I thought I'd get a little variety in my life, so for today's listening I got a bit of both the sublime and the ridiculous. The three Wagner excerpts are among the beautiful creations of Western art, while Leopold Mozart's Toy Symphony is...well, let's just say it moves me to tears of a very different sort.
Let's get started with a bit of story time:
Leopold Mozart: Toy Symphony - February 15th, 1941
I may just be a bass player in the Spokane Symphony (described by one reviewer as a "competent, provincial ensemble"), but I have a few claims to musical fame that go beyond the fact I once coughed up wine onto conductor Roger Norrington's floor. Yes sir, I have some stories to tell. Back in November of 1995 I served as a, ahem, featured soloist with the Seattle Symphony Orchestra. Granted, I was not soloing on the double bass, or even on any instrument that is normally expected to make musical sounds outside of a kindergarten class. But still, I was a soloist with a major orchestra!
What happened was that a group of musicians from the Seattle Youth Symphony orchestras were asked to play various toys in a children's concert performance of Leopold Mozart's incandescently masterpieceful Toy Symphony. The toy I was given was an instrument P.D.Q Bach once wrote for called the Lasso d'Amore, which is a hollowed-out pipe of foam that you twirl around at different speeds to make different pitches. I was devoted to mastering this instrument and practiced it for hours every day, give or take a few hours.
The idea of having Youth Symphony musicians play these toys in the concert was probably that they would look cute in their youthful toy-playing whimsy, but this was strained by the fact that in 1995 I was going through my wannabe criminal delinquent phase. I was fifteen years old and had grown a scraggly beard and refused to smile even to get dates (for some reason I thought the appropriate attire for this look was a button-down shirt and sport coat). The passport photo I carried around during that time was widely described as "terrorist-looking". I once went through a security check at the Amsterdam airport (after shaving and getting a haircut) where a border control agent looked at my passport, then glanced up at me. He seemed puzzled and then carefully studied the photo. When he finally looked up he said "What happened?"
Anyway, I may not have been the Seattle Symphony's idea of a fresh-faced, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed toy musician looking for playful hijinks, but I'd like to think I gave a perfectly satisfying performance on the Lasso d'Amore that was filled with profound musical substance.
If indeed a meaningful performance of the Toy Symphony is possible, it was certainly intrepreted in this manner by Toscanini in this 1941 performance with the NBC Symphony. The toys were all played with remarkably concentrated precision, and Leopold Mozart's unique way with orchestral fun was given deeply serious under-tones (based on Leopold's portrayal in Amadeus I'm not sure that's at all inappropriate). Overall I enjoyed this performance very much, but it could have used a lot more Lasso d'Amore.
Wagner: Act I, Scene III from Die Walküre - February 22nd, 1941
Toscanini was the first non-German to ever be invited to conduct at the Wagner temple at Bayreuth, where he conducted for the first time in 1930. The seeds of this appearance were sown thirty years earlier, when Wagner's son Siegfried attended a performance of Tristan that Toscanini led at La Scala. Siegfried was sufficiently impressed to report to his mother about the extraordinary level of the Italian production. Cosima Wagner later wrote to Toscanini to say that "My son has given me an account of the performance of Tristan which he attended in Milan, and he has told me so many good things about it that I take upon myself the duty of expressing to you the contentment I feel in knowing that a work of such great difficulty has been performed with care on a foreign stage….All these indications of your respect towards and instinct for the incomparable work to which you have dedicated yourself with so much ardor made my son very happy to have been a witness, and at a distance I join in his satisfaction."
Despite this apparent appreciation from the Wagner family it took quite some time for Toscanini to be invited to conduct at Bayreuth - the idea of inviting an Italian to conduct at this most Teutonic of festivals seemed unthinkable. When finally the pieces came into place for Toscanini to conduct at Bayreuth the effect was galvanizing. Rehearsing entirely from memory he was able to correct mistakes in the parts that had gone unnoticed for decades. He would erupt in fury when the orchestral playing was not to his liking, and nearly left the festival out of anger. Siegfried Wagner convinced him to stay by promising that the weaker players would be replaced (as a union musician I can't condone this).
It is very unfortunate that no complete Wagner operas conducted by Toscanini exist in good sound (a surviving 1937 Salzburg Die Meistersinger is almost unlistenable) but the few excerpts he led at NBC are so extraordinary that he can be forgiven. I wish that Toscanini had instead recorded the final scene of Act III from Die Walküre with its heartbreaking duet between Wotan and Brünnhilde, but this Act I excerpt will suffice. Helen Traubel and Lauritz Melchior joined NBC for this performance, and these two great Wagner singers are spectacular.
This Die Walküre excerpt was drawn from the same live broadcast that the next recording came from, an all-Wagner program that one excited amazon reviewer called "the greatest Wagner concert of all time." The Die Walküre excerpt is wonderful, but still greater was yet to come on the same concert.
Wagner: Dawn, Duet, and Siegfried's Rhine Journey from Götterdämmerung - February 22nd, 1941
Toscanini conducted the concert arrangement of Siegfried's Rhine Journey many, many times, but this is the only surviving performance of the excerpt in its full operatic context. Although his recordings of the concert arrangement are wonderful, this recording with Melchior and Traubel is in an entirely different class. Of Toscanini's recording of the orchestral excerpt with the New York Philharmonic I complained about the overly polished, antiseptic sound, but presenting this music in its intended context seems to blow all of that away. The youthful energy of this recording absolutely explodes out of the NBC Symphony, and the singing of the soloists is nothing short of stunning. In this scene Siegfried has just spent his first night with Brünnhilde and is setting off for adventure down the Rhine. This is the music of exalted exuberance, and it apparently needs to be heard with singers to come across with its full powerful effect.
I would rank this Wagner performance with the 1939 Beethoven Eroica as the greatest Toscanini recording I have yet listened to during this project. Incidentally this comes from one of the very few official RCA releases that are currently available for download from amazon. I would strongly recommend obtaining this extraordinary performance.
I should also perhaps note that this recording is another example of the incredibly schizophrenic brass playing of the NBC Symphony. These first two Wagner excerpts were drawn from the very same concert, but the brass (and particularly principal trumpeter Harry Glantz) sound mind-blowingly awful in the Die Walküre scene, while they somehow sound fabulous in the Rhine Journey. Glantz is note-perfect in the climax of the Rhine Journey duet (in the same passage where he split at least one note in all three of Toscanini's orchestra-only recordings) yet sounded like an amateur in the earlier excerpt. I have no explanation.
Wagner: Brünnhilde's Immolation from Götterdämmerung - February 24th, 1941
This was also performed on the same concert as the two earlier Wagner excerpts, though for some reason it was decided to rerecord Brünnhilde's Immolation in a separate recording session two days later. It was this studio recording that was approved by Toscanini and appears on the official RCA release. The live performance has been released on EMI's Great Conductor's series (which is available for download), and Toscanini fans have long debated whether the studio or live version is superior. I've found that there is a bit more raw intensity to the live performance, while the studio recording has more of a contemplative quality. This latter approach seems to me the more appropriate. Brünnhilde is facing both her own mortality and the end of the reign of the gods, yet willingly rides her horse into her own funeral pyre. The studio recording seems to analyze her emotions at a distance, yet for me that makes the music even more powerful. I don't want to split hairs, as both the live and studio recordings are extraordinary. They just tell two different sides of the story, and the fact that Toscanini could tell both sides so effectively exposes the lie that he was always rigid in his interpretation.
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That's it for today! Tomorrow will bring Brahms 1 and two Verdi excerpts.
Take care, and I'll see you soon!
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