CD REVIEW: Franz Schubert — SCHWANENGESANG, D.957 (Hermann Prey, baritone; DECCA 480 8171 and James Rutherford, baritone; BIS Records BIS-2180)

FRANZ SCHUBERT (1797 – 1828): Schwanengesang, D.957— [1] with Goethe Lieder by Schubert and Lieder by Richard Strauss (1864 – 1949); Hermann Prey, baritone; Walter Klien, piano (Schwanengesang); Karl Engel, piano (Goethe and Strauss Lieder) [Recorded in Sofiensaal, Vienna, Austria, 13 – 15 April 1963 (Schwanengesang) and DECCA Studios, West Hampstead, London, UK, 4 – 7 June 1963 (Strauss Lieder) and 14 – 18 February 1964 (Goethe Lieder); DECCA 480 8171; 1 CD, 78:52; Available from Amazon (USA – mp3 only), jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers] and [2] with four miscellaneous Schubert Lieder; James Rutherford, baritone; Eugene Asti, piano [Recorded in Potton Hall, Saxmundham, Suffolk, UK, in January 2015; BIS Records BIS-2180; 1 SACD, 69:48; Available from ClassicsOnlineHD, Amazon (USA), jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

At least since the inceptions of artistic endeavors and observers’ responses to them, there has been an insatiable interest, sometimes well-intentioned and at other times unjustifiably perverse, in perusing, contemplating, and analyzing artists’ final works. Since the advent of Freudian psychology, this interest has been intensified into an often misguided desire to interpret artists’ last creations as symbolism-laden, portentous metaphysical statements about life, death, and the people and places encountered along the way. It is beyond dispute that the death of Franz Schubert on 19 November 1828, before he reached his thirty-second birthday, was a blow to music of no less impact than the similarly early demises of Mozart, Mendelssohn, Bellini, and Chopin, but what stories do his last compositions tell? A generation ago, it might have been suggested that, except as a composer of Lieder, Schubert’s youthful promise was never fully realized: his chamber music, liturgical works, and writing for piano remained in the shadows of Beethoven and Haydn, his operas were unsuccessful, and his most ambitious undertaking as a symphonist was left unfinished. These shortsighted assessments now mostly abandoned, Schubert is recognized as the genius that his music confirms that he was. With this recognition inevitably comes the impetus to scrutinize the collection of the late Lieder published in 1829 as Schwanengesang (D.957) for the cryptic confidences of an artist aware of his own imminent extinction. In a sense, Schubert is as apt a prototype for the Artist as Melancholic Loner paradigm as Tchaikovsky: the sentimental arcs of the Austrian’s earlier, bonafide Lieder cycles, Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise, give modern psychoanalysts sufficient fodder for tomes of Traumdeutung. Settings of texts by Heinrich Heine, Ludwig Rellstab, and Johann Gabriel Seidl rather than a single poet’s verses as was the case in Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise, the Lieder that comprise Schwanengesang were almost certainly not intended to constitute a cycle in the traditional manner, instead likely falling victim to a publisher’s action that was equal parts simple convenience and Romanticized marketing ploy. Hearing these songs performed by baritones of different generations and nationalities, Hermann Prey on DECCA and James Rutherford on BIS, offers fascinating insights into the complex but often over-complicated microcosms of Schwanengesang. Where these very different performances, recorded a half-century apart, intersect is in their participants’ commendable refusals to indulge in anachronistic emotional dissection of Schubert’s music; there and in the joy of hearing the composer’s songs sung so capably and meaningfully. Put down your pens, armchair psychologists, and merely listen for a while!

Born in Berlin in 1929, Prey was the rare singer who was from the start of his career a Lieder interpreter of the first order. As voice aficionados opine, there are great natural instruments and great singers, but few are the great artists whose work encompasses both important voices and the skills to use them properly. Portraying the eponymous protagonist of Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia in the opera house, performing Brahms’s Ein Deutsches Requiem on the concert stage, or singing Lieder in the recital hall, Prey was a great artist in whose singing voice and technique achieved equal levels of reliable excellence. Making its first appearance on compact disc in DECCA/Universal’s Most Wanted Recitals! series, Prey’s 1963 reading of Schwanengesang, recorded in Vienna’s storied Sofiensaal, is one of the most worthy recipients of Víctor Suzán Reed’s near-miraculous remastering. Among many studio recordings, including performances of Schwanengesang accompanied by Philippe Bianconi on Denon, Leonard Hokanson on Deutsche Grammophon, and Gerald Moore on Philips, none comes closer to faithfully reproducing on disc the rounded beauty and haunting overtones of Prey’s voice as it sounded in the theatre. [I heard him as Der Musiklehrer in Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos near the end of his career, when, past the age of sixty, he mastered every note and word of the part with an ease that singers half his age—myself included—should have envied.] In such an aural setting, the many virtues and the few vices of this disc are stunningly apparent.

Without strong-arming the music in a conscious effort to metamorphose the songs into a younger sibling for Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise, Prey and pianist Walter Klien, a renowned interpreter of Schubert’s piano music, build a Schwanengesang with a cumulative narrative that is considerably more effectively linear—or cyclical, as it were—than many readings that force the issue manage to engender. Recorded here in his mid-thirties, it is not surprising that Prey was on superb vocal form. Though he vocalizes splendidly, this is noticeably a young man’s Schwanengesang, in the course of which somber emotions, presumably foreign to a man in the early prime of his life, sometimes prompt over-singing. Prey was too sensitive and sensible an artist to wholly abandon musicality, but there are passages in which he seems to be purposefully emulating singers with larger voices. This introduces a suggestion that Prey, not yet having fully discerned how to be Prey, was fashioning his performance after the model of a singer like Hans Hotter. In the fourteen canonical Lieder of Schwanengesang [Prey and Klien embrace tradition by closing with ‘Die Taubenpost’ but exclude ‘Herbst,’ adopted by Rutherford and Asti as a part of the de facto cycle], Klien’s straightforward pianism, animated and subtly nuanced, provides Prey with generally beneficial support. The very different tests of the first three songs of Schwanengesang, ‘Liebesbotschaft,’ ‘Kriegers Ahnung,’ and ‘Frühlingssehnsucht,’ are negotiated with boundless vocal fortitude, the tremendous quality of Prey’s voice immediately apparent. For those acquainted with the baritone’s later work, especially his subsequent recordings of Schwanengesang, the too-emphatic approach, disjointed phrasing, and straying intonation that intrude into Prey’s singing in these songs may be surprising, but these undoubtedly are the follies of youth, not of indifferent artistry. Prey voices the familiar ‘Ständchen’ elegantly, and the sinewy sturdiness of the voice is an obvious strength in ‘Aufenthalt,’ here sung with greater power than poetry. There are glimpses of vulnerability in his account of ‘In der Ferne,’ the words sagaciously pointed. The performances of both ‘Abschied’ and ‘Der Atlas’ are characterized by firm, resonant singing that sporadically overwhelms the intricacies of Schubert’s vocal lines.

The Prey familiar from his later, probing performances of Winterreise emerges in his singing of ‘Ihr Bild.’ Here, the true artist’s verbal acuity and keen intelligence outweigh the young singer’s inclination to focus primarily on vocalizing impressively. In ‘Das Fischermädchen,’ too, Prey adheres to a dedication to extracting meaning from the manner in which Schubert manipulated text within the cadences of his music. Very different musically and dramatically, ‘Die Stadt’ and ‘Am Meer’ are sung with intensity that highlights the kinship between the songs. The same can be said of Prey’s handling of ‘Der Doppelgänger’ and ‘Die Taubenpost.’ The first of these, one of Schubert’s most unnervingly sublime inspirations, receives from Prey a performance of startling vehemence, the narrator’s confusion transformed into the singer’s vivid discontent. For this singer, ‘Die Taubenpost’ is less dismaying than disquieting, the song’s sentiments viewed through the prism of a young man’s worldview rather than that of a weary wanderer. Boldly, intermittently bruisingly sung, this Schwanengesang is not a concerted leave-taking but an extended act of resistance.

Slightly less than a year after recording Schwanengesang in Vienna, Prey joined with pianist Karl Engel in London to record several of Schubert’s Lieder with texts by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The passing of a year did not measurably alter the young baritone’s gifts as a Lieder interpreter, but the ruddy health of the voice is perhaps even more astonishing in his singing of these seven songs than in the previous year’s Schwanengesang. Prey’s singing of ‘Heidenröslein’ (D.257), ‘An die Entfernte’ (D.765), and ‘Rastlose Liebe’ (D.138) radiates confidence and imagination, thereafter perpetuated but cleverly adapted to the differing requirements of ‘Erster Verlust’ (D.226) and ‘An Schwager Kronos’ (D.369). Listeners in search of examples of the verbal and musical acumen that made Prey one of the most effective Papagenos in the two-century performance history of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte can find a pair of them in ‘Schäfers Klagelied’ (D.121) and ‘Willkommen und Abschied’ (D.767) on this disc.

Committed to vinyl in London in 1963, with Engel at the keyboard, the three Lieder by Richard Strauss on this disc also here make their CD début, and they are especially welcome, as even now performances of Strauss Lieder by lower voices are less frequent than the continuing popularity and artistic merit of Strauss’s song literature dictate that they should be. Prey sings ‘Ich trage meine Minne’ (Op. 32, No. 1) commandingly, basking in the composer’s late-Romantic idiom. ‘Befreit’ (Op. 39, No. 4), one of Strauss’s most familiar songs and a mainstay of virtually every soprano’s recital repertory, is imaginatively phrased by the baritone, the challenging range of the vocal line troubling him little. Prey’s singing of the spirited ‘Bruder Liederlich’ (Op. 41b, No. 4) has the broad good humor and playfulness of an university glee club’s singing of bawdy madrigals. Singing early or late Schubert or Strauss, this artist offers performances in which even their imperfections captivate. That Prey was one of the most important Lieder singers of the Twentieth Century can hardly be questioned, but it is wonderful to have this empirical verification of the legitimacy of his lionization.

Since taking the top prize in Seattle Opera’s first International Wagner Competition in 2006, the Norwich-born Rutherford has expanded his Wagnerian credentials with acclaimed portrayals of Kurwenal in Tristan und Isolde, Hans Sachs in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, and, most recently, Wotan in Der Ring des Nibelungen. Like Prey, whose Metropolitan Opera début was in the lighter Wagner rôle of Wolfram in Tannhäuser in 1960 and whose Beckmesser in Die Meistersinger was a much-loved component of MET and Bayreuth productions, the British baritone is as comfortable in recital as in opera and concert. Also like Prey, he and his Schwanengesang pianist, Eugene Asti, bring to their musical partnership credentials that qualify them individually and jointly as proven dynamos of Lieder repertory, this ideally-produced BIS recording celebrating fifteen years of collaboration on Schubert Lieder. Having recorded Schubert’s pseudo-cycle when he was nearly a decade older than Prey was at the time of the DECCA recording, Rutherford brings to his performance a greater depth of pessimism, the narrative voice that emerges from his energetic but eloquent interactions with Asti’s accompaniment weighted and worn by unfulfilled longing. Rutherford’s voice is heavier and darker than Prey’s, but his is the lighter Schwanengesang, one in which events occur and are faced rather than confronted and defied. The performance of the opening ‘Liebesbotschaft’ sets the tone for the cycle as a whole: the pianist’s crystalline execution of rhythmic figurations enhances the singer’s realizations of Schubert’s remarkably intuitive amalgamations of words and music. Ironically, Rutherford, with a more robust timbre than Prey had at his disposal, delves further into the delicate recesses of the music, the size of the voice only rarely impeding his examination of small details of the songs. He sings ‘Kriegers Ahnung’ sonorously, the soul of Wotan flickering to life in the Lied’s expressive gravity. ‘Frühlingssehnsucht’ and ‘Ständchen’ are molded by baritone and pianist with musical and emotional elasticity, Rutherford wielding a degree of flexibility admirable for a singer of his Fach. The bristling force of this pair’s traversal of ‘Aufenthalt’ never damages the song’s underlying gentleness. As it is performed here, the inclusion of ‘Herbst’ (D.945) is an organic extension of the spiritual voyage without which Schwanengesang seems reduced. Rutherford mines the disparities between ‘In der Ferne’ and ‘Abschied’ for their psychological consequence and refines this raw ore into a brilliant ingot of priceless beauty. Though the voice is occasionally unwieldy and unfocused, virtually unavoidable aspects of scaling a larger voice to the dimensions of ‘smaller’ music, Rutherford’s pitch is laudably certain.

Propelled by Asti’s resilient playing, this is a performance of ‘Der Atlas’ in which the singer sounds as though bearing the weight of the world upon his shoulders should be but a minor burden. The pain of ‘Ihr Bild’ emanates from the grim colorations of Rutherford’s tones without upsetting the balance of his vocal registers. By uniformly transposing the Lieder that comprise Schwanengesang down by a minor third, Rutherford and Asti preserve the relationships among the songs’ keys as originally conceived by Schubert, whether or not they were composed with any conscious associations. This strategy sometimes makes the tessitura of Schwanengesang more challenging for the baritone than it could otherwise be, but Rutherford copes heroically. His voicing of ‘Das Fischermädchen’ is distinguished by glimmers of optimism that ripple along the surface of the line. The feelings that flood the baritone’s voice in ‘Die Stadt’ and ‘Am Meer’ are explored but not exaggerated. Whereas Prey’s interpretation of ‘Der Doppelgänger’ was shaped by an almost violent fervor, the urgency of Rutherford’s reading is drawn from a crushingly inward recognition of failure. ‘Die Taubenpost’ is likely the last Lied that Schubert completed, and it is here performed with a touching sense of finality. Beyond its superlative musical qualities, this disc makes one of the most convincing cases yet recorded for regarding and performing Schwanengesang as a cycle, the seeds of complementary ideas blossoming in the warmth of Rutherford’s and Asti’s nurturing.

Rutherford and Asti supplement their Schwanengesang with performances of four paragons from Schubert’s extensive Lieder catalogue. The baritone works earnestly to evince a measure of freshness in the familiar ‘Die Forelle’ (D.550), and his diaphanous management of the song’s distinctive rhythms is delightful. Asti’s playing infuses ‘Auf der Bruck’ (D.853) and ‘Gruppe aus dem Tartarus’ (D.583) with musical integrity that is anything but common, and Rutherford’s vocalism soars on the zephyr of his accompanist’s exertions. ‘An die Musik’ (D.547) is an ideal summation of the prevailing sensibilities of this disc: reveling in their collaboration, Rutherford and Asti deliver a grand ode to Schubert’s music.

Those who look to Schwanengesang for answers about what made Schubert’s genius unique often ask the wrong questions. Fascinating as facets of the creative process invariably are, the circumstances that engendered the composition of the Lieder later assembled and published as Schwanengesang are surely less important that the songs themselves. Is a presentiment of death at the heart of the songs? Was Schwanengesang, in part or in whole, Schubert’s deliberate farewell to the Art of Song? Though they are products of very different eras in the history of recorded Classical Music, these performances of Schwanengesang concentrate not on ephemeral concerns but on tangible musical standards. Their toils separated by fifty-two years, Hermann Prey and James Rutherford exhibit why Schubert’s swan song still sings so magically to those ears willing to hear it on its own terms.

RECORDING OF THE MONTH / May 2016: Francesco Cavalli — SOSPIRI D’AMORE (Giulia Semenzato, soprano; Raffaele Pe, countertenor; Glossa GCD 920940)

PIER FRANCESCO CAVALLI (1602 – 1676): Sospiri d’amore – Venetian Opera Duets and Arias, 1644 – 1666—Giulia Semenzato, soprano; Raffaele Pe, countertenor; La Venexiana; Claudio Cavina, conductor [Recorded in Teatro alle Vigne, Lodi, Italy, in December 2015; Glossa GCD 920940; 1 CD, 60:07; Available from Glossa, ClassicsOnlineHD, jpc (Germany), and major music retailers]

Collaborations among artists are the most structurally substantial cornerstones upon which Classical Music is built. Whether contributing to the creation or the performance of music, artistic relationships define the pasts, presents, and futures of all genres of Classical Music, the exchanges of ideas spurred by the creative impulses producing both great masterpieces of Western music and legendary performances of them. Händel and Senesino, Mozart and Da Ponte, Rossini and Colbran, Bellini and Romani, and Verdi and Boito are the sorts of artistic unions that have yielded history-altering works, but no less vital to the development of musical traditions are the collaborations among fellow musicians. As the Bible suggests and Abraham Lincoln reminded, houses divided against themselves cannot stand: from a musical perspective, how long can any musical ensemble whose members do not have at least a respectful rapport endure? United in celebration of the musical genius of Pier Francesco Cavalli, soprano Giulia Semenzato and countertenor Raffaele Pe construct during the sixty minutes of Sospiri d’amore an edifice as gratifyingly solid as the still-strong marvels of ancient Rome. The combatants in this musical Colosseo, situated by Glossa’s engineering in a ingratiatingly natural acoustic, are more delicate than Rome’s legendary gladiators and fearsome beasts, but opening one’s ears and heart to their contests reveals that the musical weapons that they wield are just as penetrating as polished blades and gnashing teeth.

Under the direction of Claudio Cavina, himself a much-admired altus, the musicians of La Venexiana fully embrace the spirit of collaboration that exists between Semenzato and Pe. Though details of his career are more documented than those of many of his contemporaries, Cavalli’s musical world nonetheless remains enigmatic in some crucial ways. Born in the commune of Crema in the Italian region of Lombardia on 14 February 1602, Cavalli received from Jacopo Peri, Claudio Monteverdi, and a handful of other, less-familiar innovators the first fruits of a concerted effort at achieving through song a renaissance of stylized Hellenic drama. From these fruits, Cavalli extracted an essence that was distilled into opera in the form in which it passed through the hands of guardians like Agostino Steffani into the company of geniuses of the ilk of Georg Friedrich Händel and thus into every subsequent generation of composers, performers, and observers. Cavalli is no less significant to the development of opera than Monteverdi, Händel, Gluck, Mozart, Verdi, and Wagner; more so, in fact, for without Cavalli’s clear differentiations of recitatives, ariosos, arias, and ensembles, the roads to Tamerlano, Così fan tutte, Falstaff, and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg would have been considerably more difficult to navigate. Questions about instrumentation and the precise constitution of the continuo in Cavalli’s operas likely will never be answered with certainty or finality, but the solutions proposed on this disc by La Venexiana’s players—Efix Puleo and Daniela Godio on violin, Luca Moretti on viola, Antonio Papetti on cello, Alberto Lo Gatto on violone, Chiara Granata on triple harp, Gabriele Palomba and Diego Cantalupi on theorbo, and Luca Oberti on harpsichord—compellingly evoke the grandeur of Cavalli’s mature style whilst also ideally preserving the emotional intimacy of his finest music. Cavina’s alert, wonderfully ‘vocal’ pacing and the entrancing battery of sounds produced by the musicians combine in each selection—each of the cleverly-contrasted but complementary sighs, that is—on Sospiri d’amore to create an atmosphere in which the singers are not forced to resort to over-emoting in order to convey the nuances of the text to the listener. Cavalli’s voice here emerges as clearly as those of his modern-day interpreters, and he is sounding astonishingly fresh and modern these 340 years after his earthly voice fell silent.

Establishing himself as a presence as vital to Glossa’s catalogue of recordings of vocal music as Maria Callas and Renata Tebaldi were to the efforts of EMI/Angel and DECCA/London in the 1950s, Raffaele Pe follows his superb performance as the Evangelista on Glossa’s recording of Gaetano Veneziano’s Passione secondo Giovanni [reviewed here] with passionate, poignant accounts of music by Cavalli on Sospiri d’amore. From the first bar of ‘Corone ed honori’ from the 1653 opera Il Ciro, Pe’s wholly organic affinity for this repertory is apparent. Admirably sure of intonation throughout the full range of his music on this disc, from ruby-hued tones in chest resonance to refulgently full-throated falsetto, Pe’s confident handling of Cavalli’s vocal lines yields exquisite results, the immediacy of his singing revealing to the modern listener the communicative power that exerted such a profound influence both on Cavalli’s contemporaries and on future generations of composers. Similarly, ‘Io misero fui Rege’ from Scipione Affricano (1664) receives from Pe a performance of unstinting commitment to music and text, the singer’s exemplary diction, reliant upon clear but unexaggerated elocution of vowels, highlighting the skill with which Cavalli replicated the natural cadences of speech. Whether in the opera house, on the concert stage, or in the recording studio, Pe is an artist who sings to rather than at the listener, transforming every alert observer of a performance into a participant, and the textual clarity, emotional directness, and tonal beauty with which he sings Cavalli’s music on this disc marginalizes the distance between the Seventeenth and Twenty-First Centuries. Pe here reminds the listener that singers whose work equates period-appropriate performance standards with pedantry disserve themselves, composers, poets, and audiences.

Soprano Giulia Semenzato proves in her singing of three of Cavalli’s most inspired arias to be an interpreter of the composer’s music fully worthy of partnering Pe. In her traversals of the markedly different ‘Lassa, che fò’ and ‘Vanne intrepido o mio bene’ from the too-seldom-performed Statira, principessa di Persia (1656—a full century before the birth of Mozart, it is worth noting, despite the rapid pace at which Cavalli’s vocal writing propels opera out of the Seventeenth Century and into the Eighteenth), Semenzato’s phrasing is as well-considered as her tones are focused and confidently projected. The first of the two numbers from Statira exemplifies the skill with which Cavalli could instigate a psychological avalanche without burying a character beneath blizzards of unnecessary notes and emotive wailing. Like her countertenor colleague, Semenzato’s singing exudes comfort with the idiom, and the soprano meets no challenges that overextend her resources. As sung by Semenzato, ‘Alpi gelate’ from Pompeo Magno (1666) is as potent as a soliloquy by any of Shakespeare’s great heroines, the vocal line scaling extraordinary heights of expression. With engagements at many of Europe’s leading opera houses, including La Scala, to her credit, the soprano is a musical storyteller whose artistry belies her youth. Like Pe’s singing, her way with Cavalli’s music illustrates her flair for enlivening music that many singers foolishly dismiss as antiquated.

Pe’s and Semenzato’s accounts of their arias are wonderful, but the duets are the lifeblood of Sospiri d’amore. Even expert singers with seemingly compatible sensibilities do not always prove to be well-matched duet partners. No concerns about the cooperation between Semenzato and Pe and the symbiosis that they achieve deter from enjoyment of this disc. The subtle but animated mingling of voices in ‘O luci belle’ from Eritrea (1652) at once discloses the communicative impact that this duo’s endeavors are capable of deploying. The singers’ contrasted timbres facilitate exploration of the dramatic impetus at the heart of each duet, not least in ‘Qui cadè al tuo piè’ from Orimonte (1650), in which the interaction between the voices propels both thematic development and deepening feelings. Semenzato and Pe create fully human characters, not dulcet-voiced ciphers.

It was as Delio in Spoleto Festival USA’s 2015 modern première production of Cavalli’s 1652 score Veremonda, l’amazzone di Aragona that Pe confirmed his stature as one of the fledgling millennium’s most thoughtful and accomplished young countertenors, his portrayal of the libidinous young man combining sensitive singing of star quality with heroic machismo—frequently frustrated, albeit—in the best tradition of Mario del Monaco and Franco Corelli. Melding their voices like sunlight and stained glass, he and Semenzato conjure in the studio much of the magic in their singing of ‘Né meste più’ that he and soprano Francesca Lombardi Mazzulli created upon the Charleston stage. Cavalli’s unsurpassed gift for enveloping even inimical sentiments in music of unmistakable sensuality elevates ‘L’aspetto feroce’ from Muzio Scevola (1665) and ‘D’Amor non si quereli’ from Ormindo (1644) into the company of the celebrated ‘Pur ti miro, pur ti godo’ in Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea, the text and, less certainly, the music of which are now commonly attributed to a 1641 Bologna staging of Benedetto Ferrari’s Il pastor regio. [The operatic Poppea having been first crowned in 1643, some scholars theorize that the opera’s closing duet was composed by Cavalli, but no concrete evidence to substantiate (or refute) this has thus far been discovered.] Certainly, Semenzato and Pe sing both numbers with the flexibility, technical accomplishment, and unabashed opulence that Monteverdi’s—or, in this context, Ferrari’s—Poppea and Nerone demand.

The dialogue for Clori and Lidio from L’Egisto (1643), ‘Hor che l’Aurora,’ is a splendid example of a form that Cavalli perfected, fusing the allegorical discourses among archetypes of the sort found more than a half-century later in Händel’s Il trionfo del tempo e del disinganno with starkly real circumstances of people of flesh and blood. The gap separating Cavalli’s Clori and Lidio from Mozart’s Pamina and Tamino, Beethoven’s Leonore and Florestan, Verdi’s Aida and Radamès, Wagner’s Brünnhilde and Siegfried, and Puccini’s Minnie and Johnson is startlingly narrow, the later composers having crafted their own individual styles of giving life to characters’ high-stakes conversations from the raw materials of Cavalli’s dialogues. Semenzato and Pe enact the dialogue for Clori and Lidio with intelligently-phrased intensity that uncannily preserves and transcends the formality of the music’s construction. Their singing of ‘Io chiudo nel core’ from Il rapimento di Elena (1659) indeed seems to emanate directly from the hearts of both artists, the concentrated passion of their singing surpassed only by its unspoiled beauty. The slightly mysterious aura of Ormindo’s ‘Sì, sì, che questa notte’ is an ideal setting for Semenzato’s and Pe’s understated brilliance: using Cavalli’s pointed melodic lines as their canvas, they spread the colors of their voices over a ravishing musical panorama of the jagged, jarring topography of humanity.

In today’s complicated, sometimes disheartening Classical recording industry, a disc’s success often depends upon its ability to justify its existence. In these performances by Giulia Semenzato and Raffaele Pe, any piece on Sospiri d’amore can be cited as an irrefutable raison d’être for this absorbing disc, but the prevailing triumph of Sospiri d’amore is the wondrous, often deeply moving synergy among singers, musicians, and music that, owing to performances of this quality, is as alive today as when it was first performed more than three centuries ago.

PERSONAL PERSPECTIVES: The finest Art — Remembering a Lady whose stage was family, Daisy Belle Bradley Newsome (1920 – 2016)

Daisy Belle Bradley Newsome
3 November 1920 – 1 May 2016

My grandmother was not a world-renowned singer, a prima ballerina, or a celebrated painter, but there is no question that Daisy Belle Bradley Newsome was a great artist. In the rôles of daughter, sister, wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, aunt, and friend, her virtuosity was remarkable, as unforgettable in its way as Callas’s Norma and Fonteyn’s Giselle. She spoke her mind and expressed her opinions, but she loved and accepted unconditionally, and she personified the qualities that lend the heroines of Mozart, the protagonists of Austen, and the sentiments of Dickinson their enduring value and appeal.

In an age in which individuality is prized far above loyalty, even after fifteen years of widowhood she proudly signed herself as Mrs. Robert Newsome, a tribute to the husband of sixty-three years whose memory she cherished. She always carried a purse not as a vehicle for makeup or a mobile phone but because someone might need a Kleenex or a comb—or food might need to be smuggled out of a restaurant. She knew her part in every production, whether a son’s wedding or grocery shopping, and played it with grace and contentment that rooted her character not in complacency but in unwavering faith and commitment to family.

It was in her mastery of the art of living fully but humbly that my grandmother excelled most astoundingly. Wherever she resided, she never pretended to be anything but a child of rural Virginia who was said to have been named after her beloved Daddy’s favorite cow. Her siblings called her Belle, and that is what she was: a true Southern belle of the kind now irreversibly endangered, a lady who wore hats and gloves to church and always knew what to say and when and how to say it. I am immeasurably blessed to have had in my life four grandparents who were afraid of neither living nor dying, their honor in the former nobly transitioned into uncompromised dignity in the latter.

In the nine-and-a-half decades of her life, my grandmother likely never attended the opera or ballet or bought a recording of a symphony or string quartet, but she lived what so many artists can only feign, making music, motion, and beauty of everyday things too simple to be taught and too monumental to be imitated.

IN MEMORIAM: Internationally-acclaimed countertenor BRIAN ASAWA, 1966 – 2016

BRIAN ASAWA

1 October 1966 – 18 April 2016

There is no aspect of writing about the Performing Arts that I find more difficult than memorializing artists of importance to me, especially when I am fortunate enough to value them as much for their humanity off the stage as for their musical accomplishments. The news of the passing of renowned countertenor Brian Asawa at the age of forty-nine is therefore as unnerving as it was unexpected. One of the most gifted singers in his Fach whose passion for furthering the art of countertenor singing and nurturing the burgeoning careers of young artists recently led him into the arena of artist management, Asawa’s vocalism was virtually inseparable from his personality. To hear him sing was to know his soul, and to know his soul was to cherish his artistry, whether or not countertenors occupy a place of affection in one’s own heart.

In 1991, Asawa was the first countertenor to garner an Adler Fellowship to San Francisco Opera’s prestigious Merola Opera Program and to win the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions. His fellow Merola participants in 1991 included artists of the calibre of Robert Breault, William Burden, Steven Condy, Earle Patriarco, and Daniel Sumegi, and he shared the laurels in the MET National Council Auditions with such luminaries as Elizabeth Futral, Paul Groves, and Kenneth Tarver. Following triumphant débuts with San Francisco Opera and the Mozart Bicentennial celebration at Lincoln Center, he received a career grant from the Richard Tucker Music Foundation and became the first countertenor to take the top prize in Plácido Domingo’s Operalia competition. Asawa made his formal MET début on 18 February 1994, providing the silvery Voice of Apollo in Benjamin Britten’s Death in Venice. The following year, he recorded a performance of the rôle of Oberon in Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream under Sir Colin Davis’s baton that has never been surpassed. Asawa returned to the MET in 1999 and 2000 for eight performances of Tolomeo in Händel’s Giulio Cesare.

In the course of his career, Asawa appeared in many of the world’s greatest opera houses, carving new paths along the trail blazed by Alfred Deller and Russell Oberlin, but the cavernous spaces of opera houses were too impersonal for the poetic intimacy of his artistry. Espousing repertory spanning almost half a millennium, ranging from the typical countertenor territory of Elizabethan lute songs to Ned Rorem’s Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century art songs, Asawa’s recordings expanded the horizons of what countertenor voices can do. In addition to his Oberon on the Philips label, his Farnace in the DECCA recording of Mozart’s Mitridate, re di Ponto is a performance of astonishing musical and histrionic power, one in which he sometimes outshone the high-wattage singing of Cecilia Bartoli and Natalie Dessay.

Asawa could be prickly, but the affection that his colleagues have for him is evidence of the inexhaustible commitment that he had for whatever task he undertook. In his funeral oration for Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Grillparzer wrote that until the moment of his death the great composer ‘preserved a human heart for all men, a father's heart for his own people, the whole world.’ The musical children who treasured his paternal heart and the artistry that it enshrined understood that Asawa’s was a spirit that was easily wounded, not from weakness but from strength of integrity and perceptiveness.

I had the pleasure of making Asawa’s acquaintance during the planning of his most recent recording, Spirits of the Air, a beautiful disc on which he collaborated with mezzo-soprano Diana Tash in performances of music by Marco da Gagliano, Monteverdi, Purcell, Alessandro Scarlatti, and Händel. I found a message still in my inbox in which, in the context of an exchange about the disc’s repertory, he wrote to me, ‘Thank you for loving this music enough to support us coloring outside [of] the lines.’ This is precisely the sentiment that explains why Asawa was an artist of great significance: he loved music enough to follow wherever it led.

PERFORMANCE REVIEW: Richard Wagner — DER FLIEGENDE HOLLÄNDER (W. Tigges, C. Pier, P. Volpe, C. Bix, R. Pike, D. Blalock; Virginia Opera, 17 April 2016)

RICHARD WAGNER (1813 – 1883): Der fliegende Holländer, WWV 63—Wayne Tigges (Der Holländer), Christina Pier (Senta), Peter Volpe (Daland), Corey Bix (Erik), Rachelle Pike (Mary), David Blalock (Der Steuermann Dalands); Virginia Opera Chorus; Richmond Symphony Orchestra; Adam Turner, conductor and Chorus Master [Sara Widzer, Director; James Noone, Set Designer; Erik Teague, Costume Designer; Mark McCullough, Lighting Designer; James McGough, Wig and Makeup Designer; Felicity Stiverson, Choreographer; Virginia Opera, Richmond CenterStage, Carpenter Theatre, Dominion Arts Center, Richmond, Virginia; Sunday, 17 April 2016]

When Der fliegende Holländer premièred at Dresden’s Semperoper on 2 January 1843, Richard Wagner’s thirtieth birthday was slightly less than six months in future. Though already long in the musical tooth by the standards of Mozart and Mendelssohn, Wagner was hardly a novice, his career as a composer for the stage already encompassing several aborted operas and the completed scores Die Feen, never performed during the composer’s lifetime; Das Liebesverbot, suppressed after its first performance in 1836; and Rienzi, the sprawling tale of a Fourteenth-Century Roman tribune. Likely the opera composer about whom the most scholarly tomes and less-learned chronicles have been written, Wagner did much to cultivate his own mythology, lore that has expanded exponentially in the 133 years since the composer’s death in 1883. Whether by the composer’s or others’ designs, a tenet of the Wagner Legend is the notion that the composer of Tristan und Isolde, Der Ring des Nibelungen and Parsifal emerged like Athena from the head of Zeus, fully in command of his genre-changing genius. Said by the composer to have been inspired, at least in part, by a tempestuous sea voyage from Latvia to England, the culmination of a perilous flight from creditors during which his first wife Minna suffered a miscarriage, Der fliegende Holländer was adapted primarily from an episode in Heinrich Heine’s satirical novel Aus den Memoiren des Herrn von Schnabelewopski. Sketched by Wagner as early as Spring 1840, the opera was pitched to Léon Pillet, Director of the Opéra de Paris, to whom it is alleged that the nearly-destitute composer sold the scenario for 500 francs in order to raise much-needed funds. Even with nothing so convenient as a bill of sale surviving to substantiate the Opéra’s transaction with Wagner, who hoped that Paris might witness the première of a Fliegende Holländer en français, it can hardly be coincidence that Pierre-Louis Dietsch’s Le vaisseau fantôme, a setting of a libretto by Paul Foucher and Bénédict-Henri Révoil that closely followed Wagner’s proposed drama, was premièred at the Opéra in 1842. What needs no proof beyond what the ears can perceive is that Wagner’s style evolved momentously between the completion of Rienzi in November 1840 and his composition of the bulk of Der fliegende Holländer in Summer 1841. For Wagner and for German opera in general, Der fliegende Holländer was a point of no return. Anchored in Richmond’s historic Carpenter Theatre at Dominion Arts Center, Virginia Opera’s production of Der fliegende Holländer was a point of departure for a spellbinding journey through the score in which, in the sense of his development of the history-altering Gesamtkunstwerk, Wagner became Wagner.

Whether presented using Wagner’s intended through-composed structure or the more familiar three-act form and set in Scotland, Norway, or a real or imagined alternate locale, Der fliegende Holländer poses difficult questions that production teams must endeavor to answer. Offering the company’s second interpretation of the opera, Virginia Opera’s Fliegende Holländer revived a production by acclaimed director and designer Francesca Zambello that was created for The Glimmerglass Festival and later mounted by Hawaii Opera Theatre. Directed for Virginia Opera by Sara Widzer, the insights of Zambello’s concept were sharpened to razor’s-edge intensity, giving the relationships among characters—and the characters themselves—specificity that enhanced their inherent symbolism despite an over-reliance on imagery involving ropes, also a component of Zambello’s Metropolitan Opera production of Berlioz’s Les Troyens, and blocking that often seemed tentative and uncomfortable for the singers. Nevertheless, Senta thus became a determined, even humorous woman experiencing a sexual catharsis, as well as a manifestation of the archetypical ‘Eternal Feminine,’ the literal and spiritual vessel of the Holländer’s redemption. What Senta emphatically is not is a Brünnhilde without battle armor, and Widzer’s direction facilitated the development of a youthful, idealistic Senta with her own unique identities within the contexts of the performance and the Wagner canon. Erik Teague’s costume designs served the drama well but were less kind to the bodies that wore them. Jim McGough’s wigs and makeup were more successful at flattering both composer and cast, and Felicity Stiverson’s choreography infused the production with an organic range of motions to which the dancers—Dominique Buffington, Marcia Burns, Katie Henly, Maurio Hines, Kevin Jones, Nicole Lorah, Elliot Peterson, and Stiverson herself—mostly responded with unaffected movement. Though Richmond is a two-hour drive inland from the Atlantic, the achievements of set designer James Noone and lighting designer and implementer Mark McCullough and Serena Wong convincingly brought the sea to the stage, the relentless churning of the surf that resounds in Wagner’s music depicted in the production with an immediacy that heightened the drama’s emotional impact.

The musical challenges of Der fliegende Holländer are at least as terrifying as the opera’s scenic elements, and Virginia Opera’s production scaled the dangerous precipices of Wagner’s score on the sure footing of conductor and chorus master Adam Turner. At the helm of the Richmond Symphony Orchestra for the Richmond performances, Turner paced a traversal of the score in which gravitas occasionally outweighed momentum. Senta’s Ballade was slightly lugubrious, but there were notable benefits to the conductor’s approach. Allowed to expand without rushing, phrases often revealed beauties that remain hidden in speedier performances, and the singers were given the breadth and support that they needed to refine their characterizations. Turner’s conducting of the Ouvertüre ​had a depth that recalled the Wagner performances of Hans Knappertsbusch and Sir Reginald Goodall, the young maestro’s contrasted handling of the Allegro con brio, Andante, and Molto espressivo sections ideally balancing rhythmic tautness with unabashed Romanticism. The indebtedness of Wagner’s ensemble writing to Mozart, Beethoven, and Weber was especially apparent, and it was astonishing to note how closely the marvelous duet for Senta and the Holländer is related to the scene for newly-reunited father and daughter in Act One of Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra. The Richmond Symphony’s playing was little short of spectacular, the horns earning special praise for their near-perfect executions of their parts. Turner’s training of the Virginia Opera Chorus yielded choral singing that set a high standard with the first ‘Hojohe! Hallojo!’​ and maintained it throughout the performance, the quality of both voices and vocalism displayed by the tenors’ unbothered rise to top G in their opening phrase. Though falling victim to more rope-trick business and being asked to pop up and down in their chairs like citizens of a prairie dog town, the ladies were most impressive in ‘Summ’ und brumm’, du gutes Rädchen’ in the scene with Senta and Mary. Gentlemen and ladies sang powerfully in ‘Steuermann, laß die Wacht!’ and ‘Mein! Seht doch an!’ The foremost misjudgment of the afternoon was the garish over-amplification of the offstage singing of the Holländer’s crew. Presumably, the intended effect was an ethereal disembodiment of the voices, but it was overloud, ugly, and detrimental to enjoyment of the choristers’ expert work. This production of Der fliegende Holländer is Turner’s maiden voyage as a conductor of Wagner repertory, and the thoughtfulness and thorough preparation of this freshman outing suggest that he has exceptional promise as a Wagnerian.

It was wonderful to encounter in native New Zealander mezzo-soprano Rachelle Pike a Mary who was a foil for Senta who did not require the assistance of ear trumpets and walking canes. Age is one of opera’s confounding variables, but why so many productions dictate that Mary must sound like a crone is mystifying. Mary is no Ortrud, Venus, Brangäne, or Fricka, but she is a more significant presence in Der fliegende Holländer than many productions permit her to be. With her vibrant voicing of ‘Ei! Fleißig, fleißig! Wie sie spinnen will Jede sich den Schatz gewinnen,’ Pike enriched the scene at the start of Act Two—part of Act One in Virginia Opera’s production, which divided the opera into two acts, with the interval after Senta’s duet with the Holländer—with sounds that could be truly enjoyed, not merely endured. Her reading of ‘Das Schiffsvolk kommt mit leerem Magen’ was a taskmistress’s order that demanded obedience. Pike made Mary’s fear of the consequences of Senta’s obsession with the Holländer’s predicament palpable, her firm, musical singing far more effectively conveying the character’s panic than other singers’ shrewish wailing. Whatever a rôle’s duration, good singing always counts for much, and Virginia Opera had in Pike an uncommonly well-sung Mary. Whether she was intentionally costumed and posed whilst Daland introduced Senta to the Holländer to strongly resemble Whistler’s mother is a secret that this Holländer will take to Davy Jones’s Locker.

North Carolina-born tenor David Blalock was a Steuermann whose secure, sonorous singing reminded the listener that voices as beautiful as those of Ernst Haefliger, Anton Dermota, Fritz Wunderlich, and George Shirley were once heard in the rôle, both in opera houses and on disc. Blalock’s performance was a wonderful return to this tradition, his refined but robust vocalism seeming as capable of meeting the demands of Erik’s music as it was of making easy going of the Steuermann’s lines. In Act One, Blalock sang ‘Ho! Kapitän!’ with good-natured zeal, his G at the top of the stave easy and ringing. He phrased the Steuermann’s Lied, ‘Mit Gewitter und Sturm aus fernem Meer,’ with boyish charm, his golden top B♭ like a lover’s sigh. Later, his voicing of ‘’Sist nichts, ’sist nichts!’ and ‘Fürwahr! Tragst’s hin den armen Knaben!’ was delightfully confident. Like Pike’s Mary, Blalock’s Steuermann was a tremendous boon, a performance of leading-man quality in a rôle that in recent years has rarely received such treatment.

Wagner’s music for Erik, the conformist yokel who earnestly woos Senta and is a symbolic representative of the oppressive society from which she longs to escape, asked nothing of tenor Corey Bix that was not well within the scope of his capabilities. The tessitura that Erik faces is evident immediately upon his entrance, the first note that he sings being a top A, and Bix shrank from none of the rigors of ‘Senta! Willst du mich verderben?’ or the energetic duet with Senta, ‘Bleib’, Senta! Bleib’ nur einen Augenblick.’ In what is generally Act Three, Bix fired ‘Was mußt’ ich hören!’ like a warning shot from his hunting rifle, and the tenor’s performance of Erik’s Kavatine, ‘Willst jenes Tag’s du dich nicht mehr entsinnen,’ was distinguished by nimble negotiations of the turns and top B♭. Still, it was not difficult to discern why Senta so readily abandoned her dalliance with Erik in order to surrender to her fascination with the enigmatic Holländer: would any self-respecting lady with an adventurous imagination ally herself with a man whose every word is shouted at her? This is as much Wagner’s fault as the tenor’s, of course, but other singers—the young Sándor Kónya, for one—have deployed greater finesse in their performances of Erik’s music. Crucially, though, few of today’s Eriks sing the rôle as ably as Bix breathed life into his foursquare lines in Richmond.

Bass Peter Volpe’s sonorous, refreshingly uncomplicated Daland, as much a descendant of Rossini’s money-hungry Don Basilio as of Mozart’s Osmin and Beethoven’s Rocco, proffered in Virginia Opera’s Fliegende Holländer the levity that was surely a vital aspect of Wagner’s vision. The character’s untroubled spirit emanated from Volpe’s singing of ‘Kein Zweifel! Sieben Meilen fort trieb uns der Sturm von sich’ren Port’ and ‘He! Holla! Steuermann!’ His appetite for material gain whetted in the Duett with the Holländer, this Daland declaimed ‘Wie wunderbar! Soll deinem Wort ich glauben?’ with the exuberance of a card shark holding a winning hand. Glimpses of a more serious facet of Daland’s brassy demeanor flickered through Volpe’s singing of the aria ‘Mögst du, mein Kind, den fremden Mann willkommen heißen,’ his voice glowing more brightly than the cask of riches laid before him by the Holländer. His function in the brief Terzett with Senta and Holländer amounted to little more than anchoring a few chords, but Volpe did even that with panache. Ending the opera with Senta asphyxiating herself—a final use of the rope motif and here one with an unsavory hint of autoeroticism—was one of the production’s rare disfiguring misfires, but having Daland gently caress Senta’s lifeless hand as the curtain descended, the first and ultimately sole gesture of genuine affection between father and daughter in the performance, was surprisingly moving. Volpe’s voice was audible throughout the range of the music, and this Daland’s cheery disposition—no careworn old sea dog, this fellow!—shone as luminously when he was silent as when he sang.

American soprano Christina Pier, a winner of the Metropolitan Opera’s prestigious National Council Auditions and a student of the acclaimed Romanian soprano Virginia Zeani, herself an unexpectedly effective heroine in performances of Der fliegende Holländer sung in Italian, proved a Senta with nothing to fear from comparisons with the great Sentas of previous generations. Unlike many of her colleagues who now sing the rôle, Pier possesses a voice of dimensions equal to Senta’s music, her upper register focused and utterly reliable but also skillfully integrated with the bottom octave of the voice. Moreover, Pier is an expressive artist who communicates more than words, pitches, and rhythms. Singing ‘Was hast du Kunde mir gegeben’ inwardly, Pier was from the start a Senta trapped between fantasy and dreary reality. Battling a slow tempo, Pier conjured an atmosphere of near-ecstatic concentration in the Ballade, ‘Jo ho hoe! Traft ihr das Schiff.’ In the piece’s Più lento section, ‘Doch kann dem bleichen Manne Erlösung einstens noch werden,’ her voice radiated girlish purity, the profusion of Gs at the top of the stave mastered unflinchingly. The soprano’s Senta grew ever more agitated and justifiably frustrated in the Duett with Erik, but her singing of the Lento ‘Fühlst du den Schmerz, den tiefen Gram, mit dem herab auf mich er sieht?’ was shaped by a beautifully-extended bel canto line. Her patience finally failed her in the Allegro con fuoco section, ‘Er sucht mich auf,’ and she lashed at the guileless Erik with a mighty top A. The dramatic temperature of Senta’s pivotal Duett with the Holländer was elevated markedly by Pier’s incandescent voicing of ‘Versank ich jetzt in wunderbares Träumen,’ the ecstatic top Bs igniting the dark surroundings like Saint Elmo’s fire. Confronted by conventionality one last time, this Senta was passive, even indifferent in the brief Duett with Erik preceding his Kavatine. Observed with Erik by the Holländer, who mistakes her rejection of the huntsman for tenderness, Pier explained Senta’s actions with a scorching performance of ‘Halt’ ein! Von dannen sollst du nimmer flieh’n!’ Forever joining her fate with that of the Holländer, Senta has her own Liebestod in miniature, and Pier sang ‘Preis’ deinen Engel und sein Gebot!’ with astounding singularity of purpose and phenomenal top As and B. The scarcity of dramatic voices among today’s singers is often—and justifiably—lamented, especially by earnest Wagnerians, but Sentas of the quality that Pier accomplished in Richmond are neither more nor less plentiful now than when Kirsten Flagstad sang Senta in Covent Garden’s 1937 Coronation Season or when Astrid Varnay interpreted her at the MET in 1950 and 1951 and at Bayreuth in 1955, 1956, and 1959. Singing such as Pier’s is always a precious commodity. That she was not as convincing dramatically as she was dominant musically was the result of a staging that needlessly highlighted her minor weaknesses rather than exploiting her considerable strengths, but Virginia Opera can rightly boast of having offered audiences a sensational, once-in-a-generation Senta.

Having heard bass-baritone Wayne Tigges’s smug, slyly menacing Assur in Waahington Concert Opera’s November 2015 performance of Rossini’s Semiramide [reviewed here], it was difficult to believe that the same artist sang the Holländer in Richmond. It was the same imposing, sinewy voice, of course, but the snarling mettle of the singer’s Assur here metamorphosed into an engrossing vulnerability. From the first hushed notes of his Act One aria ‘Die Frist ist um,’ this Holländer was plainly a broken man but very much a man, not a phantom. The thunderous power of Tigges’ voice was unleashed in the Allegro molto agitato section, ‘Wie oft in Meeres tiefsten Schlund stürtz’ ich voll Sehnsucht mich hinab: doch ach! den Tod, ich fand ihn nicht,’ the bass-baritone weathering the repeated ascents to top E♭ with the dependability of the tide. In the wake of such vocal muscularity, the heartrending sadness of Tigges’ articulation of the Maestoso ‘Dich frage ich, gepries’ner Engel Gottes’ was stunning and all the more profound. The sheer exhaustion of the Holländer’s beleaguered spirit weighted the singer’s heartfelt delivery of ‘Weit komm’ ich her: verwehrt bei Sturm und Wetter ihr mir den Ankerplatz?’ In the Duett with Daland, Tigges voiced ‘Durch Sturm und bösen Wind verschlagen’ with guarded elation, his hope returning with the prospect of winning Senta’s hand. Meeting the cause of his renewed optimism, he sang ‘Wie aus der Ferne längst vergangner Zeiten spricht dieses Mädchens Bild zu mir’ in the Duett with Senta with touching amazement, recognizing in the naïve young woman before him traits unknown even to a soul forced to endlessly wander the earth. In the Duett’s Molto più section, Tigges uttered ‘Du bist ein Engel!’ with grave beauty of tone, giving voice to the Holländer’s anticipation of his long-awaited rebirth. Finding Senta in Erik’s arms in the penultimate scene, the magnitude of Tigges’s singing of ‘Verloren! Ach! verloren!’ was transfixing not because of the character’s capacity for violence but owing to the bitterness of his despair. Revealing the Holländer’s true identity, which only Senta had truly grasped, Tigges flung out the text of ‘Erhahre das Geschick, vor dem ich dich bewahr’!’ breathtakingly. Tigges had at his disposal the full measure of brute force that the scale of the Holländer’s music necessitates, but his performance was most remarkable for the poignantly suffering man that he created beneath the Holländer’s ghastly persona. It is unusual that a Holländer impresses as much with beauty as with brawn, but, like Hans Hotter, Friedrich Schorr, and Josef Metternich before him, Tigges’s portrayal of the Holländer was guided by the humanity with which Wagner imbued this most emotionally ephemeral of his heroes.

Der fliegende Holländer was a milestone in Wagner’s career and in the progress of German opera from the work of Baroque master Reinhard Keiser to the scores of modern composers like Hans Werner Henze and Aribert Reimann. In the pages of Der fliegende Holländer, Wagner not only paved the way for his later masterpieces but also provided a tangible connection between Teutonic styles old and new. As it was when the company first staged the opera in 1996, this production of Der fliegende Holländer is likewise a milestone in Virginia Opera’s continuing dedication to bringing world-class opera to the Old Dominion. Sunday’s performance was a celebration of collaborative music making that reaffirmed that even in the metaphysical realm of Wagner’s operas voices eclipse vanities.

Heil, Holländer: Bass-baritone Wayne Tigges as Der Holländer in Virginia Opera’s production of Richard Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer, April 2016 [Photo by Lucid Frame Productions, © by Virginia Opera]