Category: Opera

Wagner and Weber for the summer

radio klassik Stephansdom broadcasts four complete operas every week — a unique quality in itself — and this summer the station will be devoted to the operas of two great German composers in recognition of a few anniversaries.

Carl Maria von Weber died on 5 June 1826, two hundred years ago, at the age of 39. Despite that relative youth, by the time of his death Weber had become perhaps the most accomplished composer of German romantic opera, producing several operas, some of which remain in the repertory today. radio klassik Stephansdom will broadcast seven Weber operas in their entirety in June, including his most famous opera Der Freischütz and two complete recordings of his one-act comedy Abu Hassan. More information about this mini-Weber-festival can be found here.

Weber was a profound influence on Richard Wagner, a man not fond of acknowledging influences outside of himself. The 150th anniversary of the opening of Bayreuth takes place this August, and during that month and the month of July radio klassik Stephansdom devotes the larger segment of its programming to Wagner, and specifically his Ring cycle. Both the Solti and von Karajan Ring cycles will be broadcast in their entirety through those two months, along with special programming from Stefan Mickisch that examines over 200 motifs in the Ring and a six-part special series by Markus Vorzellner on the origin story of the tetralogy. (Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg will also be broadcast on 23 June; one can also expect broadcasts of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony [which opened the Bayreuth Festival on 13 August 1876] and selections from Tristan ünd Isolde, perhaps my favorite Wagner opera, if not my favorite opera of them all.) More specific information here.

I can now see how I’ll be spending the summer — along with dedicating myself more diligently to improving my German so that I can enjoy more fully the rest of rkS’s programming. A full June-August schedule of radio klassik Stephansdom’s opera programming can be found here. More on that fine Vienna institution radio klassik Stephansdom here.

Opernachmittag

I couldn’t let the day go by without noting that tomorrow’s Metropolitan Opera broadcast will feature the new Met production of Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, featuring Lise Davidsen and Michael Spyres; Yuval Sharon directs and Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts. You can stream this via Philadelphia’s WRTI tomorrow afternoon, March 21, at 12:00 noon Eastern time.

The New York Times‘ Josh Barone was enthusiastic about the new production earlier this month — “the event of the season,” he says (gift link to his review here) — and it will undoubtedly be worth the time. Davidsen is reputed to be nothing less than miraculous (director Sharon has given her a baby in this one; I’m thinking I’ll be glad to listen and not sorry to miss the visuals), and Nézet-Séguin conducted a terrific in-concert version with Nina Stimme last season. I confess I’m somewhat skeptical of director-centric productions by the likes of Sharon; on the other hand, I was spellbound by the Chereau Ring at Bayreuth and recently very much enjoyed Barrie Kosky’s Don Giovanni for the Vienna opera. The little I’ve read of Sharon’s A New Philosophy of Opera is intriguing and tempts me to read further — what do I know? Still, a baby?

Event of the season or not, Tristan is one of the great achievements of the aesthetic imagination, an extraordinarily erotic and meditative work, Schopenhauer as music. Listen, and before a second listening read Bryan Magee’s The Tristan Chord.

Opernabend: Trouble at the mill

Tomorrow’s opera from radio klassik Stephansdom is Eugen D’Albert’s Tiefland, which premiered in Prague in 1903. A verismo opera nodding, as the genre does, towards a gritty realism, Tiefland is largely set in a village mill and is described in MusicWeb International as follows:

Tiefland tells the story of Marta, a poor young woman who is the mistress of the local landowner Lord Sebastiano. Sebastiano has money troubles, so is about to marry an heiress, and thus needs to expunge the local notoriety associated with keeping a mistress. He plans to have Marta marry his naïve shepherd Pedro, so that she can live nearby and still serve as his mistress. However, his plan fails when Marta and Pedro actually fall in love, and Sebastiano’s manipulation is revealed. The opera ends in a physical struggle in which Pedro strangles Sebastiano, and then escapes with Marta up into his beloved mountains, and away from the corrupting lowlands.

D’Albert, a noted pianist, was born in Glasgow in 1864 but emigrated to Germany, where he was a student of Franz Liszt. He wrote 21 operas, and his romantic history seems just as prolific as his musical career: he was married six times and died in Riga in 1932, where he was pursuing a divorce from his sixth wife. Tiefland also has the dubious distinction of being the only opera to be adopted to film by Leni Riefenstahl. Says the Wikipedia page for the opera: “The best-known film adaptation of the opera was by the German director Leni Riefenstahl, with Riefenstahl herself playing Marta. The film, begun in 1940, but not released until 1954, used Roma slave labor from a German transportation camp for some of the extras, many of whom were sent to Auschwitz before the end of the war.”

So: a true curiosity, more produced today in Europe than in the United States, and not often there. radio klassik Stephansdom will broadcast a 2002 recording of the opera, with the ÖRF Radio Symphonie Orchester Wien conducted by Bertrand de Billy. You can hear it tomorrow, February 23, at 2:00 pm Eastern time here.

Opernabend and World Radio Day

A memory of childhood: The crystal radio kit.

It’s an all-Mozart-opera Valentine’s Day coming up tomorrow. On Philadelphia’s WRTI-FM at 1:00 pm Eastern time, you can enjoy a 1986 Metropolitan Opera production of Idomeneo, featuring Frederica von Stade and Hildegard Behrens and conducted by Jeffrey Tate. A hour later on Vienna’s radio klassik Stephansdom at 2:00 pm, Richard Schmitz will review a variety of productions of La Clemenza di Tito, featuring interpretations by conductors such as René Jacobs, Charles Mackerras, Pinchas Steinberg, Christopher Hogwood, and John Eliot Gardiner. A new production of Tito is coming up next month at the Wiener Staatsoper, so it’s a good time to revisit what’s been done with it in the past. Both broadcasts are available for the streaming.

Today is also UNESCO’s World Radio Day. “It is a Day to thank broadcasters for the news they deliver, the voices they amplify and the stories they share,” reads the Web site, and although they’re looking at the heinous use of AI in the medium, it still provides food for thought. I’ve been a radio enthusiast since I built my first crystal radio set as a kid, and in high school I hosted a few “High School Hours” that ran on WAZL, the local AM station. (I was told by the DJ who was running the show, Scott McAndrews, that I had a very good voice for radio — something I’ve often been told since then — which makes me think I may have missed my calling.) I also spent a year as the president of my college radio station, and in the early 1990s, when I lived in Central Europe, the BBC World Service and especially ÖRF’s late, lamented English-language broadcast Blue Danube Radio on shortwave got me through more than a few evenings.

Although television beat out radio as the most popular broadcast medium many years ago, and podcasts have revived the form somewhat, I still retain a weakness for it. Like many kids my age, I enjoyed tuning in to distant radio stations on my small transistor radio when I was 10 or 11 or so, and I think what is best about it is the sense of connection that it engenders between the broadcasters and their listeners, especially when the broadcast is live. First, of course, is the feeling that you’re one of many people listening to the same broadcast in real time, a feeling of community. But second, and maybe just as important, is the sense that there’s a personal relationship between the DJ or radio personality and the individual listener, however many dozens, hundreds, or thousands of miles may be separating you in distance — in time, you’re somehow listening to the same things together. The great radio personalities like Jean Shepherd exploited this personal connection in a way that no podcast or television show could emulate, which testifies to the uniqueness of the medium.

So I lift my glass to radio today. I’m not sure anybody else is celebrating, but if they are, I hope they’re listening with me.

Opernabend: Don Giovanni, Vienna, 1955

A rehearsal session for Mozart’s “Don Giovanni.” Conductor Karl Böhm is on the right; next to him Erich Kunz; behind him George London; Sena Jurinac; and at far left Anton Dermota. Vienna, 1955.

An “alpha-plus” according to the eminent Sir Denis Forman, Mozart’s 1787 Don Giovanni, in a landmark 1955 Wiener Staatsoper recording conducted by Karl Böhm, will be broadcast by radio klassik Stephansdom tomorrow, Saturday, January 31, at 2:00 pm Eastern time. The fine cast includes George London as the lecherous Giovanni, Erich Kunz as his hapless servant Leporello, Sena Jurinac as Donna Elvira, and Ludwig Weber as Giovanni’s nemesis, The Commendatore.

Eva Reinold hosts this broadcast, a fitting end to Mozart’s Birthday Week. You can stream it here.