CD REVIEW: Ruggero Leoncavallo — ZAZÀ (E. Jaho, R. Massi, S. Gaertner, P. Bardon, D. Stout, N. Spence, K. Rudge, S. Thorpe, F. Wyn, J. Ferri; Opera Rara ORC 55)

RUGGERO LEONCAVALLO (1857 – 1919): Zazà—Ermonela Jaho (Zazà), Riccardo Massi (Milio Dufresne), Stephen Gaertner (Cascart), Patricia Bardon (Anaide), David Stout (Bussy), Nicky Spence (Courtois), Kathryn Rudge (Natalia), Simon Thorpe (Duclou), Fflur Wyn (Floriana), Julia Ferri (Toto), Christopher Turner (Augusto), Helen Neeves (Signora Dufresne), Edward Goater (Marco), Robert Anthony Gardiner (Un signore), Eleanor Minney (Claretta), Rebecca Lodge (Simona); BBC Singers; BBC Symphony Orchestra; Maurizio Benini, conductor [Recorded at BBC Maida Vale Studios, London, UK, in November 2015; Opera Rara ORC 55; 2 CDs, 136:01; Available from Opera Rara and major music retailers]

So often are opera lovers cautioned that the plots of the works that they love must be taken with a grain of salt that the true aficionado’s diet must be dangerously suffused with sodium. Whether a score’s drama is one of Roman emperors, legendary warriors, or more ordinary personages, opera is the realm of idealism set to music. The denizens of operatic plots rarely behave as their counterparts off the stage might be expected to do: perhaps their actions are larger for having absorbed the vicarious ambitions of their portrayers and observers. For all of its verismo vestments, Ruggero Leoncavallo’s seldom-heard Zazà is clothed in unabashedly Romantic hues that would be embarrassingly garish if viewed outside of the opera house. The tale of a vaudeville chanteuse’s vain seduction and eventual selfless rejection of a married man melds the realms of the Moulin Rouge and the Palais Garnier, but the opera’s plot is marginally too starry-eyed to be swallowed without the seasoning of that proverbial dose of salt. The histrionic shortcomings of the heroine and her circle notwithstanding, Zazà has been done few favors by the handful of indifferently-produced recordings of the score despite admirable performances of the title rôle by Mafalda Favero, Clara Petrella, Lynne Strow-Piccolo, and Lisa Houben. What Zazà needs is star treatment, and that is what the opera receives in spades from Opera Rara in this expertly-prepared studio performance, recorded in advance of a critically-acclaimed concert outing at the Barbican. Here extending the focus of the label’s celebrated endeavors to the very end of the Nineteenth Century, Zazà having premièred at Milan’s Teatro Lirico on 10 November 1900, the principal question raised by this release is whether Opera Rara can deal as authoritatively with verismo as with bel canto. The answer, this recording proves, is a resounding Sì!

Guided by the propulsive, idiomatic conducting of Maurizio Benini, the musicians of the BBC Symphony Orchestra play Leoncavallo’s episodic score with brio that qualifies them as honorary Italians regardless of the flags under which they were born. The opera’s orchestration is clever and colorful if never especially inventive, though the use of the offstage banda to create the contrasting back- and front-of-house perspectives of Zazà’s milieu is witty and managed by Benini with panache and by the banda personnel with raucous brilliance. Motivic writing is not as prominent in Zazà as in many post-Wagner works originating on any side of the Alps, but Benini’s attentiveness to the most minute details of thematic material ensures that subtleties of characterization can be enacted by the singers without exaggeration. The conductor looks to the score for guidance on setting tempi that serve both drama and cast, and his clear-sighted pacing of the performance minimizes the doldrums of Leoncavallo’s workaday passages.

Emerging from the ranks of the BBC Singers, whose vocalism enlivens every scene in which Leoncavallo employed choristers, mezzo-sopranos Rebecca Lodge as Simona and Eleanor Minney as Claretta, soprano Helen Neeves as Signora Dufresne, Milio’s wife, and tenor Edward Goater as the Dufresne family butler Marco epitomize the exalted measure of excellence to which the choir adheres. Throughout the performance, the choristers are individually and collectively credible in every guise in which the composer presents them.

Opera Rara releases have reliably utilized first-rate talent in supporting rôles, and this Zazà is among the label’s greatest successes in this regard. The boyishly handsome tenor Nicky Spence has never sounded better on disc than as the put-upon impresario Courtois in this performance of Zazà—quite a feat considering his impressive discography! Whenever the character appears, Spence’s evergreen voice infuses Leoncavallo’s conversational music with golden-toned life. Baritones Simon Thorpe as the put-upon stage manager Duclou and David Stout as the journalist Bussy further raise the vocal standards of the recording, and their strong work is seconded by the accomplished singing of tenors Christopher Turner as the writer Augusto and Robert Anthony Gardiner as the unnamed Signore.

The characterful vignettes created by the ladies of the supporting cast are no less vibrant than those engendered by their male colleagues. Mezzo-soprano Kathryn Rudge provides great pleasure with her impersonation of Zazà’s maid Natalia, the indefatigable energy of her singing heightening the character’s significance. Irish mezzo-soprano Patricia Bardon, consummate mistress of a wide repertory spanning from unforgettable portrayals of Händel’s travesti heroes to rewarding ventures into Twenty-First-Century music, is captivating as Zazà’s perennially-inebriated mother Anaide. Even in a relatively small rôle, how an artist of Bardon’s stature can shine! As Floriana, Zazà’s rival on stage and in love, soprano Fflur Wyn is the oft-thwarted seconda donna to the life, her bright timbre, crisp diction, and take-no-prisoners vocalism unmistakably conveying the character’s vexation. Heeding the examples of her singing teammates, Julia Ferri portrays the speaking rôle of Totò, Milio’s daughter Antonietta, without artifice, enunciating her lines clearly and animatedly.

In reviewing a 2005 Alice Tully Hall concert performance of Zazà by Teatro Grattacielo, New York Times critic Bernard Holland praised the ‘strong, cultured baritone’ that Stephen Gaertner wielded in his interpretation of Zazà’s once-and-future lover Cascart. A decade later, that assessment applies even more fully to the singer’s Cascart for Opera Rara. Gaertner is a connoisseur’s baritone, one whose performances offer tantalizing glimpses of bygone eras in which singers like John Charles Thomas, Lawrence Tibbett, and Leonard Warren were emblematic of the magnificence of American baritone singing. In this portrayal of Cascart, a rôle created by Mario Sammarco, who originated the rôle of Carlo Gérard in Andrea Chénier for Umberto Giordano four years before the première of Zazà, and first sung at the Metropolitan Opera by Pasquale Amato, Gaertner sings with the unapologetic machismo of Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, the true swagger of a nightclub star sure of his value and virility. From the beginning of his scene with Zazà in Act One, there is obvious tenderness in his approach to the part, however, and Gaertner woos and pleads without crooning. In Act Two, the sheer sonic impact of his singing of ‘Buona Zazà del mio buon tempo ascolta’ is arresting, but the character’s gentleness towards Zazà is again evident in the humor with which Gaertner’s Cascart goads her with ‘E s’anco ti spossare? saresti... una borghese!’ When the baritone sings ‘Zazà, piccola zingara, schiava d’un folle amore’ in Act Four, the extent to which Cascart’s destiny is intertwined with Zazà’s is palpable, and the sincerity of Gaertner’s delivery is moving. With a singer of Gaertner’s abilities in the rôle, Cascart’s part in the drama is all the more pivotal, and the misfortune of Zazà’s love for Milio is intensified by her neglect of a man so devoted to her.

Production Manager Kim Panter and her Opera Rara colleagues are owed considerable gratitude for adding one of today’s finest tenors to the label’s roster of compelling artists. Here performing Leoncavallo’s music for Zazà’s initially reluctant but ultimately fervent paramour Milio Dufresne with laudably firm, focused tone that meaningfully conveys the tension of complicated love, Italian tenor Riccardo Massi makes his Opera Rara début in a rôle to which his talents are ideally suited. With acclaimed portrayals of rôles as challenging as Alvaro and Radamès in Verdi’s La forza del destino and Aida and Cavaradossi and Calàf in Puccini’s Tosca and Turandot to his credit, Massi is an elegant singer with a voice reminiscent in its blend of strength and sweetness of that of his countryman Giovanni Malipiero. When Milio makes his first entrance in Act One, the performance as a whole gains momentum, and Massi voices ‘È un riso gentile quall’alba d’aprile’ with the Italianate fervor that the music desperately needs and has received on disc only from the slightly over-parted Giuseppe Campora. In the subsequent scene with Zazà, Milio’s burgeoning love simmers in Massi’s resonant vocalism until it can be restrained no longer: bursting forth like flood waters pulverizing a dam, his words of affection pour from the tenor’s throat, resonant but refined. In Act Two, Massi invests both ‘Mia Zazà, mio bene! Ragiona dunque; che follie son queste?’ and ‘Zazà, Zazà, non ti attristare’ with subtle inflections drawn from the text, giving Milio greater depth than Leoncavallo achieved in words or music. Milio’s aria in Act Three, ‘Oh mio piccolo tavolo ingombrato siccome ingombro è di sgomenti il cuore,’ its sentiments not unlike those of the heroine’s ‘Adieu, notre petite table’ in Act Two of Massenet’s Manon, is scaled by Massi as a genuinely inward meditation, the character’s desperate uncertainty magnified by the insurmountable solidity of the tenor’s singing. The emotional obstacle course of Act Four never disrupts the meticulously-maintained balance of Massi’s performance. The expressive immediacy of his articulations of ‘Zazà, tu mi rimproveri d’aver ti troppo amata?’ and ‘Ed ora io mi domando come, vicino a te, potei scordar la dolce mia buona creatura!’ reveals the essence of his artistry: there is beauty in even the ugliest moments of life. In tinging his performance with haunting morbidezza without resorting to Gigli-esque sobs and cheap effects, Massi makes Milio less a conceited prig than a man swept along by an illicit affection, his timbre burnished and his intonation absolutely secure throughout the range. How could a man who sings so well not be forgiven?

Breathing life into the too-easily-caricatured title rôle, Albanian soprano Ermonela Jaho allies glistening, well-controlled vocalism with ardent but polished emoting that often proves revelatory. Building upon a career firmly rooted in Opera Rara’s familiar bel canto territory, Jaho waded into the tempestuous waters of verismo with a heartrending portrayal of Puccini’s Suor Angelica at Covent Garden, and she is scheduled to bring her shattering Cio-Cio-San to Kennedy Center in Washington National Opera’s 2016 – 2017 Season. It is hardly coincidental that, four years after Leoncavallo’s opera was first performed, the first Zazà, Rosina Storchio, was also Puccini’s first Cio-Cio-San or that Geraldine Farrar was the first to sing both rôles at the Metropolitan Opera. Though a temperamental cabaret singer to the marrow of her bones, Jaho’s Zazà is most fully an open-hearted, deeply-feeling woman. Facing a bevy of distractions in Act One, Jaho’s Zazà fires ‘Ogni seme di bene in te si strugge, e diventa l’amore una parola!’ at Cascart with unmistakable meaning, and the soprano’s singing in the exasperated but dutiful daughter’s scene with her worrisome mother is a model of barely-concealed ennui. Then, singing ‘Io son diversa da voi – Non ardisco dirvelo, e pur d’un sogno mi beava!’ to Milio, she is transformed from the haughty creature of the stage into a disquietingly vulnerable woman hopelessly in love in spite of herself. Limning the progress of that love’s development in Act Two, Jaho voices ‘Amor mio, che farà non più vicina a te, la tua Zazà, la tua piccina’ expressively, her luminous upper register projected excitingly without forcing. Joining with her mother and Cascart, this Zazà dispatches ‘Ah, ah, ah! Che quadretto!’ charmingly, her irony as bewitching as her flirtation. Her exclamation of ‘Bisogna ch’ei scelga – O me o l’altra... Via!’ has the conviction of Tosca, the diva’s soul bared in a single phrase. Unexpectedly learning in Act Three that her lover is not only married but also father to a precious daughter, Zazà undergoes another metamorphosis, heartbreakingly depicted by Jaho in the scene with Milio’s daughter Totò. Here, singing ‘È finita!... Ammogliato... e un angelo ha per figlia!’ with mesmerizing simplicity that brings to mind Maria Callas’s singing in scenes like those with Norma’s and Cio-Cio-San’s children, the exuberant, fiery lover becomes the tragic heroine determined to act for the greater good. Confronting Milio in Act Four, the pain that courses through Jaho’s stark readings of ‘M’ami troppo? Mai quanto basta!... Ti par tedioso l’amor mio?’ and ‘Ebbene, si, so tutto! Che hai moglie... che mi fuggi!’ is tempered by an omnipresent acceptance of the inevitability of safeguarding the bond between father and child. Jaho sings ‘Che ho fatto? Egli parte! Egli va? Non torna indietro...’ with unbreakable determination, will triumphing over desire. Leoncavallo lunges at the jugular with Zazà’s final utterance of ‘Milio! torna! Milio... È all’angolo... È sparito! È non ritorna più... mai più! Tutto è finito,’ but Jaho prefers music to mania. Like Massi, she finds the light in the darkness of her character’s circumstances. How Zazà’s story ends is one of opera’s mysteries, but how her life is changed by a sole encounter with a young girl is made startlingly real—that verismo, at last!—by this uncommonly intuitive soprano.

Even in a performance as wonderful as this one, the reasons for Zazà’s neglect are apparent. The composer most often associated with Leoncavallo, Pietro Mascagni, remarked that, with the extraordinary success of his early opera Cavalleria rusticana, he was, in terms of renown, crowned before he was king. A similar assessment might justifiably be applied to Leoncavallo, whose Pagliacci ushered him into immortality in 1892, whilst his compositional skills and individual style were still developing. The difference is that several of Mascagni’s post-Cavalleria rusticana scores—L’amico Fritz, Guglielmo Ratcliff, and Il piccolo Marat, for instance—are confident, tightly-constructed, masterful works of a quality that Leoncavallo’s Zazà cannot claim as her own. Compared with Pagliacci and even Leoncavallo’s infrequently-performed but meritorious La bohème, premièred a year after the first performance of Puccini’s Bohème, Zazà amounts to an enjoyable journey without a clear destination: unlike the finest verismo scores, that is, it is attractive music that never really goes anywhere. Zazà is a heroine of a different mettle than Nedda, Mimì, and Musetta, however, and Ermonela Jaho succeeds in the context of this recording better than Leoncavallo managed to do at making her a three-dimensional woman of genuine emotions. Finally heard in the top-quality sound that the score deserves, the heart missing from previous recordings beats powerfully in this one. In short, hold the salt: all of the ingredients needed to savor Opera Rara’s Zazà are present in this performance in precisely the right proportions.

RECORDINGS OF THE MONTH | June 2016: Benjamin Britten — SERENADE FOR TENOR, HORN, & STRINGS and Georg Friedrich Händel — WHERE’RE YOU WALK (Allan Clayton, tenor; Linn Records CKD 478 and Signum Classics SIGCD457)

[1] BENJAMIN BRITTEN (1913 – 1976): Young Apollo, Op. 16; Lachrymae, Op. 48a; Prelude and Fugue, Op. 29; Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings, Op. 31—Allan Clayton, tenor; Richard Watkins, French horn; Máté Szücs, viola; Lorenzo Soulès, piano; Aldeburgh Strings; Markus Däunert, director [Recorded at Snape Maltings, Snape, Suffolk, UK, 20 – 22 October 2012 (Lachrymae, Prelude and Fugue), 24 – 25 November 2013 (Serenade), and 4 April 2015 (Young Apollo); Linn Records CKD 478; 1 CD, 55:02; Available from Linn Records, ClassicsOnlineHD, Amazon (USA), jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

[2] GEORG FRIEDRICH HÄNDEL (1685 – 1759), THOMAS ARNE (1710 – 1778), WILLIAM BOYCE (1711 – 1779), and JOHN CHRISTOPHER SMITH (1712 – 1795): Where’re You Walk – Handel’s Favourite Tenor [A programme of music composed for or sung by John Beard (circa 1715 – 1791)]—Allan Clayton, tenor; Mary Bevan, soprano; The Choir of Classical Opera; The Orchestra of Classical Opera; Ian Page, conductor [Recorded in All Saints Church, Tooting, London, UK, 15 – 18 September 2015; Signum Classics SIGCD457; 1 CD, 68:59; Available from Signum Classics, ClassicsOnlineHD, Amazon (USA), jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

It may seem counterintuitive, daft, or even provocative to suggest that the foremost thrill of the human voice is its innate propensity for disaster, but is the mountain climber exhilarated more by how far up he manages to go or by how far down it is to the doldrums of mundane, earthbound life? A perverse component of the mystique of Maria Callas is the realization of proximity to failure: listening carefully to her ‘live’ recordings reveals that the precarious, barely-sustained notes on high were often more vociferously cheered than the full, easy ones, the conqueror rewarded. It is the prospect of a performance going wrong that establishes the perspective that promotes enjoyment of all that goes right. In the haze of brilliantly-combusting imperfection, singers who quietly plot their own paths to self-sufficient artistic grace are often, exasperatingly, in peril of disappearing into the shadows. A good-humored, unpretentiously handsome gentleman who has intimated that he would just as happily be a match-saving footballer, English tenor Allan Clayton is no Ivory Tower-dwelling, platitude-spouting Artist. With a trophy-earning striker’s balance of natural ability and unwavering discipline, he possesses a Champions League-worthy voice and an uncanny ability to find the goal despite every conceivable complication on the pitch—and with imperturbably certain pitch! Philosophy suggests that the profusion of ugliness in this world is necessary in order to give meaning to the recognition of beauty, and the same conceit can be extended to music. With this pair of very different but remarkably compatible discs, their content separated by two of the most decisive centuries in the history of Western music, Allan Clayton eschews the notion of pontificating on why he is among today’s finest singers and simply sings in accordance with his gifts. Whether tackling the penalty kicks of Benjamin Britten’s angular writing in the Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings or the roll and cut reverses of arias from the great operas and oratorios of Georg Friedrich Händel’s tenure in London, Clayton restores to the vocal recital disc a focus on the singer’s voice rather than his ego. That a particular excitement of voices is their variability is what makes a singer like Allan Clayton so special: fantastically reliable, each successive phrase of his singing impresses anew. If full appreciation of the contrast of a singer like Clayton with the ranks of more ordinary troubadours means that profusions of mediocre discs must be endured, what a minuscule price this is to pay for these superb Linn and Signum Classics recordings.

Setting the stage for Clayton’s performance of the Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings, the Linn disc, distinguished by the sonic quality for which the label is rightly celebrated, opens with beautiful performances of Britten’s Young Apollo (Opus 16), Lachrymae (Opus 48a), and Prelude and Fugue (Opus 29). Interestingly, Britten suppressed the score of Young Apollo after its 1939 première by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation forces for which it was commissioned, and the piece, inspired by John Keats’s unfinished epic poem ‘Hyperion,’ was not performed again until 1979, three years after the composer’s death. As performed here by Aldeburgh Strings and pianist Lorenzo Soulès, whose adroit handling of the prickly writing for the keyboard is commendably unaffected, it is difficult to imagine that Britten would object to the piece’s reinstatement to the repertory.

Director and concertmaster Markus Däunert leads the Aldeburgh musicians in comfortably navigating the harmonic channels of Lachrymae, a series of variations on the principal theme of John Dowland’s song ‘If my complaints could passions move’ in which the familiar melody of Dowland’s ‘Flow my tears’ is also sampled. Lachrymae was written in 1950 for viola virtuoso William Primrose and revised in 1975 for violist Cecil Aronowitz, at which time the original piano part was reimagined for string orchestra, producing the version performed on this disc. Máté Szücs, principal violist of the Berliner Philharmoniker, proves an excellent exponent of the piece in this performance, drawing from his instrument tones that recall the glowing-amber timbre of the Guarneri viola preferred by Primrose throughout much of his career. Here, too, Däunert and the Aldeburgh Strings musicians follow the composer’s meanderings expertly, the sinuous textures of the music sometimes reminiscent of the ethereal writing for strings in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The melancholy that colors Dowland’s songs is subtly evinced by Szücs’s noble phrasing and soothed by Däunert’s insightfully-gauged support.

Composed in 1943, the Opus 29 Prelude and Fugue for strings in eighteen parts is an aptly unsettled bridge between the other works on the disc and the Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings, the composition of which it immediately followed. The Prelude is played with the gravitas that the music demands, each musician clearly attentive to the importance of her or his part to the Prelude’s shifting tonalities and the crucial violin solo lines beautifully realized by Däunert. Performance of a fugue with an unique part for each of the eighteen instruments, a device familiar from the polyphonic masterpieces of Thomas Tallis, requires extensive resources of concentration, rhythmic precision, and uninhibited cooperation. This performance displays an abundance of these resources, the Aldeburgh Strings producing detailed, engaging vignettes that unite in a complex but marvelously coherent musical mosaic. Throughout this traversal of the Fugue, the inventiveness of Britten’s contrapuntal writing is evident. Though not as widely-known as his Simple Symphony and Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge for similar forces, the Opus 29 Prelude and Fugue constitute one of Britten’s most accomplished works, a distinction made audible in the performance on this disc.

It is no coincidence that horn soloist Richard Watkins occupies the Dennis Brain Chair on the faculty of the Royal Academy of Music. Continuing the legacy of Brain, at whose suggestion the Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings was composed in 1943, whilst Britten convalesced from a serious bout with measles and concurrently toiled on the libretto for his opera Peter Grimes, and Barry Tuckwell, with whom Britten recorded the Serenade two decades after its première, Watkins acquits himself impeccably in this performance of the Serenade. His easy command of the horn’s infamously tricky natural harmonics, exploited to chilling effect by Britten, is nothing short of remarkable, but the technical mastery of his playing never overwhelms its innate expressivity. Especially in the Serenade’s Prologue and Epilogue, entrusted solely to the horn, Watkins rises to the challenges of Britten’s music spectacularly, producing a stream of even, accurately-pitched tones that fully expose the genius of the composer’s writing for the instrument.

Not surprisingly, the vocal part in the Serenade was written for and first performed by Sir Peter Pears, Britten’s partner in life and music and the muse for whom the composer created a succession of the finest tenor rôles in Twentieth-Century opera. With his opening phrase in ‘Pastoral,’ his elocution of Charles Cotton’s text shaped by an audible sensitivity to Britten’s use of consonants as rhythmic markers, Clayton establishes himself as a triumphantly worthy successor to Pears. The serenity with which the younger tenor delivers the line ‘The shadows now so long do grow’ ideally complements the yearning discord lurking within the music. Lord Tennyson’s words in ‘Nocturne’ are articulated with equal comprehension, the contrasting open and closed vowels in the lines ‘O love, they die in yon rich sky, / They faint on fill or field or river’ enunciated with clarity that enhances the gnawing harmonic complexity of Britten’s setting. With a haunting text by William Blake, ‘Elegy’ is among its composer’s most poignant inspirations, its vocal line so meticulously sculpted for Pears’s sinewy voice that even speaking the words in time to the music seems to recreate the graceful whirr of his singing. Clayton’s voice is both more beautiful and more secure throughout the range than Pears’s, but the forthrightness with which he limns the distress of lines like ‘O rose, thou art sick’ recalls Pears’s interpretive perspicuity.

The anonymous text drawn from the Lyke-Wake Dirge melds with Britten’s music in ‘Dirge’ with a sensual desolation that gains pathos from the sincerity with which Clayton sings ‘If even thou gavest hosen and shoon.’ Like all of its companion movements in the Serenade, ‘Hymn’ receives from tenor and musicians a reading of unflappable musicality and intelligence, their seamless collaboration yielding extraordinary dividends. Here, too, Clayton’s use of text, in this instance by Ben Jonson, heightens the impact of the composer’s harmonies, so carefully crafted to complement the nuances of the words, not least in the passage beginning with ‘Earth, let not thy envious shade.’ Tapping the vein of melody in John Keats’s verse, ‘Sonnet’ inspires singer and musicians to starkly persuasive, startlingly lucid music making, the sting of the lines ‘Turn the key deftly in the oilèd wards, / And seal the hushèd / Casket of my Soul’ surging from the disc. In the Serenade and in Britten’s music in general, the foremost pleasures are almost always found in the dialogues among artists instigated by the intimacy of even his most expansively-constructed scores. Forcing nothing, Clayton and his colleagues here converse with the camaraderie of beloved friends. Is this not the truest essence of what music is meant to achieve?

Likely born in 1716 or 1717, only a few years after the death of the heirless Queen Anne ended the Stuart dynasty and settled the English crown on the heads of the German-speaking Electors of Hannover, the tenor John Beard was not only one of the most renowned singers of the Eighteenth Century but was also one of the few lower-voiced singers who managed to snatch leading, heroic rôles in operas and oratorios from the gilded throats of castrati. That he earned the respect and endorsement of a man as particular as Georg Friedrich Händel is indicative of the tremendous quality of Beard’s voice and the integrity of his artistry. As a gentleman of the Commonwealth might suggest, though, the proof of Beard’s importance to Eighteenth-Century British music is in the pudding, and the music composed for or adopted by Beard constitutes a deliciously rich concoction. After hearing the selections on this Signum Classics disc, it is perplexing to note that programmatic exploration of repertory associated with Beard has heretofore been rare. Not merely owing to its subject is this disc unusual, however: here, too, Allan Clayton offers singing of a caliber that both discloses his own skills and highlights the accomplishments of the composers whose music he sings. How might one better pay homage to a legendary artist of the past than by performing music that formed his artistic identity with fresh insights and imagination?

Neither Thomas Arne nor William Boyce is as appreciated by Twenty-First-Century listeners as his talents and fame in Eighteenth-Century Britain merit, but Beard was more generous with his gifts than modern-day observers are with their attention. Anyone who has heard the familiar strains of the chorus of ‘Rule, Britannia’ in a film or television score has encountered Arne’s music, perhaps unknowingly, and the composer’s Artaxerxes was one of the most successful English operas of the Eighteenth Century, its notoriety having been so great that it was during a performance of the Metastasio-derived Artaxerxes that rioters chose to destructively object to an ill-timed elimination of discounted tickets. The air ‘Thou, like the glorious sun’ is indicative of the quality of the score, and the performance that it receives is indicative of the quality of Clayton’s singing on this disc. Every note of the music and syllable of the text are given their due, and Clayton phrases with a poet’s feeling for words. The Sinfonia prefacing Part Two of Boyce’s masterful 1742 oratorio Solomon introduces a sequence of beautifully-written numbers that give credence to the reputation that the composer enjoyed among his contemporaries. Clayton sings both the recitative ‘My fair’s a garden of delight’ and the air ‘Softly rise, o southern breeze’ contemplatively but with unmistakable histrionic thrust. The superbly-trained voices of the Choir of Classical Opera deliver ‘Ye southern breezes gently blow’ rousingly, the balance among parts absolutely ideal and the words cleanly articulated.

Born in the Bavarian town of Ansbach, John Christopher Smith followed his father to London and into service to Händel, for whom he was copyist and, after the older composer’s blindness prevented him from leading public performances of his own music, conductor until Händel’s death in 1759. Though not on par with the quality of his employer’s scores, Smith’s surviving works reveal charm and well-crafted vocal writing and instrumentation that bear the stamp of Händel’s influence. In the delightful air ‘Hark how the hounds and horn’ from Smith’s 1755 opera The Fairies, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Clayton sings with the boyish playfulness of Puck, the aristocratic elegance of Theseus, and the romantic ardor of Demetrius and Lysander. Smith asks nothing of the tenor that he cannot supply with panache, and his buoyant rhythmic accuracy conveys all the enchantment of the text and the opera’s plot.

Taking full advantage of the unfailingly period-appropriate but never pedantic support of the Orchestra of Classical Opera and conductor Ian Page, the selections by Händel constitute a fascinating explication of the working relationship between the master composer and one of his most trusted interpreters. Clayton provides precisely the jubilant spirit and musical exuberance that the delightful air ‘Tune your harps to cheerful strains’ from Esther requires, and his Italian diction proves no less vibrant than his native tongue in his impeccably stylish performance of the aria ‘Sol nel mezzo risona del core’ from the too-seldom-performed Il pastor fido.

The winningly dovetailed seriousness of purpose and youthful energy that made their recent account of Mozart’s Il re pastore one of the finest opera recordings of recent years distinguish the Classical Opera personnel’s dramatically-charged playing of the Sinfonia that opens Act Two of Ariodante. Following Page’s lead, Clayton voices the daunting aria ‘Tu vivi, e punito’ thrillingly, his bravura technique as impressive as his handling of more introverted music. The recitative ‘M’inganna, me n’avveggo’ and aria ‘Un momento di contento’ from Alcina could hardly make a greater contrast, and the tenor’s poised vocalism fills the long-breathed lines of ‘Un momento di contento’ exquisitely, the simple beauty of his timbre highlighting the communicative power of Händel’s genius. No less noteworthy is Clayton’s singing of ‘Vedi l’ape che ingegnosa’ from Berenice. In this aria, too, his affinity for musical storytelling is wonderfully apparent.

If there is a more euphonious recorded performance of music from the Eighteenth Century than Clayton’s account with radiant-voiced soprano Mary Bevan of the duet ‘As steals the morn upon the night’ from Händel’s 1740 John Milton-inspired ode L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, there are no words adequate to describe it. In reality, mere words are sorry company for Clayton’s and Bevan’s singing, as well. There is an almost erotic tension in the serpentine intertwining of their voices, and the singers effortlessly match flawless intonation with unobtrusive vibrato. In the recitative ‘Let but that spirit’ and air ‘Thus when the sun from’s wat’ry bed’ from Samson and the recitative ‘’Tis well, my friends’ and air ‘Call forth thy pow’rs, my soul, and dare’ from Judas Maccabaeus, Clayton’s tones ring out magnificently, his commands of dynamics and tonal shading enlivening every bar of the music. The same is true of his performance—and, make no mistake, it is a wholly thought-out performance, not a strictly-for-the-microphone studio run-through—of the air ‘Hide thou thy hated beams, O sun, in clouds,’ the stirring accompagnato ‘A father, off’ring up his only child,’ and the grandiloquent air ‘Waft her, angels, through the skies’ from Jephtha. The many wonders of these pieces and the sublime air and chorus ‘Happy pair’ from Alexander’s Feast pour forth from Clayton and his Classical Opera colleagues with boundless finesse.

Jupiter’s ‘Where’re you walk’ from Händel’s Semele is surely the best-qualified candidate for the dubious distinction of being the Baroque aria for tenor as hackneyed as the Duca di Mantova’s ‘La donna è mobile’ from Verdi’s Rigoletto and Calàf’s ‘Nessun dorma’ from Puccini’s Turandot. Like those later tunes, it has been sung by virtually every tenor of the past three centuries, regardless of familiarity with the requisite style. Beard sang Jupiter in Semele’s 1744 première, but the rôle might have been tailor-made for Clayton. As the younger tenor sings it on this disc, the aria is wholly the amorous, hypnotic number that Händel clearly intended it to be, an oasis amidst Semele’s calamities, conflicts, and conniving. Framing the air with a pointed reading of the recitative ‘See, she appears,’ Clayton devotes an appealing lightness to the familiar music. Throughout this recital, Clayton honors traditions by looking beyond them, honoring Beard by singing music familiar to him with precisely the commitment and adroitness that surely endeared the illustrious tenor to Händel.

In the three centuries since the birth of John Beard, Britain has produced a number of fine tenors, among whom Gervase Elwes, Heddle Nash, Alexander Young, Richard Lewis, John Mitchinson, Stuart Burrows, Ian Partridge, and Anthony Rolfe-Johnson have been some of the most renowned. The rightly-lamented Rolfe-Johnson finds in Allan Clayton’s lustrous, lyrical vocalism a legitimate heir, but these discs confirm that, artistically, Clayton is his own man. Nearly fifty years ago, Mama Cass Elliot entreated us to ‘make your own kind of music,’ to find our own ways even among the too-trodden ways of the past. How much there is to enjoy in these recorded products of Allan Clayton having taken that advice to heart!

Man with a Händel on Britten: Tenor Allan Clayton [Photo by Laura Harling, © by Allan Clayton/Maestro Arts]

CD REVIEW: R. Nathaniel Dett — THE ORDERING OF MOSES (L. Moore, R. N. Miller, R. Dixon, D. R. Albert; Bridge Records BRIDGE 9462)

ROBERT NATHANIEL DETT (1882 – 1943): The Ordering of Moses—Latonia Moore (Miriam), Ronnita Nicole Miller (The Voice of Israel), Rodrick Dixon (Moses), Donnie Ray Albert (The Voice of God, The Word); May Festival Chorus; Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra; James Conlon, conductor [Recorded ‘live’ in concert in Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage, Carnegie Hall, New York City, USA, during the Spring for Music Festival on 9 May 2014; Bridge Records BRIDGE 9462; 1 CD, 48:32; Available from Bridge Records, Amazon (USA), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

Judged before ever producing a single note based upon age, appearance, ethnicity, faith, sexual preference, weight, and countless other spoken and unspoken prejudicial criteria, the discrimination that today’s musicians are charged with overcoming is perhaps less in frequency of occurrence than that endured by previous generations of artists but is surely not reduced in ferocity. It is said that music is the universal language, but far too many people in far too many communities throughout the world are denied the wonders of exposure to and tutelage in the dialects of Classical Music because of factors having nothing to do with their capacities for absorbing, enjoying, and practicing musical conversations. Even now, when new and rejuvenated media platforms facilitate the dispersion of cultural endeavors on a global scale, opportunities are not so bountiful as to ensure dependable, satisfying work for every aspiring artist, but neither are significant musicians so prevalent as to warrant thinning their ranks by excluding individuals because of who they are (or are not) rather than what they can (or cannot) do. That in 2016, when composers from every recess of merited and unmerited obscurity have joined the ranks of Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms in the playbills of the world’s concert halls, the Canadian-born Robert Nathaniel Dett remains a little-known presence among the respected composers of the first half of the Twentieth Century is a travesty for which there is no polite explanation. Recorded in performance at Carnegie Hall during the Spring for Music Festival on 9 May 2014, and preserved in sound of great immediacy and depth—nothing less than the music deserves—by WQXR and Bridge Records, Dett’s The Ordering of Moses compellingly inventories this neglected master’s prodigious gifts. What some listeners might be inclined to dismiss as a curiosity is here performed with the ardor devoted to traversals of acknowledged masterpieces. Hearing is believing, conventional wisdom would have it, and to hear this performance of The Ordering of Moses is to believe that talent can and must always prevail over prejudice.

Dett’s musical language in his 1932 oratorio The Ordering of Moses is a complex synthesis of original idioms and accents borrowed from composers ranging from Schumann and Brahms to Bruckner and Nadia Boulanger, with whom Dett studied in Paris. For the work of a composer born in Canada and resident throughout much of his career in the United States, where his professional attachments included a stint as Music Director at Bennett College in Greensboro, North Carolina, The Ordering of Moses is surprisingly untouched by the broad grasp of the English choral tradition: there are occasional hints of the Elgar of Caractacus, but Dett’s voice is prevailingly cosmopolitan and Continental, more influenced by Dvořák and Debussy than by music of the Commonwealth. It was by the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra that The Ordering of Moses was premièred at the 1937 May Festival, during which NBC’s broadcast of the first performance was famously interrupted without comment, perhaps in reaction to objections to nationwide broadcast of music by a prominent Black composer. [In the Carnegie Hall performance and WQXR broadcast that yielded this recording, archival broadcast tapes from 1937 were employed to recreate the atmosphere of the first performance, including NBC’s introduction of the work as the product of a ‘Negro’ composer and the abrupt termination of the broadcast. Dedicated to communicating the cumulative impact of Dett’s score, the CD release does not include these supplements.] Nearly eight decades after the oratorio’s first performance, the current generation of Cincinnati Symphony musicians play the score with great skill, the music’s passages of Mahlerian gravitas executed with vigor that does not overwhelm the moments of more inward contemplation. All sections of the orchestra are manned with capable technicians whose work discloses not only a high level of musicality but also the rare art of truly listening to one another.​ Whether Sir Eugene Goossens, who conducted that auspicious first performance of The Ordering of Moses, wielded as complete an understanding of Dett’s music as American conductor James Conlon exhibits in this performance can be debated, but the strength that the score gains from Conlon’s leadership is undeniable. Long a champion of undervalued American composers and their music, Conlon makes no attempts to apologize for or gloss over the minimal defects of Dett’s music, foremost among which is an over-reliance on dynamic extremes to impart dramatic magnitude. Conlon’s tempi consistently enable the performers to dispatch their parts with accuracy and enthusiasm. Many conductors could learn from Conlon’s approach: permitted to make its points on its own terms, Dett’s music reveals its glories with verve that confirms not only its stageworthiness but the senselessness of the neglect to which its composer has been subjected in the seventy-three years since his premature death.

​​Prepared by Robert Porco, the 150 ladies and gentlemen of the May Festival Chorus sing Dett’s music with zeal that matches the momentousness of the words and the power of the composer’s responses to them. From the first bars of ‘By reason of their bondage,’ the choir’s animated singing keenly exudes both the singers’ commitment to the score and their attention to every nuance of the composer’s part writing. The piquant rhythms and cadences of jazz emerge in isolated phrases, but the presiding ethos is that of the great oratorios of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, Händel’s Judas Maccabaeus, Haydn’s Die Schöpfung, Mendelssohn’s Elijah, and Liszt’s Christus. The choristers’ animated performance lends ‘And from a burning bush, flaming, God spake unto Moses’ and ‘Go down, Moses, way down in Egypt’s land’ the momentum that the story needs. The unaffected sincerity with which ‘Hallelujah, hallelujah, let us praise Jehovah,’ ‘Thy right hand, O Lord, is become glorious in power,’ and ‘He is King of kings; He is Lord of lords’​ are sung transforms the chorus from a body of observers into a true community participating in the oratorio’s action. As recorded, there are slight deficiencies in the balances among voices that affect the choral singing at top volume, but the raw aural and emotional impact of 150 voices resonantly uplifted in song is phenomenally thrilling.

Too numerous to count are the works and performances of them that the participation of a quartet of soloists of the quality of the four singers assembled for this performance of The Ordering of Moses would lift from the mundane to the magnificent. Many a Beethoven Ninth and Mahler Eighth could be rescued from banality by singing such as mezzo-soprano Ronnita Nicole Miller accomplishes in her embodiment of The Voice of Israel. Commendably even-toned throughout the range required by her music, Miller’s voice is lushly beautiful, her singing of ‘O Lord, behold my affliction’ a stretch of firm, focused vocalism in the tradition of Marian Anderson and Carol Brice. It is the haunting voice of Brazilian contralto Maura Moreira that Miller’s singing in this performance most readily brings to mind, however. Already heard in numerous leading rôles in European opera houses and as a granite-voiced Norn in Wagner’s Götterdämmerung at the Metropolitan Opera, Miller is a singer of tremendous potential whose superlative singing in The Ordering of Moses is but the proverbial tip of her artistic iceberg.

Endowed with a voice of imposing, Wagnerian grandeur, baritone Donnie Ray Albert is an ideal choice for delivering the consequential utterances of The Word and The Voice of God. Declaiming God’s ‘Who hath made a man dumb, or who hath made his mouth speak?’ with the force of breakers crashing upon the shore, Albert is an apt musical conduit for Providence, his timbre conveying an irrefutable authority that both awes and soothes. He articulates The Word’s ‘And when Moses smote the water’ and ‘Then did the women of Israel gather with timbrels and dances’ with wonderful diction, his elocution giving each syllable of the text an indelible purpose within the narrative. Among the soloists, Albert suffers most from the composer’s use of volume as a storytelling device, the voice occasionally forced uncomfortably in pursuit of the grandiloquence sought by Dett. Albert is a shrewd singer, though, and his sonorous vocalism provides this performance of The Ordering of Moses with a foundation as unshakable as Jebel Musa.

​When soprano Latonia Moore débuted at the Metropolitan Opera in the title rôle of Verdi’s Aida in a 2012 Saturday matinée broadcast performance savored by opera lovers throughout the world, the emergence of a major new American voice was rightly heralded. When Moore returned to the MET stage in 2016 to continue the legacy of Leontyne Price and Martina Arroyo as Cio-Cio-San in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, the soprano revealed her vocal production and technique to be even more refined than when heard in 2012. In some ways, her portrayal of Moses’s sister Miriam in The Ordering of Moses is the best of these New York outings. Moore voices ‘Come, let us praise Jehovah’ and ‘O praise ye, Praise ye Jehovah, Praise His holy name!’ with the bel canto integration of vocal registers that distinguishes her Verdi singing. Exclaiming the ‘Song of the Sea’ (the Hebrew שירת הים), sometimes cited as one of the earliest scriptural celebrations of the Exodus, Moore sings ‘The horse and his rider He hath thrown into the sea!’ exhilaratingly, and the pious sincerity that shapes her readings of ‘And He hath become my salvation!’ and ‘My fathers’ God, and I will exalt Him’ is arresting. In the final ‘Jehovah shall reign forever and ever!’ with Moses, Moore is taxed by the range of the part, but she holds nothing back, soaring to the final high note with the power of a Brünnhilde conquering the last scene of Siegfried. An entrancingly melodic prophetess, this Miriam certainly possesses the ‘tuneful voice’ attributed to her in Thomas Morell’s libretto for Händel’s Joshua!

The rôle of Moses is heroic on the scale of Händel’s Samson and Elgar’s Gerontius and demands vocal and dramatic charisma that he receives in spades from tenor Rodrick Dixon. In a practical sense, Moses was one of humanity’s greatest salesmen, ‘pitching’ an intangible product to an oppressed people desperate for deliverance. Such an endeavor requires steely resolve and sensitivity in equal measures, and it is this balance that Dixon’s singing displays. The self-doubt that plagues Moses as he sings ‘Lord! Who am I to go unto Pharaoh’ finds an ideal outlet in the lyricism of Dixon’s singing, and the absolute confidence with which the tenor voices ‘I will praise Jehovah,’ ‘Sing ye to Jehovah,’ and ‘O praise ye, Praise Jehovah, Praise His holy name!’ credibly establishes his Moses as the iron-willed but humble instrument of the Israelites’ liberation. His accounts of the increasingly profound ‘I will sing unto Jehovah, for He hath triumphed gloriously,’ ‘Jehovah is my strength and my song,’ and ‘This is my God, and I will praise Him!’ mark him as an expressive artist of the first order. Dixon’s incandescent vocalism makes ‘Thou, Lord, in Thy loving kindness hast led the people, whom Thou hast redeemed!’ a statement of both deeply personal and universal faith. Fearlessly joining with with Moore’s Miriam, Dixon’s Moses voices ‘Jehovah shall reign forever and ever!’ with ringing fortitude, the siblings crowning the oratorio with an effusion in unison that could have been borrowed from Giordano’s Andrea Chénier and Maddalena de Coigny. Like any epic hero of the stage, Dett’s Moses needs an interpreter whose individual gifts equip him to find the vulnerability beneath the vanity that is a component of a paragon’s psyche and in Dixon has precisely that.

The institutional stupidity that barred the doors of many of America’s musical temples to generations of artists of color may now be largely eradicated, but the juggernaut of hard-earned equality still fails to progress into every niche of the Performing Arts. When compositions in Classical veins by popular white songwriters like Sir Paul McCartney and Roger Waters are encouraged, financed, performed, and praised, where are the commissions for Lieder cycles, operas, and oratorios from today’s brilliant songsmiths of color, musical poets like Andra Day, John Legend, and Janelle Monáe? When the world’s theatres reverberate with the sounds of music by white composers whose names are unfamiliar to all but the most punctilious scholars, why do the thoughtfully-crafted scores of Charles Lucien Lambert, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Rudolph Dunbar, and William Grant Still lay in silence? With this recorded performance that movingly pays homage to both its composer and its exalted subject, Robert Nathaniel Dett’s The Ordering of Moses roars out of the silence. May its voice lead other products of suppressed genius into the light.

ARTS IN ACTION: Uruguayan soprano MARÍA JOSÉ SIRI tapped to open Teatro alla Scala’s 2016 – 2017 Season as Puccini’s Cio-Cio-San

Bella Butterfly: Uruguayan soprano María José Siri, scheduled to open Teatro alla Scala’s 2016 – 2017 Season in the title rôle of Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly on 7 December 2016 [Photo © by David Puig]

The American attorney and author John Luther Long wrote of the pair of lovers in his 1898 short story ‘Madame Butterfly’ that ‘when you know what Cho-Cho-San’s smile was like,—and her hand—and its touch,—you will wonder how Pinkerton resisted her. However, he only laughed at her,—goodnaturedly always,—and said no.’ Long was describing the American sailor’s refusal of his demure, devoted bride’s request that her relations be permitted to visit her in her new home, symbolically Americanized by the addition of locks to the traditional Japanese screens in order, as Luther wrote, ‘to keep out those who are out, and in those who are in.’ It is the disarming tenderness of her smile and the exquisite limpidity of her touch, qualities as crucial to the effectiveness of librettists Luigi Illica’s and Giuseppe Giacosa’s heroine upon the operatic stage as to that of Long’s delicate geisha upon the page, that are missing from so many portrayals of Cio-Cio-San in Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. When the 2016 – 2017 Teatro alla Scala season opens on 7 December 2016, with a performance of Puccini’s adaptation of Long’s tale of tragic devotion and betrayal in Nagasaki featuring soprano María José Siri as the opera’s delicate but determined heroine, the sweet-spirited girl’s feminine qualities will be entrusted to one of today’s most capable singing actresses. Continuing the grand tradition of Toti Dal Monte and Margaret Sheridan, very different but unforgettable interpreters of Cio-Cio-San in Madama Butterfly’s century-long history at La Scala, the stunning beautiful Siri will collaborate with conductor Riccardo Chailly to reacquaint Milan audiences with Cio-Cio-San as Puccini first brought her to life in song.

Born in Uruguay but now living in Italy, Siri brings to her rôle début as Cio-Cio-San credentials spanning a broad repertory, her especially notable success in Verdi repertory extending from thrilling performances of the treacherous music for Odabella in Attila to the title rôle in Aida, a part in which she has garnered acclaim at La Scala and the Arena di Verona, as well as in Russia, Brazil, and her native Uruguay. In the Puccini canon, her Manon Lescaut, Mimì in La bohème, and Tosca are already much-admired characterizations, and her portrayal of the grueling protagonist of Suor Angelica, heard in Copenhagen in 2014 and reprised in a production that opened today, 28 May 2016, at Naples’s famed Teatro di San Carlo, is poised to become one of the current generation’s most complete realizations of this challenging part. Nevertheless, Siri is alert to the unique demands of Cio-Cio-San. ‘I have been preparing to face this character for quite some time,’ the soprano recently stated, reflecting on the musical and dramatic requirements of Puccini’s music. ‘I’m particularly happy because I [have] never sung with Riccardo Chailly, and I had never sung Madama Butterfly before when the Maestro, who is a great interpreter of Puccini, heard me and chose me for the rôle. I’m also happy to be singing the critical edition of the opera, becoming part of Chailly’s project for La Scala, [which] intends to present Puccini’s operas in their original versions,’ she said. Soon after opening the La Scala season in Madama Butterfly, Siri reunites with Maestro Chailly in Berlin in January 2017, when she will sing the soprano solos in Verdi’s Messa da Requiem with the Berliner Philharmoniker, and, if her first Cio-Cio-San were not daunting enough, she sings her first Norma in Bellini’s bel canto masterpiece at the 52^nd Macerata Opera Festival, opening in the historic Arena Sferisterio on 23 July 2016.

 

To learn more about María José Siri’s exciting career and upcoming engagements, please visit her website. Tickets for the remaining Naples performances of Suor Angelica, paired with Enrique Granados’s Goyescas, and the Macerata Norma are on sale now, and tickets for Madama Butterfly at La Scala will be available from 11 October 2016.

Soprano del Sur: Uruguayan soprano María José Siri, scheduled to open Teatro alla Scala’s 2016 – 2017 Season in the title rôle of Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly on 7 December 2016 [Photo © by Victor Santiago]

PERFORMANCE REVIEW: Richard Wagner — GÖTTERDÄMMERUNG (N. Stemme, D. Brenna, M. Citro, R. McKinny, E. Halfvarson, G. Hawkins, J. Barton; Washington National Opera, 22 May 2016)

RICHARD WAGNER (1813 – 1883): Götterdämmerung, WWV 86D—Nina Stemme (Brünnhilde), Daniel Brenna (Siegfried), Melissa Citro (Gutrune), Ryan McKinny (Gunther), Eric Halfvarson (Hagen), Gordon Hawkins (Alberich), Jamie Barton (Waltraute, Zweite Norn), Lindsay Ammann (Erste Norn), Marcy Stonikas (Dritte Norn), Jacqueline Echols (Woglinde), Catherine Martin (Wellgunde), Renée Tatum (Floßhilde); Washington National Opera Chorus and Orchestra; Philippe Auguin, conductor [Francesca Zambello, Director; Michael Yeargan, Set Designer; Catherine Zuber, Costume Designer; Mark McCullough, Lighting Designer; S. Katy Tucker and Jan Hartley, Projection Designers; Denni Sayers, Movement Director; Washington National Opera, Opera House, The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington, D.C., USA; Sunday, 22 May 2016]

When in the wee hours of 18 August 1876, the curtain fell on the world première of Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, inaugurating the composer’s custom-built Bayreuther Festspielhaus with the first complete performance of Der Ring des Nibelungen, much of the world slumbered in blissful ignorance of the extraordinary ways in which the course of operatic history had been altered. Like the New Madrid earthquakes of 1811 and 1812 that upset the flow of the Mississippi River, Wagner’s Ring was a seismic jolt to the composition and performance of opera, the aftershocks of which remain perspective-permuting in the Twenty-First Century. Especially among Teutonic composers, it became necessary in the final quarter of the Nineteenth Century to declare an allegiance, either espousing or rejecting the lessons of Wagner’s concept of music drama. Upon listening closely to their music, however, one often finds that Wagner’s detractors were as strongly influenced by his work as his disciples: flattery may be the highest form of compliment, but concerted reactionary efforts are perhaps a truer gauge of the consequence of an artistic entity. Whether composers of subsequent generations revered or reviled Wagner, their endeavors were shaped by his example. The characters and situations in Götterdämmerung continue to assume new identities and diverse forms in works for the stage. Siegfried at odds with his social surroundings is a direct ancestor of Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler, Berg’s Wozzeck, Britten’s Peter Grimes and Billy Budd, Martinů’s Manolios, Glass’s Galileo and Gandhi, and Adès’s Prospero, just as Brünnhilde as the instrument of redemption is the spiritual godmother of Strauss’s Färberin, Puccini’s Liù, Berg’s Gräfin Geschwitz, and Poulenc’s Madame Lidoine. The necessity of meeting the opera’s Herculean musical demands notwithstanding, a wholly successful performance of Götterdämmerung is distinguished from a merely proficient one by the intelligibility with which Wagner’s characters and their fates stimulate the audience’s emotions. The culmination of a decade of preparation, the Götterdämmerung that closed the third and final of Washington National Opera’s Rings was a performance in which more than four hours of music seemed like only a few minutes. Mere proficiency in this score is dismayingly rare, but Götterdämmerungs such as this one, an afternoon that found every participant at her or his best, are justifiably legendary.

Staging Wagner’s Ring is an opera company’s Denali, Everest, K2, and Kilimanjaro condensed into one epic, four-part undertaking. Thankfully, Wagner’s confounding tetralogy claims fewer lives than the icy slopes of its geological counterparts, but its heights are similarly treacherous—and, in a practical sense, it pulverizes lungs as mercilessly as those peaks’ oxygen-depleted atmospheres. As Bayreuth productions by Wagner progeny and Metropolitan Opera outings supervised by Herbert von Karajan and Robert Lepage attest, controversy is as traditional a component of Der Ring as the Valkyries’ much-parodied horned helmets. Acclaimed director Francesca Zambello is a Wagnerian of proven vision and resourcefulness whose gift for peeling away layers of accumulated grime—and the grunge of controversy—in order to reveal scores’ purest essences has never been more eloquently evident than in this Götterdämmerung. Refined through outings of the constituent operas in San Francisco and Washington, Zambello’s Ring is emblematic of the ways in which the technological marvels of the modern age can be used to highlight the timelessness of Wagner’s musical and dramatic conceits, here heightened by an ecological subtext that movingly examines the disastrous ways in which human greed destroys not only lives but the earth that sustains them. Sharpened by Michael Yeargan’s abstract but starkly beautiful set designs, Mark McCullough’s often ingenious lighting designs, and the alternately menacing and mesmerizing projections by S. Katy Tucker and Jan Hartley, the focus of Zambello’s examination of Götterdämmerung’s emotional foundation was centered on the multitude of ramifications of betrayal. The Norns are betrayed by their fraying cables, Gunther by his own lust for prestige, Hagen by his utter inability to fathom true heroism, the Rhinemaidens by the sickening ruin of their riparian home, and Gutrune by her desperate need for love. Like Santuzza in Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana, Brünnhilde betrays both Siegfried and herself by revealing his vulnerability to Hagen. Her concept furthered by Catherine Zuber’s vibrant, evocative costumes, Anne Ford-Coates’s hair and makeup designs, and Denni Sayers’s movement direction, which combined to give each character credible specificity, Zambello germinated the seeds of coexisting humanity and conservationism that Wagner deposited into the rich soil of Götterdämmerung. In this production, the opera was not so much a tale of metaphysical redemption as of physical renewal, its defining images being those of the Gibichung women tossing refuse extricated from the waters of the Rhine and, even more significantly, their men’s guns onto Siegfried’s funeral pyre and a radiant young girl, a reborn Erda, planting a sapling as Brünnhilde disappears into the flames. Like Leonard Foglia’s production of Jake Heggie’s Moby-Dick, Zambello’s Götterdämmerung utilized Kennedy Center’s technical wizardry not to mire the composer’s score in the quicksand of invented effects but to free it to exert its own magic.

Near Capitol Hill, nicht auf dem Grünen Hügel: (from left to right) Director Francesca Zambello, soprano Nina Stemme (Brünnhilde), and conductor Philippe Auguin during curtain calls for Washington National Opera’s performance of Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, 22 May 2016 [Photo by the author]

From the first notes of the Vorspiel, it was apparent that the musicians of the Washington National Opera Orchestra were prepared, practiced, and poised to offer an account of Wagner’s score that would rival the best Ring performances of established Wagner centers from Bayreuth and Vienna to New York and Seattle. How proud WNO’s late Music Director Emeritus Heinz Fricke would have been of the sounds that emerged from the pit during the course of this Götterdämmerung! Under the baton of the company’s current Music Director, French conductor Philippe Auguin, the performance, virtually ideal of pacing and precision, possessed the sense of occasion that a performance of Götterdämmerung must have: it is a long score, after all, and, without compelling, consistent momentum, sounds it. Meticulously heeding Wagner’s dynamic markings, Auguin led the orchestra in an exhilarating display of their instruments’ capabilities, the playing consistently equal to that of the best orchestras in the world and often markedly superior to the work of most opera house orchestras. The brasses and woodwinds were incredible, and the percussion jolted the body like electricity in moments of greatest intensity. When the harps emerged from the din, it was with dramatically-charged purity of sound. The Norns, Waltraute, and the Rhinemaidens offered genuine narratives, but Auguin’s conducting of their scenes was so nuanced as to make these pages of the score seem newly written. The clarity and linear thrust of Auguin’s approach brought to mind the underrated Wagner conducting of the Belgian André Cluytens, and the WNO Orchestra fully realized his every intention. Götterdämmerung demands nothing less than it received from Auguin and the WNO musicians, but hearing the score brought to life with such wealths of emotion and virtuosity was nothing short of revelatory.

Encountered in the primordial environment of the opera’s opening scene, here placed amidst a jumble of gargantuan power cables in the bowels of American infrastructure, the Norns were in this production neither coldly symbolic nor shrewish harbingers of universal cataclysm. Like the Rheintöchter in the opening pages of Das Rheingold (and later in Götterdämmerung, as well), there was a gratifying sense of girlishness in the earnestness with which the Norns performed their fateful work, but there was no mistaking the prescience and significance of their utterances, particularly when they were voiced so strongly. As the Erste Norn, contralto Lindsay Ammann—the strikingly thoughtful and sonorously-sung Suzuki in North Carolina Opera’s Autumn 2015 Madama Butterfly—introduced herself with a statement of ‘Welch Lieht leuchtet dort?’ that resounded through the auditorium. She was joined by the Zweite Norn of acclaimed mezzo-soprano and 2015 Richard Tucker Award recipient Jamie Barton, her singing of ‘Dämmert der Tag schon auf?’ meriting comparison with the Wagner singing of Oralia Domínguez and Lili Chookasian. When to their company was added the voice of soprano Marcy Stonikas, to be heard as Turandot in Atlanta Opera’s 2016 – 2017 Season, in the Dritte Norn’s ‘Loges Heer lodert feurig um den Fels,’ the trinity claimed a rightful place at the core of the drama. Stonikas wielded a formidable top G, but all three ladies were completely and reliably in control of the tessitura of their music. Individually and collectively, Ammann, Barton, and Stonikas were rare Norns whose forebodings were as entrancingly attractive as they were dramatically portentous.

Auf den Seilen: (from left to right) Soprano Marcy Stonikas, contralto Lindsay Ammann, and mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton as Die Nornen in Francesca Zambello’s production of Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung at Washington National Opera, May 2016 [Photo by Scott Suchman, © by Washington National Opera]

Auguin led the orchestra in sinuous, unabashedly erotic accounts of the Sonnenaufgang and Voller Tag, Wagner’s depictions of sunrise and ‘complete day,’ that were an aptly impassioned introduction to the momentous dawn duet and the powerhouse vocal actors who sang it. Fresh from a triumphant portrayal of the title rôle in the Metropolitan Opera’s incarnation of the much-lauded Patrice Chéreau production of Richard Strauss’s Elektra, the final performance of which was only two weeks ago [her first Washington Brünnhilde was sung in the third Cycle’s Die Walküre on 18 May], Swedish soprano Nina Stemme enriched Washington National Opera’s Götterdämmerung with a Brünnhilde of deftly-contrasted strength and subtlety, her interpretation of the Valkyrie still coming to terms with womanhood by turns galvanizing and deeply touching. When this Brünnhilde sang ‘Zu neuen Taten, teuer Helde,’ her excitement was both amorous and palpably psychological. Her ‘O heilige Götter!’ was monumental, and Stemme’s expansive, seemingly indefatigable voice made easy going of the repeated top A♭s and rising line to top B♭s. Her glorious top C at the duet’s end was neither forced nor frantic: she simply had the note and launched it into the auditorium with security, certain intonation, and amplitude that Donner at his most tempestuous could only envy. Having earned praise for his MET début as Alwa in Alban Berg’s Lulu earlier this season, American tenor Daniel Brenna was an able partner for Stemme, his Siegfried matching her Brünnhilde with firm tone, excellent pitch, and engaging youthfulness. Singing ‘Mehr gabst du Wunderfrau, als ich zu wahren weiss’ with abandon, Brenna immediately revealed his Siegfried to be a good-natured, fun-loving man-child who was as awed as he was enticed by his conquest. Giving Brünnhilde Alberich’s ring as a token of his devotion, Brenna’s Siegfried phrased ‘Lass’ ich, Liebste, dich hier in der Lohe heiliger Hut’ with iron-cored tenderness. As sung by Stemme and Brenna, Brünnhilde and Siegfried were believable lovers rather than two-dimensional marionettes being manipulated by the unseen hands of destiny.

Stewarding the transition to Act One, Auguin paced Siegfrieds Rheinfahrt slowly but with close attention to the story that it tells, not just masking a scene change but genuinely following the progress of Siegfried’s journey. When the curtain rose on the act’s first scene, the Gibichung Hall that emerged was a sleek Bauhaus edifice of steel and glass, its angular lines and garish animal prints in conflict with the landscape that it forcibly dominated. In the person of tall, handsome bass-baritone Ryan McKinny, the same could be said of Gunther: he seemed restless and uncomfortable among the trappings of his forebears’ accomplishments. As he voiced ‘Nun hör, Hagen, sage mir, Held,’ though, the singer’s comfort in the rôle’s music was absolute, and McKinny traversed the full range of his part without an iota of stress not required by the drama. One of America’s most admired and experienced Wagnerians, bass Eric Halfvarson was envious evil personified as Hagen, one of the nastiest characters in opera, but he gave Wagner’s music its due even when snarling malevolently. Halfvarson sang—ja, actually sang—‘Dieh echt gennanten acht’ ich zu neiden mich du!’ and ‘Siegfried, der Wälsungen Sproß: der ist der stärkste Held’ chillingly, little challenged by the top Fs. Lithe, seductive, and as beautiful as a platinum-locked Yvonne De Carlo, soprano Melissa Citro was a Gutrune who sang as alluringly as she looked. Her ‘Welche Tat schuf er so tapfer, daß als herrlichster Held er genannt?’ was the shy query of a demure young woman starved of affection. The inhabitants of Die Halle der Gibichungen am Rhein are grave liabilities in many performances of Götterdämmerung, but Washington National Opera populated the ancestral home with a current generation of top quality.

Der Bösewicht und seine Opfer: Bass-baritone Eric Halfvarson as Hagen (left) and soprano Melissa Citro as Gutrune (right) as Gutrune in Francesca Zambello’s production of Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung at Washington National Opera, May 2016 [Photo by Scott Suchman, © by Washington National Opera]

In Scene Two, Hagen’s rousing ‘Heil! Heil! Siegfried, teurer Held!’ was dispatched with ringing insinuation by Halfvarson and answered by a fresh-toned ‘Wer ist Gibichs Sohn?’ from Brenna’s endearingly befuddled Siegfried, those garish animal prints proving too great a temptation for the inquisitive young hero’s curiosity. McKinny’s stirringly masculine singing of Gunther’s ‘Begrüße froh, o Held, die Halle meines Vaters’ lent his welcoming of Siegfried sincerity that was eerily undermined by Halfvarson’s reptilian delivery of Hagen’s pointed ‘Doch des Nibelungenhortes nennt die Märe dich Herrn?’ There was nothing duplicitous in Citro’s elated enunciation of Gutrune’s ‘Willkommen, Gast, in Gibichs Haus!’ or her character’s attraction to the assertively virile Siegfried. Having fallen victim to Hagen’s poison and rashly proposed to Gutrune, Siegfried all too eagerly swore a blood oath with Gunther, the tenor’s voice gleaming in his broadly-phrased articulation of ‘Blühenden Lebens labendes Blut träufelt ich in den Trank.’ Brenna and McKinny sang ‘Treue trink’ ich dem Freund!’ thrillingly, their voices combining like lightning and thunder. Siegfried and Gunther having set off on their quest to fraudulently win Brünnhilde for the Gibichung’s bride, Halfvarson transformed Hagen’s watch into a monologue of startling dramatic potency, declaiming ‘Hier sitz’ ich zur Wacht, wahre den Hof’ with secure, oily tone and the intensity of a Shakespearean villain.

Auguin shaped the orchestral interlude that ushered in the seminal third scene with vehemence that uncannily exposed the poignant sadness, anxiety, and bitterness that suffuse the music. Stemme wove a fragile thread of uncertainty into her voicing of Brünnhilde’s ‘Altgewohntes Geräusch raunt meinem Ohr die Ferne,’ her descent to C4 like an expression of doubt and fear of which she was ashamed. Greeting her sister Waltraute, Stemme’s Brünnhilde was suddenly, tellingly metamorphosed from the battle-worn Valkyrie stripped of her dignity into a woman brimming with optimism and new life. Trading the Norn’s industrial garb for Waltraute’s aerial warrior’s attire, Jamie Barton voiced ‘Brünnhilde! Schwester! Schläfst oder wachst du?’ with hesitant trepidation, her lovely top G igniting the atmosphere atop Brünnhilde’s rock as illuminatingly as Loge’s fire. Obviously greatly affected by their reunion, the sisters questioned one another meaningfully, Stemme’s quicksilver ‘Kommst du zu mir? Bist du so kühn, magst ohne Grauen Brünnhild’ bieten den Gruß?’ followed by Barton’s pained ‘Teilen den Taumel, der dich Törin erfaßt?’​ ​and ‘Höre mit Sinn, was ich dir Sage!’ The mezzo-soprano’s climactic top G again filled the auditorium with glowing sound. That neither sister was unfailingly audible when her music took her to the bottom of the stave was clearly more Wagner’s doing than the singers’ or conductor’s. Brünnhilde’s ‘Welch banger Träume Mären meldest du Traurige mir!’ inspired Stemme to an outpouring of golden tone that seemed to burst from the hearts of both the character and the artist portraying her. Brünnhilde’s unwavering fidelity to Siegfried was expressed by a ringing top A, scorned by Waltraute with a contemptuous ‘Wehe! Wehe! Weh dir, Schwester! Walhalls Göttern Weh!’ in which Barton unleashed her own resplendent top A♭ and A.​ ​The raw emotion of Brünnhilde’s dismissal of her sister erupted in Stemme’s volcanic singing of ‘Blitzend Gewölk, vom Wild getragen, stürme dahin,’ the words hurled out with the stinging ferocity of the fallen Valkyrie’s perceived injury.

Greeting the Tarnhelm-clad figure ​she​ both rightly and wrongly identifie​d​ as the returning Siegfried with a tremendous top A and B♭, Stemme’s Brünnhilde cowered in fear as she grasped that the form before her was not that of Siegfried as she knew him. Horror propelled Stemme’s performance of ‘Verrat! – Wer drang zu mir?’ As Brünnhilde’s domestic bliss unraveled, the soprano’s singing took on an element of indignant defiance, her upper register used like a weapon against Notung’s blows. Impersonating Gunther without resorting to schoolyard mimicry or silly attempts at changing the voice, Brenna traversed Siegfried’s ‘Brünnhild’! Ein Freier kam, den dein Feuer nicht geschreckt’ with burgeoning anger and frustration, his sparring with Brünnhilde prompting particularly forceful singing and aptly chauvinistic behavior. Stemme capped ‘Wotan! Ergrimmter, grausamer Gott!’ with a mighty top A bettered only by her top B in ‘Stärker als Stahl macht mich der Ring: nie—raubst du ihn mir!’ Here and throughout the performance, Stemme sang with astounding tonal sheen and dramatic intensity. Watching her Brünnhilde struggle against Siegfried’s rough handling, it was virtually impossible to believe that she was braving the vocal tortures of Strauss’s Elektra as recently as two weeks ago. If this is how one sings Brünnhilde almost immediately after singing another of the most repertory’s most difficult rôles for soprano, all Brünnhildes should study Stemme’s example.

Der Tatort: (from left to right) Bass-baritone Ryan McKinny as Gunther, bass Eric Halfvarson as Hagen, and tenor Daniel Brenna as Siegfried in Francesca Zambello’s production of Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung at Washington National Opera, May 2016 [Photo by Scott Suchman, © by Washington National Opera]

After a playing of the Vorspiel to Act Two that crackled with growing tension and accompanied a disquietingly amusing scene in which the channel-surfing Hagen attempted to initiate contact with Gutrune that was anything but brotherly, baritone Gordon Hawkins literally arose from the abyss to intone Alberich’s ‘Schläfst du, Hagen, mein Sohn?’ Each repetition of the phrase grew more sinister, and Halfvarson growled Hagen’s reply, ‘Ich höre dich, schlimmer Albe,’ drowsily but with venomous irony. With a son of such moral emptiness, Alberich’s treachery was easily enacted, but Hawkins’s performance exuded complementary malfeasance and musicality. Driving ‘Den goldnen Ring, den Reif gilt’s zu erringen!’ into Hagen’s psyche like a dagger’s blade, this Alberich was a conniver, not a mindless thug whose sole train of thought was bound for violence. Hawkins delivered ‘Sei treu, Hagen, mein Sohn! Trauter Helde!—Sei treu! Sei treu!—Treu!’ with tone that both evoked the decay of death and grippingly conveyed the eternal magnetism of revenge. A Hagen such as Halfvarson could only have been the son of an Alberich such as Hawkins, whose vocalism was all the more effective as the sound of corruption and iniquity because it was so appealing.

Joining his false bride and brother-in-law, Brenna’s Siegfried bounded through the act’s second scene with the vigor of a rutting stag, singing ‘Hoiho, Hagen! Müder Mann! Siehst du mich kommen?’ brashly. The subterfuge of Halfvarson’s ‘Hei! Siegfried! Geschwinder Helde!’ was unmistakable, but the scene’s musical laurels ultimately belonged to Citro’s Gutrune, the soprano’s voice ringing out gorgeously in ‘Freia grüße dich zu aller Frauen Ehre!’ and ‘Siegfried! Mächtigster Mann!’ Her top As sliced through orchestral textures like laser beams. The subsequent scene was dominated by Halfvarson, who declaimed Hagen’s summoning of the vassals, ‘Hoiho! Hoihohoho! Ihr Gibichsmannen, machet euch auf,’ hair-raisingly, and his management of the droning Cs at the top of stave and trills in his exchanges with the chorus was masterful. Trained by Steve Gathman, the gentlemen of the Washington National Opera Chorus sang magnificently, hurtling ‘Was tost das Horn?’ into the house. The tenors undauntedly conquered the grueling range of their music, including the top C that Wagner demonically demanded of them.

In the act’s final scene, one of the most riveting scenes in the Ring, the choristers earned admiration anew for their roof-raising performance of ‘Heil dir, Gunther! Heil dir und deiner Braut! Willkommen!’ Providing soaring accounts of ‘Brünnhild’, die hehrste Frau, bring’ ich euch her zum Rhein’ and ‘Gegrüßt sei, teurer Held; gegrüßt, holde Schwester,’ McKinny confirmed how markedly a superlative Gunther can increase enjoyment of a performance of Götterdämmerung. After Brünnhilde’s distraught entrance, Brenna’s articulation of Siegfried’s ‘Was müht Brünnhildes Blick?’ was the model of brawny simple-mindedness, and Halfvarson’s emphatic singing ensured that Hagen’s critically important ‘Jetzt merket klug, was die Frau euch klagt!’ found its target, foreshadowing the tragedy that would befall Siegfried. The urgency with which Stemme communicated Brünnhilde’s anger and despair, epitomized by her exclamation of ‘Nahmst du von mir den Ring, durch den ihr dir vermählt,’ was dazzling. Neither the concentrated expressivity of ‘Ha! Dieser war es, der mir den Ring entriß’ nor the trills on ‘Er zwang mir Lust und Liebe ab’ disconcerted this Brünnhilde, and, appalled by Brenna’s insouciant voicing of Siegfried’s ‘Achtest du so der eignen Ehre,’ Stemme lobbed ‘Du listiger Held, sieh, wie du lügst! Wie auf dein Schwert du schlecht dich berufst!’ like a spear aimed at the wayward man’s heart. Brünnhilde’s repetition of Siegfried’s ‘Helle Wehr! Heilige Waffe! Hilf meinem ewigen Eide!’ took Stemme to a fantastic top B♭, which seemed to trigger the bewildered zeal of Brenna’s singing of ‘Gunther, wehr deinem Weibe, das schamlos Schande dir lügt!’ Left to contemplate the events set in motion by Hagen’s chicanery, Brünnhilde and Gunther reluctantly but unequivocally endorsed the Nibelung’s plot to murder Siegfried in ostensible retribution for his wrong-doing. The sheer enormity of Stemme’s top B♭ in ‘Welches Unholds List liegt hier verhohlen?’ erased any doubts of the totality of Brünnhilde’s complicity in the scheme to punish Siegfried’s infidelity. Reveling in the impending realization of his ambitions, Halfvarson’s Hagen could barely contain his glee in ‘Vertraue mir, betrogne Frau! Wer dich verriet, das räche ich.’ The invigorating masculinity that McKinny brought to ‘O Schmach! O Schande! Wehe mir, dem jammervollsten Manne!’ transcended the self-pity that renders many Gunthers spineless snivelers, further refining the baritone’s interpretation of the much-maligned rôle. Closely collaborating with Auguin, this trio of committed artists brought the curtain down on Act Two with a furious display of exceptional singing and fiery but unexaggerated acting.

Der letzte Kuss: Soprano Nina Stemme (Brünnhilde, center left) and tenor Daniel Brenna (Siegfried, center right) during curtain calls for Francesca Zambello’s production of Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung at Washington National Opera, 22 May 2016 [Photo by the author]

In the opening scene of Act Three, the Rheintöchter toiled to counteract the pollution that crippled their habitat, the majestic river reduced by human carelessness to a toxic trickle that no longer responded to the warming rays of the sun. Singing ‘Frau Sonne sendet lichte Strahlen’ with exquisite, well-blended tones, the ladies moved with the sinuous agility of their aqueous home. Glamorous soprano Jacqueline Echols, North Carolina Opera’s cosmopolitan Musetta in Puccini’s La bohème and heartbreaking Violetta in Verdi’s La traviata, offered a clarion voicing of Woglinde’s ‘Ich höre sein Horn,’ seconded by mezzo-soprano Catherine Martin’s elegant singing of Wellgunde’s ‘Der Helde naht.’ Reprising a part for which she has garnered acclaim in MET Rings, mezzo-soprano Renée Tatum chanted Floßhilde’s ‘Laßt uns beraten!’ engrossingly. The Siegfried who resisted the charms and ignored the wisdom of such Rheintöchter was a true fool, and Brenna portrayed him with utterly unaffected sincerity and spry sexuality, his sunny crooning of ‘Ein Albe führte mich irr, daß ich die Fährte verlor’ having the charisma of unspoiled adolescence.

The relative peace of the Rhine’s sullied banks disturbed by the sounds of hunting horns and Halfvarson’s bellowing ‘Hoiho,’ Brenna responded with his own trumpeted ‘Hoiho! Hoiho! Hoihe!’ The exposed top C with which Wagner punctuated Siegfried’s cries was, like the character’s seldom-heard top C in Act Two, an unnecessary risk that Brenna did not take, and the wisdom of his choice was verified by the reserve of strength that he maintained until the last note of his part. He relayed his tales from Siegfried’s adventure-seeking life before Götterdämmerung with ardor in his finely-phrased ‘Mime hieß ein mürrischer Zwerg.’ Brenna’s Siegfried met his end as he grasped his life, unapologetically and with naïve confidence. Though his singing of ‘Brünnhilde, heilige Braut! Wach auf! Öffne dein Auge!’ was not as accomplished, musically or dramatically, as all that came before it, the tenor made Siegfried’s death bizarrely spontaneous, eliciting an unexpectedly vivid emotional response from the audience. Perhaps Auguin and the orchestra were captivated by the hero’s harrowing passing, too: their adrenalized but somber performance of the Trauermusik threatened to unseat Kennedy Center from its foundations and send the enthralled audience on a fluvial journey of their own.

At the start of the third scene, Citro proved to be a rare Gutrune capable of truly commanding the stage, her depiction of the character’s debilitating doubt and apprehension rippling through her splendidly-sung ‘War das sein Horn?’ Halfvarson’s blaring of Hagen’s ‘Der bleiche Held, nicht blast er es mehr’ goaded Citro to an explosive vocalization of ‘Siegfried—Siegfried eschlagen!’ that was capped with a brilliant top C♭. Hagen’s ‘Ja den! Ich hab’ ihn erschlagen’ and Brünnhilde’s ‘Schweigt eures Jammers jauchzenden Schwall’ were polarized statements of claimed victory and swelling truculence. The blood of both the man that she knew as her husband and her brother now staining Hagen’s hands, the breadth of Gutrune’s sorrow and rage cascaded from Citro’s singing of ‘Verfluchter Hagen, daß du das Gift mir rietest.’ One of Zambello’s boldest and most inspired innovations was the reconciliation between Gutrune and Brünnhilde: each seeming to accept the legitimacy of the other’s grief, Gutrune carried out the grim preparation of Siegfried’s funeral pyre before ceding the privilege of following him into a hero’s death to Brünnhilde. The image of Gutrune and Brünnhilde embracing in a final gesture of understanding and mutual comforting was hauntingly beautiful.

After battling page after page of the most vocally and psychologically demanding music in opera, Brünnhilde faces in Act Three’s fifth and final scene music which not only resolves both Götterdämmerung and Der Ring des Nibelungen as a whole but also crowns a tripartite explication of humanity through the eyes of a single woman. That her immolation was the apotheosis of Stemme’s portrayal of Brünnhilde was apparent from the first notes of her unfaltering ‘Starke Scheite schichtet mir dort am Rande der Rheins zuhauf!’ Throughout the scene, her voice, on inimitably assured form from her opening phrase in the dawn duet, was distilled into a sound of penetrating purity. If a passage was sung loudly, it was because its sentiments must reach the vaunted halls of Walhalla. If a top note was accentuated, it was because the word that it carried demanded to be heard. The soprano’s steely ‘Wie Sonne lauter strahlt mir sein Licht’ gave way to a tranquilly cathartic ‘Ruhe, ruhe, du Gott!’ in which Stemme in those few notes burned through the haze that hangs over Götterdämmerung. The flames of Siegfried’s funeral pyre flickered in her singing of ‘Mein Erbe nun nehm’ ich zu eigen,’ and there was a surprising gentleness in her ‘Fliegt heim, ihr Raben,’ the loving daughter sensitive to the import of this final acknowledgement of her father’s presence. At last reclaiming Brünnhilde’s identity as the fearless Valkyrie, Stemme unfurled the full might of her voice in ‘Grane, mein Roß, sei mir gegrüßt,’ her top B♭s and Bs perfectly supported and projected with a staggering absence of effort. Never has a soprano made singing the Götterdämmerung Brünnhilde seem easy, but Stemme’s performance, blending elements of Flagstad’s femininity, Traubel’s grandeur, Harshaw’s dependability, Varnay’s dedication, Mödl’s intelligence, Nilsson’s unflappability, and Jones’s indomitability, was distinguished by a serenity that heralded her not merely as a remarkable Brünnhilde but, for this listener, as a definitive one.

The ardor with which the perceived paucity of truly great singers is lamented might erroneously lure the casual observer into believing that the first sixteen years of the Twenty-First Century have delivered opera into a wasteland in which occasional encounters with mediocrity are construed as oases of genius. For an operaphile who has not yet reached the age of forty, it can be wearying to hear only that there are now no Flagstads, Melchiors, or Hotters. It is difficult to imagine that any of the Wagnerian adventurers who spent Sunday afternoon together at Kennedy Center listened to the breathtaking Götterdämmerung wrought by Washington National Opera with longing for singers of the past occupying their thoughts. No, there were no Flagstads, Melchiors, or Hotters, but Francesca Zambello and Philippe Auguin presided over a production and a performance in which great voices wielded by imaginative artists set Kennedy Center’s Opera House ablaze with a Götterdämmerung that sprang to life upon the stage but achieved immortality in the hearts and memories of those who witnessed it.