Obituary: Johan Botha (1965-2016)

The South African tenor was beloved in Verdi and Wagner.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Johan Botha as Otello. Photo by Ken Howard © 2007 The Metropolitan Opera.

The year of 2016, that has seen the deaths of so many musically talented individuals, has now claimed the life of tenor Johan Botha. The South African singer, who was mounting a comeback following a battle with cancer and a seven-month hiatus from the stage, died yesterday. He was 51.

The Wagner Project: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg

Wagner's longest opera happens to be one of the great comedies.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

A medieval woodcut depicting the city of Nuremberg.

In 1848, Wagner had two ideas for operas. One, the saga of the swan knight, became Lohengrin, the other was Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg ("The Mastersingers of Nuremberg." Meistersinger (as it is usually called) was sketched as a rustic comedy, kind of like Tannhäuser with less sex and a happy ending. 19 years later, when Die Meistersinger finally appeared, it became Wagner's longest opera, a profound reflection on the composer's own career and the search for the meaning of German art. It remains one of his most popular operas. And yes, it's a comedy.

For Opera Goers, the Lottery is Over

Met Opera (quietly) alters rush ticket policy (again.)
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Much to this guy's relief, the Met is getting out of the lottery business.
New York Lottery image © New York State Lottery. Photo alteration by the author.

Earlier this year, Superconductor published a column regarding the Metropolitan Opera's implementation of a new rush ticket policy for the 2014-15 season which forced would-be opera goers to enter a daily lottery on the Met website. Last night, this blog discovered that as of Nov. 20, 2015, this lottery has been discontinued in favor of an online-only, first-come, first-serve policy.

Opera Review: Things Are Going to Get Merry Here

Salzburg's new Die Meistersinger is just...dreamy.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Hammer time: Michael Volle is Hans Sachs in Salzburg.
Frame-grab from the live stream of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.
Image and likeness © 2013 Salzburger Festspiele.

It is a small miracle of modern technology that blogs such as this one (given a limited budget for travel) can write about important new opera productions on another continent. It's true that the live opera house performance is always preferable to the recording, but in the case of this new production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg at the Salzburg Festival, the availability of a live stream is very welcome indeed, especially as this new production may be bound for the stage of the Metropolitan Opera in the near future.

Opera Review: The Song Contest Remains the Same

The Lyric Opera of Chicago presents Die Meistersinger. 
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Generation gap: Amanda Majeski and James Morris in Lyric Opera of Chicago's
new Die Meistersinger. Photo by Dan Rest © 2013 Lyric Opera of Chicago.

The Lyric Opera of Chicago's new production of Wagner's  Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg is one that might be familiar to Superconductor readers. It's by David McVicar, and it's the same one that premiered at Glyndebourne in 2012 and was recently released on DVD. The Chicago version is pretty much the same show--with a few changes and tweaks from director Marie Lambert. (Most notable: the elimination of the stilt-walking fire-breathers following a rehearsal accident earlier this month. They now juggle tenpins.) Sir Andrew Davis conducted a brisk, muscular performance.

DVD Review: The Shoe Must Go On

Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg from Glyndebourne.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Cobbler Hans Sachs (Gerald Finley (r.) tries to get some work done as
Beckmesser (Johann Martin Kränzle) warbles in Act II of
Die Meistersinger. Image from the Glyndebourne Festival © 2011 OpusArte.

This DVD performance (released on two discs or a single Blu-Ray by OpusArte) was shot in June 2011 at the Glyndebourne Festival. It is just the second Wagner opera to be performed at Glyndebourne following a 2003 Tristan und Isolde. (It marks a collaboration between this house, San Francisco Opera and the Lyric Opera of Chicago, who will mount this staging in February 2012.)The show features a youthful, energetic cast who exhibit a thorough dramatic involvement in this vast comedy, anchored by the Sachs of Canadian baritone Gerald Finley.

Recordings Review: Jogging through Nuremberg

Marek Janowski's brisk new Meistersinger.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

It's a concert recording, so you'll just have to imagine Ye Olde Nuremberg.

This live recording of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg was made in Berlin at a June 3, 2011 concert performance by the talented, underrated Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra. Led by veteran Wagnerian Marek Janowski, it is the first of a 10-opera project to preserve new digital version of the composer's mature operas over two years.

The Cobbler's Hammer

Another take on singers breaking character.

Bernd Weikl as Hans Sachs at Bayreuth.
Image © Unitel/Bayreuth Festspielhaus

When Anna Netrebko made her Metropolitan Opera debut in the company's new production of Anna Bolena, critics erupted in a furore over her grin at the end of the aria "Al dolce guidami."

In a recent post on The New York Observer, Zachary Woolfe offers a fascinating denfese of Ms. Netrebko's smile, arguing that singrs have a long history of breaking character onstage and should not be picked apart for doing so.

This reminded me of my first performance of Die Meistersinger at the Met, back in 1995 with an all-star cast led by Bernd Weikl as Hans Sachs. To give you an idea of the fire-power onstage, that night in Olde Nuremberg featured:

• Hermann Prey (in his only Met appearances as Sixtus Beckmesser.)
• Ben Heppner as Walther von Stolzing.
• Karita Mattila as Eva Pogner
• Two promising young basses (Alan Held and René Pape) as Fritz Kothner and the Night Watchman, respectively.

Back in those innocent (grad school) days, my mom had subscription seats in the fourth row of the orchestra on the left side of the house. This put us close enough to hear James Levine scat-singing along with the orchestra during the prelude.

It also put me directly across from Mr. Weikl's cobbler's last in the second act. If you're not familiar with this scene, it opens with Sachs singing poetically of the beauty of the night and the linden-tree overhead. It ends in comic chaos, as Beckmesser comes out in his nightshirt to sing the love-song he has planned for the next day's song-contest and unwittingly touches off a massive Straßenkampf.

Now this was my first live Meistersinger. But, budding Wagner geek that I was, I'd studied the opera in dept and learned it back-to-front from the first Solti recording. As Sachs banged his hammer on the cobbler's last, critiquing (or "marking") Beckmesser's performance, I felt myself caught up in the show. I started bobbing my head at each "bang."


Suddenly, I felt Bernd Weikl's eyes on me from across the orchestra pit. He wasn't angry. In fact, he looked amused that I was the kid knew where the hammer-strikes were in the score. He held up the cobbler's hammer, nd gave me a  questioning look. I grinned. I nodded vigorously and whack! Beckmesser had another mark against him. We never made eye contact again, and it was a great performance.

The point is that, moments like this are among the opera-goer's most cherished. If a singer does
"break character", it can leave the audience with the reminder: "Hey! They're human beings! Let's go back and see if they do something like that again."

Opera lovers, (and fellow critics): treasure those smiles, those glances, those cobbler's blows. They don't happen often.

Johannistag! Johannistag!

A Guide to Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.

Sachs and Eva, in a scene from Act II of Die Meistersinger.

Today is the solstice. In Germany, that's the signal to celebrate St. John's Day. Johnannistag. So it's time to write about...Meistersinger!

This is Wagner's lone comic effort, and his longest opera. The music, played without intermissions lasts about four and a half hours. With the necessary breaks for singers and orchestra, the piece usually lasts about six hours. The music is mostly diatonic, projecting major-key freude with only occasional forays into chromatic angst.

The story is Wagner's own. The central character is the cobbler/poet Hans Sachs, but the plot revolves around Walther von Stolzing, a German nobleman (junker) and his efforts to win the hand of Eva Pogner, daughter of the town goldsmith of Nuremberg. The right to marry her is the prize in a song-contest being held on St. John's Day. The catch--that contestants must be an accepted, accredited member of the town guild of Mastersingers.

After a crash course from David, (Sachs' apprentice) Walther ultimately receives help from the cobbler himself. Sachs is a widower, and a contender to marry the beautiful Eva, but he ultimately decides to let young love win the day. This famous character is based on a famous poet, who really was a shoemaker, part of the country's up-and-coming burgher class who did much to preserve the tradition of German music in the late medieval period.

Sachs shows Walther how to temper his artistic gifts into a musical form tha his listeners can digest and appreciate, creating a "Prize-Song" that is guaranteed to win at the contest. Along the way, both songwriters must contend with Beckmesser, the town tax collector who is also out to marry Eva. Beckmesser actually steals the prize-song in the third act, but mangles it in public performance. This gives Walther the opportunity to prove himself as a composer, and win Eva's hand in front of the whole town.

At the heart of Meistersinger is Wagner's music, which combines the composer's own melodic skill with a newfound interest in counterpoint, church modes, and comic scenes that verge on the burlesque. True, the opera has a heavy-handed sense of humor (Beckmesser's midnight serenade provokes an onstage beat-down and a town riot) but the libretto is also filled with brilliant moments that provide philosophic insight on the meaning of life.

Recording Recommendations:
There are at least a dozen Meistersingers in the catalogue. Though a number of them have all-star casts and famous conductors, many fall short of capturing the brilliance and effervescence of Wagner's version of Nuremberg. Here's three good ones:

Vienna Philharmonic cond. Hans Knappertsbusch (Decca, 1950/'51)
Sachs: Paul Schöffler
Walther: Gunther Treptow
Eva: Hilde Gueden
This is a mono recording made in a Vienna recording studio. It captures the unique quality that "Kna" brought to Wagner. the organ-like tone of the horns and the near-faultless sense of rhythm and when to let the music stretch and luxuriate in the lushest passages. Good cast, slightly past their prime, esp. Treptow. Out of print for many years, but now available from Naxos.

Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra cond. Rafael Kubelik (Arts Archives, 1967)
Sachs: Thomas Stewart
Walther: Sandor Konya
Eva: Gundula Janowitz
Made by the DG team (and then shelved for 25 years in favor of the flashy Eugen Jochum recording with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau as Sachs) this is the best studio Meistersinger ever recorded. Stewart, Konya and Janowitz are caught in ideal form. It has been issued three times and is currently in print on the small Arts Archives label. Go buy it.

Bavarian State Opera cond. Wolfgang Sawallisch (EMI, 1993)
Sachs: Bernd Weikl
Walther: Ben Heppner
Eva: Cheryl Studer
This was the recording that got me "into" this opera. Superbly conducted and paced with a fine North American pair of lovers in Studer and Heppner. He is caught in his early prime--she was starting her decline but is a potent, fresh Eva. Bernd Weikl is a good actor though his voice was starting to fade. Kurt Moll rocks the house as Veit Pogner. Now a mid-priced box from EMI.

CD Review: Wagner at the Met--Before Levine

The Sony Met Broadcasts of Die Walküre and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg

Birgit Nilsson as Brünnhilde.
From the singer's archives.

These bargain-priced recordings are live broadcasts from 1968 (Die Walküre) and 1972 (Die Meistersinger.) They date from the fertile period right before James Levine rose to power at the opera house, and feature first-class casts of Wagner singers, generally in peak form. These are CD issues of live broadcasts, and are an invaluable purchase for any Wagnerian who wants to hear how great these operas sound in front of an audience.


The first of these is Die Walküre, with a dream cast of Birgit Nilsson, Leonie Rysanek and Jon Vickers as Siegmund. Nilsson is in exceptional form here, ringing off clarion tones with seemingly impossible ease. She is matched by the late, great Thomas Stewart, an underrated bass-baritone who sang the role of Wotan on the Karajan recording of this opera.

The Wälsung twins Siegmund and Sieglinde feature the near-ideal pairing of Jon Vickers and Leonie Rysanek. The two singers share great onstage chemistry from the first lines, and the first act crackles with repressed Wagnerian sexual energy. The onion in their ointment is the Hunding of Karl Ridderbusch, another underrated singer. He brings black, resonant tone to the most unsympathetic role in the opera. Croatian conductor Berislav Klobučar leads a brisk, invigorating performance in the model of his teacher, Clemens Krauss.

Theo Adam as Hans Sachs.
Photo © Hamburg State Opera

Die Meistersinger was recorded four years later, with a strong cast anchored by Theo Adam's performance as Hans Sachs and James King's turn as Walther von Stolzing. Mr. Adam sounds completely at home in the live setting, indulging his sadomasochistic side at the expense of his apprentice David (Loren Driscoll) and singing with firm, dark tone. James King's clarion tenor is an ideal fit for Walther, and the Prize Song is sung with power and grace.


It also features the appearance of soprano Pilar Lorengar in a rare Wagnerian turn as Eva, Walther's love interest. Benno Kusche is a brusque, funny Beckmesser who involves the audience in his comic acts of artistic self-destruction, drawing them to laugh out loud in the second act.

This set was made two decades before the Met installed its titles system, so the presence of audience laughter testifies to the comic brilliance of Mr. Adam and Mr. Kusche. James Morris, who would take on the role of Sachs at the Met in the 1990s, appears here as Hans Schwarz, the stocking-weaver.

A recording like this one features the choristers tramping around Ye Olde Nuremberg in the third act, and there are problems balancing the onstage brass and percussion in the final scene. But the stage noises actually add to the feel of listening to a live performance, with the benefit of audience laughter in the second act. Thomas Schippers conducts a sprightly reading of the score and the Met orchestra and chorus are generally excellent.

Opera Within Opera...Within Opera?

The theater within a theater. Diana Damrau, Joyce DiDonato and Juan Diego Florez in Le Comte Ory.
Photo by Ken Howard © 2011 The Metropolitan Opera.

The Met's current run of Rossini's Le Comte Ory features a miniature opera theater (complete with stage-hands) in the middle of the big Met stage. The company is also reviving Richard Strauss' Capriccio at the moment, which tries to settle the case of Words v. Music in the genre. With that in mind, here's the Superconductor list of...

Five Operas...About Opera

Wagner: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg
The most famous (or infamous) response to musical criticism (not to mention the longest) Wagner's lone comedy is the story of a young knight whose radical ideas shake the staid burghers of Ye Olde Nuremberg. Meistersinger was also Wagner's way of getting back at acid-tongued Vienna critic Eduard Hanslick, who championed Brahms even as he decried Wagner's so-called "music of the future."

The story goes that at a private reading of the libretto, the critic was so enraged at the appearance of a character named "Hans Licht", that he stormed out of the room. That character's name was later changed to Sixtus Beckmesser.
Read more about Die Meistersinger with the Superconductor review of a 2008 DVD from Bayreuth.

Offenbach: Les contes d'Hoffmann
The titular character of Offenbach's final opera was himself an opera composer. Hoffmann opens at a tavern next door to an opera house which is currently staging Don Giovanni. In fact, the poet spins his three tales during the performance, which features his current obsession, the singer Stella. Two of those stories involve singing: the tale of the doll Olympia (whose "Les oiseaux" never fails to bring down the house) and the doomed opera singer Antonia, who expires onstage after her final high C.
Read the Superconductor review of the Met's September performance of Les contes d'Hoffmann.

Puccini: Tosca
The title character of Puccini's drama is an opera singer. In the second act, she fulfills a professional obligation, singing a cantata underneath Scarpia's offices in the Palazzo Varnese. Tosca is enjoying a revival at the Met right now, which makes the big opera house even more "meta."
Read the Superconductor review of this season's revival of Tosca.

Strauss: Ariadne auf Naxos
Fer cryin' out loud, the Prologue of Richard Strauss' opera opens backstage at an opera company, in a private theater in the home of "the Richest Man in Vienna." The harried Composer is a prominent character, along with the tenor, the prima donna, and the Dancing Master. The second half is the opera itself, replete with comic interruptions.
Read the Superconductor review of last year's Ariadne auf Naxos

Pfitzner: Palestrina
Hans Pfitzner's opera is set during the Council of Trent, and is about the crisis faced by a composer under pressure from the Catholic Church to produce music that will (theoretically) save the idea of church music and eventually pave the way for Pfitzner to write an opera called...Palestrina. You get the idea. The best moments of Pfitzner's opera come when a choir of angels descends and inspires Palestrina to get to work. It's at the end of the first act.
Read the Superconductor review of Palestrina, a 2009 DVD version made in Munich.

DVD Review: Die Meistersinger: Deconstructed

Katherina Wagner takes a hammer to the Bayreuth legacy.

by Paul J. Pelkonen

The Bayreuth Festival's last three productions of Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg have been staid, by-the-numbers affairs, directed by the composer's grandson, Wolfgang Wagner. However, the current production, staged by Katherina Wagner, the new co-director of the festival (and Wolfgang's daughter) offers a bold approach. This Meistersinger (filmed on July 27, 2008) cuts to the opera's core, and questions the artist's role in society.

(In other words, if you draw the line at regietheater, don't read further.)

DVD Review: Die Meistersinger von Deutsches Oper Berlin

Mention Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg to the casual opera-goer and you will either get a smile of appreciation or a shudder of dread. DMvN is Wagner's longest opera, and its score is written in such a way that the conductor cannott speed it up or slow it down. It always clocks in at four and a half hours, and that's without intermissions. (Then again, TV viewers spend even more time watching American Idol or The X Factor!) The plot of Meistersinger is similar to those shows: a singing contest where the prize is the hand of the lovely Eva. And in the Simon Cowell role: Hans Sachs, a real-life cobbler and composer who is one of the most beloved characters in German opera.

Filmed in 1995 at the Deutsches Oper Berlin, this two-DVD set is a reliable introduction to this opera. Meistersinger is a simple comedy with a lot of complex comic business, and here it is well-suited to the particular directing skills of Götz Friederich. Friedrich adds a lot of original ideas that work (Beckmesser trashes Sachs' cobbler's bench) and a few that don't (the inexplicable jugglers and tumblers cluttering up the Festival Meadow scene at the end of the opera.) Peter Sykora's spare set centers around a circular window with a curving, miniature depiction of Old Nuremberg set within its frame. Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos conducts a solid, workmanlike performance, punching up the four-square diatonic rhythms of the score.

Wolfgang Brendel gives the legendary cobbler a fresh dose of energy and comic vigor. His relationship with Beckmesser (the wonderfully insufferable Eike-Wilm Schulte) is one of the evening's comic highlight. (The best moment: a last-minute reconciliation between the two rivals that ends the opera on a triumphant, comic note.) Decked out in a shabby hat, Brylcreemed hair and pencil mustache, Schulte is the picture of pomposity. This vaudevillian approach to the town clerk is thankfully devoid of the unfortunate clichés that have dogged this character in the past.

As the young lovers Walther and Eva, tenor Gösta Winbergh and soprano Eva Johannsson look better than they sound. Johannson's voice is a bit too large for her namesake, and she over-powers the more lyrical moments. Winbergh has a fine, bright tenor voice which lacks the honey that could seduce an entire town with his lyric poetry. He delivers a high, bright "Fanget An!" and a solid Prize Song, and has good onstage chemistry with Johansson. However, the finest tenor performance on this DVD is Uwe Peper as David, who transforms the long Act I list of "tones" into a comic tour de force.

CD Review: The Goodall Mastersingers

"Open The Shrine! "

Yes, we're back after a holiday absence. Welcome to the 2009 edition of the Superconductor blog-your source for the best classical music coverage that I can find time to write about.

I know things have been dead on this page for a little while--I think every serious writer goes through "down" periods of lesser creativity where you are grinding out words but, in the words of Roger Waters, "running over the same old ground." Rather than do that (and bore the audience), I sometimes take a break from blogging. Break's over. Back to work!



I'd like to open up this year's 'Conductor (yes, it's 2009, we are closing out our second year!) by writing about one of my favorite Wagner recordings. Yeah. There's a shock. I write a lot about Wagner because I happen to KNOW a lot about it--recordings, trivia, performances and those ten (yes, it's really thirteen but the canon is ten operas) magnificent mammoth musical edifices, which never cease to amaze, fascinate and sometimes stupify audiences into submission. There's lots of interesting stuff to write about, so let's get to it shall we?

This is the first-ever Chandos issue of The Mastersingers of Nuremberg, a live radio recording made in 1968 at the Sadler Wells company, and, like everything else put out by that company, sung in English. 

This is from the days long before supertitle systems. Writers would make a "singing translation", one that had the same meter and rhythm as the original words of the libretto. Wagner, with his distinctive pseudo-high-German stabreim was particularly susceptible to this practice.

Like most Goodall recordings (the British conductor also preserved his English-language Ring and a German-language Parsifal recorded in Wales, the tempos are incredibly slow, even glacial. It's ponderous, carefully thought out music making that lumbers along and demands the utmost from players forced to slow and stretch notes to fit the conductor's design. However, slow conducting can often reveal some interesting sub-textures of the musical fabric of a piece, underthemes and buried motifs that may only be apparent through perusal of a full score. 

The cast includes an excellent Alberto Remedios (who would go on to record both Siegmund and Siegfried in the Goodall Ring) and Norman Bailey, whose superb Hans Sachs is better here than on the somewhat lead-footed Solti recording from the 1970s. Yes, it's for the completist, and yes the translation of the libretto is often awkward, but this is a fascinating Meister...excuse me, Mastersingers, making a welcome arrival in the catalogue after languishing in a British vault for forty years.

DVD Review: Two Meistersingers from Bayreuth

Superconductor reviews two classic Wagner reissues. 
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Pensive: Bernd Weikl as Sachs. © 1982 Bayreuth Festival

Wolfgang Wagner, grandson of Richard Wagner, has run the Bayreuth Festspielhaus (the opera theater in Germany designed and built by his grandfather exclusively for staging Wagner operas) for 57 years. In that time, he has had his greatest successes with stagings of Die Meistersinger, Wagner's six hour comic opera that is also a meditation on life, music, and the role of the artist. Two of these productions have been recently released on DVD by Deutsche Grammophon.