Wagner - Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg / Kollo · Donath · A

Lohengrin This celebrated 1964 recording of Lohengrin with Rudolf Kempe and the Vienna State Opera Orchestra still stands the test of time: it's a terrifically exciting performance. Kempe is a superb draftsman, and he keeps the orchestra lively, exuberant, but never strident. Pride of plac...	Wagner: Der fliegende Holländer Recorded evidence preserves a regretfully skewed view of Otto Klemperer's Wagner. Happily, this 1968 recording of Der fliegende Holländer captures the aged Otto Klemperer at his inspired and disciplined best. The vivid detail and expressive intensity of the orchestra playing...	Wagner: Tristan und Isolde It's not surprising that this sublime performance of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde has remained on the market for so long: Wilhelm Furtwängler's reading of the tale with Ludwig Suthaus, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, and Kirsten Flagstad is probably definitive. The conductor is peerles...	Tristan Und Isolde Recorded in performance, but one act at a time so that the principals could sing full-out, this is one of the most electrifying opera recordings of the stereo era. Birgit Nilsson blazes as Isolde, and Wolfgang Windgassen's Act-III evocation of the delusional Tristan is heart-wren...	Tannhäuser / Domingo, Studer, Baltsa, Salminen, A. Schmidt; Sinopoli Another Paris Tannhäuser recording, this one seeing the adaptable Placido Domingo take a break from the world of Italianate opera to try on the mantle of Heldentenor. Domingo's clear, manly voice is well suited to the transformation--precisely why Italians usually don't think...
Tannhauser (Slipcase)	Strauss - Der Rosenkavalier / Schwarzkopf · Ludwig · Karajan	Wagner: Parsifal "Knappertsbusch's expansive and dedicated 1962 reading is caught superbly in the Philips set, arguably the finest live recording ever made in the Festspeilhaus at Bayreuth, with outstanding singing from Jess Thomas as Parsifal and Hans Hotter as Gurnemanz...its spiritual quality...	Wagner - Der Ring des Nibelungen (Ring Cycle) / Sir Georg Solti Modern storage media (CD/DVD) offer both high fidelity and great reliability in the playback of music. Yet only a bit more than a generation ago, the possibilities inherent in the long-playing record inspired John Culshaw, a young producer for Decca, to attempt the most ambitious...	Wagner - Der Ring des Nibelungen / Levine, Metropolitan Opera (Complete Ring Cycle)

excellent recording
"I tried very hard to like Solti latter version or even Barenboim's but this recording never fails to leave me overwhelm by Wagner genius."

Another superb Wagner Opera!
I am relatively new to opera, however I am finding myself strongly drawn to the operas of Richard Wagner, not to mention his fantastic overtures and preludes to his operas! I think, I have ordered every opera that Wagner wrote as well as numerous cds on his opera overtures, etc. "Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg" conducted by the great von Karajan! Right now I am listening to "Siegfried" conducted by Solti and the Vienna Philharmoniker. Unbelievable!! Peter, Richmond, BC, Canada

Great for Karajan and the orchestra, but where are Sachs and Walther?
EMI had high hopes for this recording, having already caught Karajan at Bayreuth in the early Fifties in a classic live Meistesinger with Schwarzkopf in glorious form as Eva. Karajan was eager enough to take the assignment that he traveled to Dresden to work with the Staatskepelle, one of his few ventures beyond Berlin and Vienna. The final result was not a complete success, however, the fault lying with the two main male characters. The Hans Sachs of Theo Adam is so gritty and dry, so lacking in every human quality that this great chatacter should have, that I lament every time I put this Mesitersinger on. Kollo is no great shakes as Walther, either, with his absence of legato, total lack of poetry, and general charmlessness. Donath is a wonderful Eva, the minor roles are fine, and Karajan's conducting is miles ahead of competitors like Jochum on DG and Solti on Decca. If you are primarily interested in him, this Meistersinger has some lasting value. All in all, despite the bawling Walther of Hans Hopf in the earlier live Bayreuth performance, I prefer that reading over this one.

Great, but could certainly be better
This is very difficult to review. First, I should say this is a totally satisfactory recording. All of the basic elements of the score (the joy, nobility, pathos and humor) are here in abundance, and it is beautifully performed (by the wonderfully enthusiastic players from Dresden, aided by Donath's lovely Eva and Ridderbusch's amazingly good Pogner) and recorded. However, this Meistersinger always seems restrained, as if Karajan was afraid of being too emotionally connected to the score. Also some of the singing leaves something to be desired. In particular, Theo Adam as Sachs is, for me, totally unimpressive. To me, Sachs is not just a cobbler with musical talent, he is the moral center of this work, one of the wisest characters created for the stage. What makes him especially impressive for me is that Sachs is wise not because he has spent his life in an armchair thinking about philosophical problems, but because he has seen all of life, and is humble enough to see the world as it is. Almost as disturbing, Evans just creates a caricature of Beckmesser. Certainly this is a very common interpretation of the role and is a very safe one, but I really don't see where this comes from. Of course Beckmesser is the essence of a pedant, and a pretty nasty one at that, but he is a human being, not a monster. As I see it, Beckmesser is stuck on the rules of the past because he thinks they are really important in preserving the tradition of the Meistersingers, not because he has some weird hang-up on textbooks. Also, who could doubt that he really has feelings for Eva? Unfortunately, Evans just takes the humanity out of the role by playing him as a prototype for Mime. I realize he was playing it for laughs, but trying to be funny is the surest way of not getting a laugh. The best comedy is when you can't quite decide whether you should laugh because of the absurdity of the situation, or cry because it's so pathetic. To me, Evans' Beckmesser is the clearest example that this recording doesn't really delve into the essence of the work. As in the Ring and Parsifal, Wagner is imagining the youth redeeming their elders who are too conflicted to resolve their issues. Unlike those dramas, Die Meistersinger has the redemption taking place through continuation and rejuvenation of tradition, rather than through renouncing desire. Seen from this perspective, the work is much more serious and philosophically important than when it is seen as a simple comedy, but it is also more joyous, since the triumph comes from the depths of the soul, rather than from a eat, drink, and be merry kind of attitude. Again, none of this subtlety is to be found here.

DEUTSCH UND WAHR...DEUTSCH UND ECHT
The Mastersingers is a tribute to popular German art. Folk-art of this kind was probably a romantic illusion of Wagner's own, but he took seriously the idea that each culture should be true to itself, and one reason behind the particular vocal style he adopted in his music-dramas (The Rhinegold and later) was that performances outwith Germany should be able to give them in their own language, something not so easy to achieve with traditional operatic arias. Whether any of this made Wagner the socialist that Shaw liked to think he was I very much doubt. It also seems to me that attempts to find proto-nazism in Die Meistersinger are not only stuff, but also nonsense. It is quite true that towards the end of the work Sachs voices fears for the survival of the German identity, but so far as it goes I can see nothing at all wrong with that. Insofar as the musical tradition was concerned, it was by no means limited to Wagner in any case. Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Mendelssohn were thoroughly imbued in their musical idiom with the influence of Italy, but the music of Schumann and Brahms is as completely, consciously and exclusively German as Wagner's own, and as Bach's had been a century and a half earlier. The Mastersingers is a 'comedy', in something like the sense that that term applies in Shakespeare. It is not rolling-in-the-aisles stuff, and its basic message is deeply thoughtful and serious. There are actually a couple of incidents that I personally find rather amusing. One is the interminable list of rules for composition, and the other is Sachs's explanation to Beckmesser of why the latter's shoes have rather thin soles. Typically, Wagner is at pains to point out his own jokes in case we missed them. The pillorying of Beckmesser, usually identified with the eminent Vienna critic Eduard Hanslick, may be funny to some. It is certainly rather clever. Wagner neatly puts into Beckmesser's mouth some of the tin-eared rubbish that Hanslick had turned out by way of criticism of himself, although without any of Hanslick's wit and turn of phrase which must have been what really wounded Wagner. Where Wagner seems to me to take a really breathtaking risk is in writing a drama round the theme of awarding a prize to a tune of his own composition. It is very hard indeed even to imagine Handel, Mozart or Verdi or anyone else with a more developed sense of humour than Wagner walking into a trap like that. I am reacquainting myself with The Mastersingers after many years, and when young I was inclined to think that I would have withheld the prize in the competition. Wagner's tune bears a faint resemblance to one by Brahms in his 'Mastersingers' violin sonata, and I still think it suffers a little from the comparison. Whether time has mellowed my opinion or just because Wagner gives us the tune quite so often, I think better of it now, and if the resemblance is not coincidence it can only be a deliberate tribute by Brahms, bursting with melodic inspiration himself, to his great polar opposite. The Mastersingers is described in this set as an opera. I suppose it is, in one sense, but it is still a music-drama first and foremost. Goetterdaemmerung is a bit of an opera too, but not for the best of reasons as here, more of a partial relapse into the unreformed early style of Tannhaeuser. As one expects, Karajan is completely in charge of what he is doing, and there is never a hint of a stylistic lapse, not even, in my view, the way Evans handles the part of Beckmesser. There is a touch of Mime about it, but this is a work dominated by baritone voices, and the differentiation is welcome to my ears. In general, I'm inclined to argue in support of all the male casting. I go a bundle on the voice of Rene Kollo, and have done since I first heard him in the marvellous Brahms Rinaldo that he did with Sinopoli (now there is a work that gives a fascinating glimpse into another direction that German opera might have taken if the composer had found the libretto he was purportedly searching for), and when Kollo sings 'Parnass und Paradies' it was all I could do to concentrate on what I was listening to as Brahms's celestial cadence at 'Paradiese noch einmal', sung by the same voice, came into my head. I like Theo Adam as Sachs, just as I like him as Wotan. I grew up thinking of Hotter as the type of the Wagnerian bass, but Sachs is a modest craftsman, not the prophet Isaiah, and the bemused and futile Wotan is no Zeus, and I have come to prefer a lighter voice in both roles. The Eva and Magdalene seem to me good though not outstanding, although Donath produces a superb final trill at 'so hold zu werben weiss'. The big effects are big indeed here. The tradesmen process like the gods entering Valhalla in The Rhinegold, but in my own view we should think of that comparison the other way round - Wagner's gods are a wretched lot and their Valhalla a miserable tabernacle of delusion, which they enter like the cobblers bakers and tailors of Nuremberg. There is a lot of choral work here, Wagner was no Handel in that regard to put it mildly, but Karajan rightly plays the effect up. As always with Karajan, there's nothing much to criticise. However in all my life I'm not sure I can remember anything I would rather hear done by him than by anyone else. I have come back to The Mastersingers after a long time and with no other performance in my head, but I had wistful thoughts of how Fuertwaengler or Toscanini or Beecham might have done it. To that 'Silentium! Silentium!', to quote the apprentices. This is a fine issue, this is a great work, and I feel a better man for just having listened to it.