Why I Love ‘Die Walküre’ - Part 2
Perhaps before I delve into the great final act of ‘Die Walküre’, it might be interesting to look at the voices Wagner employed in this crucial work, in his development as a composer. I often feel that the casting of most of his operas must be extremely difficult, as he was quite unspecific in his notation, particularly with the lower voices. His references to Bass and Höher Bass (higher bass) in his scores are not consistent, and it is often quite unclear what category a role falls into. The strict German system of Fach, which has been used for years to cast roles in Germany, is extremely inflexible, and to my mind, largely useless and potentially dangerous, and indeed seems to be used less nowadays. Wagner roles vary alarmingly, and a simple examination of tessitura on the page is a recipe for disaster. Many of the low voice roles for men seem on the face of it similar, but actually vary enormously.
Let me give a couple of examples from my own experience. The roles of Daland (Dutchman), Landgrave (Tannhäuser), Fafner (Ring), Hunding (Walküre), King Henry (Lohengrin), Klingsor (Parsifal), and Hagen (Götterdämmerung) are all labelled Bass. However, my sort of bass could only sing comfortably Fafner, Hunding and Hagen, while being wholly unsuited to the others. I was once cast as Henry, but a series of, at the time as I thought it, unfortunate events conspired to deprive the world of my rendition of the King. As it turned out, the world and I were lucky, as the role needs a much more stentorian voice than mine, and it would have been an unhappy casting. In fact, at the highest level, my voice was quite light for Wagner, although well suited to some roles. I remember when I was understudying La Roche and Baron Ochs at the New York Met, I was overwhelmed by the size of some of the bass voices being employed there, although as in life, size is not everything!
The vocal casting in ‘Die Walküre’, our topic for today, is interesting. Hunding and Wotan are miles apart, and I was ideal if somewhat light for Hunding, and only managed Wotan in the cut and more lightly scored version by Jonathan Dove. Yet, I am sure that what I brought to the Longborough Wotan was worthwhile, in terms of my interpretation, as many of the reviewers at the time noted, although I imagine if I was reviewing now in my capacity as critic for EMR, I would probably have moaned about miscasting! The role of Siegmund is fascinating. It is called tenor, and indeed needs a tenor voice, but it is very baritonal. The highest note is the A (the one that Vickers warbled) at the end of Act 1, but even G is rare. The whole of the Todesverkündigung scene lies in what we would call the baritone register but needs the gleam of a tenor. The best Siegmund I ever heard was Jonas Kaufmann at the Met, whose lower register is firm and strong. Jon Vickers was a wonderful Siegmund, but like many tenors, he never sang the role of Siegfried, as it lies much higher. Virtually the only tenor through the years who sang both Siegmund and Siegfried was Lauritz Melchior, the great Danish Heldentenor, but he was a freak of nature. My old friend Alberto Remedios sang both roles, but I always felt he was more comfortable with Siegmund. One of the most surprising Siegmunds I heard was Robin Leggate, in Ireland in 2002. Robin had been a stalwart in secondary roles at Covent Garden for years, with Cassio in ‘Otello’ his greatest role, but he relished the opportunity to free himself from the shackles in Limerick and delivered a fine Siegmund. I was singing Fafner again, and was able to enjoy his singing enormously. The role of Sieglinde is also interesting as, like Brünnhilde, it is described as soprano, but has often been sung by a high mezzo, thus differentiating the two characters. Wotan is always described as High Bass or Baritone, but again suits some voices better than others. I always felt that Bryn Terfel was too high and John Tomlinson too low, although both were excellent. By far the best, although I only heard him on record, was Hans Hotter, my friend and mentor in the 1980s. I studied with him in Munich and Vienna and was privileged to cook dinner and entertain him with my wife at my parents’ little house in Edinburgh. He was a huge man with a huge personality. He rarely demonstrated his voice in lessons, but once sang me the last page of the last of Brahms’ four Serious Songs, and the sound was immense. His great love for Lieder meant that the subtlety of his interpretation of Wotan was unparalleled. This was a man who had worked closely with Richard Strauss, who sang with all the great conductors and singers of the second half of the 20th century, who had known Pfitzner and Orff, and who had forced Hitler to shake his hand, in the knowledge that Hotter was not going to give him a Nazi salute. Apparently, he only met Hitler once (and that was enough) at the premiere of Strauss’ opera, ‘Friedenstag’, a work that Hitler despised. From all this, you can imagine what a wonderful evening Fran and I spent with the great man, as he regaled us with stories about Maria Callas, Karajan and Clemens Krauss, the great conductor and librettist of ‘Capriccio’ at the premiere of which Hotter sang Olivier, although later, he was the best La Roche on record. I sang that role many times, and my one regret was that I had never worked on it with Hotter, although he would have laughed at the idea then of this callow youth singing such a role!
Returning to ‘Die Walküre’, the third act opens with the most famous scene in all Wagner, the Ride of the Valkyries! It’s impossible to imagine what the first audience in 1870 must have felt when they heard this phenomenal scene with eight powerful female singers belting out their Hoyotohos, and the orchestra going bananas. Its use in the film ‘Apocalypse Now’ in 1979, was iconic, although the context was nothing to do with Wagner, and, in many ways, it hasn’t helped general understanding of the composer. Its huge excitement and deliberately bombastic nature has blinded many listeners to the essential nature of most of Wagner’s operas, and has hidden the sheer beauty of much of his writing. In a similar way, the jingoistic nature of Elgar’s ‘Pomp and Circumstance March’ has shrouded much of the magnificence of that composer’s oeuvre with an overlay of nonsense. It has taken me decades to escape from that view of Elgar, rather drummed into us at school, and only now can I appreciate the musical glories of the English composer.
The Ride introduces us to the nature and purpose of the Valkyries, which is to collect the bodies and souls of slain heroes, and bring them to Valhalla, and we watch them assembling, just in time to find Brünnhilde fleeing Wotan’s wrath on her horse, Grane, bearing the exhausted Sieglinde with her. She explains to her sisters what she has done, and what needs to happen to Sieglinde. She, however, deprived of her new found brother and lover, wants simply to die, until Brünnhilde announces to her that her passion for the deceased Siegmund has borne fruit and that she carries a new hero in her womb. This energises Sieglinde, and she soars through one of the most beautiful of phrases, ‘O hehrstes Wunder’, a motif that will not be heard again until the final page of Götterdämmerung, many hours later. She escapes to a forest in the East, and we see her no more, but the music tells us that this baby will become Siegfried, the saviour of the world.
The sisters are outraged at Brünnhilde’s action in defying their father, Wotan, but she awaits his coming, on the wings of a storm. His arrival is all-consuming in its anger, and he proceeds to castigate all present in an outpouring of musical wrath, never equalled in music. This was the passage that told me that I was not going to sing Wotan in a big theatre, but it was cut enough and lightly scored enough for me to get away with it in the Jonathan Dove version! Once Wotan’s anger has dissipated somewhat, the stage is emptied of all the Valkyries, leaving only father and daughter alone together. In his outrage, he has banished her from the ranks of the Valkyries, as punishment for her disobedience. Even as she points out to him that she was only doing what he really wanted, his anger grows again, mainly due to his own impotence against the will of Fricka. He tells her that there is no mitigation, and that she must be punished for her crime. Stripped of Godhood, she will be left on a mountain top as prey to the first man who comes upon her, and will become a housewife, cooking and spinning at the hearth. For a warrior woman, this is much worse than death and she pleads and pleads with him to at least make her conqueror a brave man. Finally, he agrees that, once she is wrapped in magical sleep, he will set a fire round her that can only be crossed by the bravest of heroes (Siegfried?). She is ecstatic, as is he, and he sings the great final scene when he puts her to sleep, creates the magic fire, and declares, to the Siegfried motif, ‘Only he who does not fear my spear, shall walk through the fire to his bride’. I shall be forever grateful that Longborough Opera permitted me to sing this wondrous final monologue on stage, perhaps the best 15 minutes I have ever spent in my whole career. It was wonderful to share it with one of my oldest friends in the business, Jenny Miller, who I had first worked with at Guildhall in 1978. It was also the passage I had sung at my first singing lesson at school in 1973, utterly crazy then, but prophetic.
So ends ‘Die Walküre’, the second portion of the Ring Tetralogy, and still, to my mind, one of the greatest pieces of music ever written. Readers who have perused my recent article about modern productions in the EMR, will know how horrified I am by many of the terrible recent stagings of the Ring worldwide, and I can only hope that future productions will allow audiences to understand and love the great concept that Wagner came up with, the magnificent music, the intellectual insights, the psychological complexities, all of these clearly notated in the music, with no need for extraneous political, social or sexual invention and clumsy additional prejudices added by many directors.
There is a wealth of recordings available nowadays to listen to ‘Die Walküre’. Readers will know my preference by now for recordings from the 50s and 60s. Krauss, Furtwängler, Solti, Knappertsbusch and Karajan are my ‘go to’ conductors, and Hotter (Wotan), Nilsson, Varnay or Flagstad (Brünnhilde), Vickers or King (Siegmund) and Brouwenstijn or Crespin (Sieglinde) my tips for singers. It’s worth finding the extraordinary Act 1 conducted by Bruno Walter from 1935, with Lauritz Melchior and Lotte Lehmann, for an amazing insight into how the older generation sang Wagner. The recording is outstanding for both sound quality and emotional impact, and the singing is phenomenal. Recorded in Vienna, a full recording had been planned, but Hunding (Emanuel List) and the conductor were both Jewish, and the Anschluss stymied the project. Fortunately, Walter and List escaped the Nazis, and fled to America, as did Melchior, where he became a great Met favourite.
I fear the chances of seeing ‘Die Walküre’ in Scotland again any time soon are vanishingly small, but it remains one of my all-time great operas, and at least one can listen to great singers performing it on recordings.
