth – for
staying firmly implanted in Romanticism, and early Romanticism at that, when
the musical world had long since advanced to wrenching harmonies, atonality,
the Second Viennese School, and so forth. Whether all those changes really
constituted “advancing” is more a matter of opinion today, when music of all
styles and approaches tends to be accepted if it has something to say, than in
Bruch’s and Saint-Saëns’ own later years, when they were seen as relics of a
time gone by. Even more than Saint-Saëns, Bruch is now known for only a handful
of works, and grand opera is certainly not a field with which he is commonly
associated. But Bruch’s early promise, his wealth of melodic invention, his
devotion to the Romantic ideal, and his willingness to spin out musical beauty
at great length, were already apparent in his early opera Die Loreley, written from 1860 to 1863. The libretto was intended
for Mendelssohn, who actually wrote three numbers for it before his death, and
since Mendelssohn was one of Bruch’s major compositional models, the eventual
creation of the opera by Bruch makes considerable historical as well as musical
sense – although the path to the work’s creation was by no means smooth.
Bruch’s deeply Romantic temperament shows in the way he became attached to a
story in which it is unrequited love, with some supernatural assistance, that
leads to the creation of the Lorelei, who lures mariners to their death along
the Rhine. The Lorelei is not simply a water spirit in Bruch’s opera – she is a
woman wronged and thus transformed into a threat, in what is a very Romantic
scenario involving the power of love and the risks of its disappointment. There
are Lorelei works by Clara Schumann and Liszt that predate Bruch’s opera, but
the music of which Bruch’s work is most reminiscent is partly that of
Mendelssohn, whose works Bruch tended not only to respect but also to echo at
this stage of his career, and partly that of Carl Maria von Weber. For the
central scene of Die Loreley, and the
first that Bruch wrote – the scene around which he built up everything else in
the opera – is one in which Lenore (Michaela Kaune), the wronged woman who will
become the Lorelei, calls on dark Rhine spirits for revenge after she has been
seduced and abandoned by Otto (Thomas Mohr), the Palgrave (essentially Count),
with whom she has fallen in love without knowing his identity. The spirits
agree to grant her wish, in a scene quite reminiscent of the Wolf’s Glen scene
from Weber’s Der Freischütz, and the
remainder of the opera focuses on how that wish plays out – to the happiness of
no one, including Lenore. This is a very rarely heard opera, so the live
recording from 2014 that is now available on CPO is very much welcome – and CPO,
which has sometimes given short shrift to listeners by failing to provide
otherwise unavailable texts to allow the audience to follow the action of
unfamiliar works, deserves five stars in this release for including a complete
German/English libretto. The singing is generally quite fine, not only from
Kaune and Mohr but also from Magdalena Hinterdobler as Bertha, the unfortunate
countess whom Otto marries and quickly abandons and who, like Otto himself,
loses her life as the revenge and curse of the Lorelei take hold. The only
vocal disappointment is Jan-Hendrik Rootering as the minnesinger Reinald: his
voice is pinched, shaky and not always on key. But the remaining parts come
across very well indeed. Sumptuously scored and very well played by the
Münchner Rundfunkorchester under Stefan Blunier, Die Loreley is impressive both as Romantic opera and as further
evidence, if any were needed, of the depth to which Bruch – who was only in his
20s when he wrote this work – absorbed and continued to be guided by
emotion-packed Romanticism throughout his compositional life.
The importance of Der Freischütz (1821), and in particular the Wolf’s Glen scene, for
later composers can scarcely be overestimated. The scene, lightened and
somewhat parodied, even makes its way into Gilbert and Sullivan, in their early
The Sorcerer (1877). It is easy to
assume that Gilbert and Sullivan ruled the British musical stage in their
collaborative years, but a new recording from Naxos gives the lie to that
common belief and cannot help but make G&S fans wonder what in the world
the audiences of the time really considered top-notch entertainment. The
release is the world première recording of Dorothy
(1886) by Alfred Cellier (1844-1891), best known today, to the extent that he
is known at all, for arranging some of the G&S operettas’ overtures. Dorothy was a genuine phenomenon: its
931 performances were almost as many as those of The Mikado (672) and its successor, Ruddigore (288), combined. Why?
The recording makes that question inevitable and suggests that the only
possible answer is that Dorothy is so
feather-light that audiences did not have to think even briefly about political
satire, class issues (except very much in passing), or any sort of topsy-turvy
world along the lines of those that Gilbert was such an expert at creating. The
full libretto of Dorothy – readily
available online, thanks to Naxos – shows the weaknesses of the writing by Benjamin
C. Stevenson (1839-1906) even more clearly than do the lyrics sung on the CD,
which at least include a single number with a touch of spirit: “The old would
be young, and the young would be old,/ The lean only long to grow fatter;/ The wealthy
want health, and the healthy want gold,/ A change to the worse for the latter./
The single would wed, but the husband contrives/ To consider his fetters a
curse./ And half the world sighs for the other half’s wives,/ With the risk of
a change for the worse.” Those are the best lines by far in a very mediocre
libretto, whose story it so bland that it brings to mind the words of Bunthorne
in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience:
“If they want insipidity, they shall have it.” The story of Dorothy involves two well-born cousins,
Dorothy and Lydia, who vow not to wed (for no special reason) and who disguise
themselves as an innkeeper’s daughters (also for no special reason); they meet
two interchangeable young noblemen (less differentiated than Marco and Giuseppe
in The Gondoliers). The men romance
the girls, who give them rings; that night, with the girls out of disguise at
the local nobleman’s hall, the men romance the opposite girls (shades of Così
fan tutte) and give the rings to the “wrong” ones; the next day, everyone
switches back and all is fine (yet again for no special reason). And that is
that. The music is serviceably charming, far better than the words although it
is largely characterless. The recording of Dorothy
is nicely sung, and Richard Bonynge, a longtime advocate of less-known music,
conducts as befits a man who has turned up some real gems. But Dorothy is at best semi-precious. Perhaps
Bunthorne, again, got it right in figuring out why Cellier’s work was so
tremendously popular in its time: “It’s his confounded mildness.”
Well, being mild and accessible is surely
no crime, and certainly was not one in the Victorian age, or even the years
immediately preceding it. There is some very pleasant, if ultimately rather
inconsequential, music to be rediscovered from that time period, including the
songs of Louise Reichardt (1779-1826), a selection of which may be heard on a
new MSR Classics CD. Reichardt had a fine musical pedigree, being the
granddaughter of Franz Benda (1709-1786) and the daughter of two composers, Juliane
and Johann Friedrich Reichardt. Louise (sometimes spelled Luise) was involved
in her family’s gatherings of notable literary figures of the early 19th
century, including Goethe, Ludwig Tieck, Clemens Brentano, and Phillip Achim
von Arnim, among others. When she wrote her songs – more than 90 in all – she
often used the words of poets with whom she was personally acquainted. She also
favored poetry that was popular with other composers, such as the works of
Pietro Metastasio (1698-1782), often set by Rossini. Reichardt deliberately
created accessible, folk-music-like songs that would be easy for students to
learn and present: she was a music teacher and a choral instructor, although
not allowed, because of her gender, to conduct in public. Amy Pfrimmer offers a
nicely chosen selection of 22 of Louise Reichardt’s songs on the new CD, with
able support from Dreux Montegut – whose role is distinctly supportive and
subservient, but who handles his contributions as well as possible. The
selection begins with six songs to Metastasio texts and ends with three others;
in between are pieces to words by Tieck, von Arnim, Brentano, Novalis, Karl
Friedrich Gottlob Wetzl, Karl Philipp Conz, and Philipp Otto Runge. Reichardt
does little to “tone paint” the words, preferring simple expressiveness that
sets them to pleasant if undistinguished musical lines. Pfrimmer’s rich but
sometimes slightly wobbly soprano serves the generally unchallenging material
well, and her expressiveness effectively brings out what emotional depth the
pieces possess – not that there is a considerable amount of it. It is largely
the thrill of discovery, or rediscovery, that makes this a very pleasant and
interesting recording: nothing here is earthshaking (or was intended to be),
and Reichardt broke no new ground in the lieder
genre. But the disc stands, like those of Dorothy
and Die Loreley, as evidence of how
much interesting and very rarely heard music remains to be unearthed and given
a chance to reach a 21st-century audience that is eager to move
beyond the standard repertoire and into some less-explored parts of the musical
past.
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