Von Jarmila Novotná bis Elisabeth Schwarzkopf
Ein Lesebuch
For a few years I knew Richard Tauber by name only. I started my belcanto career with Mario Lanza’s movie That Midnight Kiss the in spring of 1950. I was six and couldn’t read titles (Dutch speaking countries Flanders and The Netherlands don’t synchronize movies as do provincial French and German speaking ones). In 1953 my mother took me to Du bist die Welt für mich; the ridiculous Tauber movie biography with Rudolf Schock. At home we didn’t have a record player and we had to rely on radio and Tauber records were not often broadcast. By 1959 consumption society started and we purchased a Dual. At the same time the public library of my home town Mechelen opened a record library. Thus I brought home an MP “Memories of Richard Tauber” with songs like “Pedro the fisherman”, “Sylvia” etc. I was not impressed. Next I borrowed an LP with Tauber opera arias. I was then in my Franco Corelli period and Tauber’s “Keiner schlafe” sounded undernourished compared to Corelli’s blazing Cetra “Nessun dorma”. Gradually I gave Tauber higher marks. In an article by Dutch critic Leo Riemens (Of Kutsch-Riemens Sängerlexikon) I read Tauber’s voice should be heard in German as much of his charm was lost in English or French. I still think Riemens was right. I collected more and more operetta recordings. Mechelen didn’t have an opera house but there were three amateur operetta companies. My father played small parts in one of them and I have great memories of performances of Paganini, Zarewitch, Eva, Giuditta, Frau Luna, Bajadère, Manina, Vetter aus Dingsda etc. In 1960 I got a small tape recorder and recorded in the theatre performances of Der fidele Bauer and Leo Asscher’s Höheit tanzt Walzer (performances in Dutch). Gradually Tauber sounded better and better in my ears and I fell for his charm, his pianissimi, his timbre and his original phrasing. Gedda, Kmennt, Schock, Traxel, Wunderlich sounded a bit bland compared to Tauber. Only Konya with his Italianate voice was a rival. I even learned to live with Tauber’s peculiar top notes which were not his glory. I remember Marcel Prawy imitating on German television Tauber’s artificially reaching with a small squawk for top notes as high A was his last comfortable note and he couldn’t even sing a full high B flat. I now own most of the tenor’s 750 recordings; even the 4 LP-box with his recordings in English. And while collecting Tauber I met a lot lesser known singers; especially sopranos. Almost all of them are to be found with recordings (sometimes only a few) on Youtube; some of them have albums devoted to their art (Alpar, Novotna, Schwarz among the pre-war ones and Güden and Schwarzkopf in the LP-days) and most have a small entry in Kutsch-Riemens or some hagiographic biography on the sleeves of Preiser Records. Therefore it was an excellent idea to ask different authors to examine their careers and their relation with the tenor.
Most singer biographies have an introduction by a later colleague and this book is no exception. Soprano Ildiko Raimondi opens with a bang calling Tauber the greatest tenor of his time. Gigli, Lauri Volpi, Martinelli, Thill, Melchior, Pertile, Merli and young Björling and most belcanto lovers probably do not agree with her opinion. Neither do I believe Tauber sang with incredible success operas of Puccini and Verdi in European opera houses unless archives of La Scala, Rome Opera, San Carlo, Covent Garden, Opéra Garnier, Liceu etc. are woefully inadequate (For Mozart or Smetana he was welcome).
The book makes abundantly clear what operetta researchers like Kevin Clark already proved. For my parents and grandparents operettas were amusement; a romantic or even comic piece with a lot of sing along music to illustrate the story. Dialogue often took more time than musical numbers. In 1960 Flemish Television published an inquiry which proved operetta was still the most popular genre with older people. My generation already swore with Presley, Avalon and Anka and I stood alone with my preference for opera singers. By 1970 operetta was in decline and almost disappeared in the eighties. Some of Tauber’s partners were stars at the opera though Vera Schwarz, Jarmila Novotna and Gitta Alpar pale somewhat compared with the best Italian, French or German (Meta Seinemeyer) opera sopranos. But they all possessed qualities necessary for an operetta career: beauty, elegance, musicality. Tauber’s other partners known from his records were definitely not able to fill an opera house; didn’t have the vocal power, the stamina and the breath to sing an opera part. They needn’t as their public didn’t expect it. My generation educated on Schwarzkopf’s complete operetta recordings only accepted opera singers on recordings though several stars never sang an operetta on scene. The authors in this book advise us to listen on Youtube to Käthe Dorsch, Rita Georg, Fritzy Massary, Mary Loseff , Evelyn Laye and it makes for a sobering experience in my ears; even though Lehar often was happy with them. The revolution created by Tauber and pursued by Schwarzkopf, Gedda, Wunderlich, Popp etc. was radical. I couldn’t and still cannot consider the afore mentioned ladies or a singer as Johan Heesters worthy of the magnificent melodies Lehar, Kalman, Fall, Jarno, Millöcker, Ziehrer etc. composed.
There is another aspect in this book that struck me. Most composers and almost all libretto writers were Jewish and later on spoke of “die gute alte Jüdische operetta”. The same can be said of most sopranos in this book. As a Fleming I can ask a question no German or Austrian dares to ask. Was there a marked ethnic preference by composers for Jewish ladies who often had their cultural Jewish background as well while at the same time rooted in German language and music culture? Or was it the Jewish heritage of singing and dancing that made Jewish singers so prominent? It comes as a relief to read that all these Jewish sopranos managed to escape the clutches of the NSDAP. It comes as a painful reminder how with the exception of Czech Novotna all of them had to struggle in a new country (often the US) where they initially didn’t speak the language, where their famous names counted for nothing. This must have been especially traumatic for Vera Schwarz who became a cult heroine with Tauber due to their performances in Paganini and Das Land des Lächelns. I didn’t know her “Flucht aus der Operette” as she resolutely and exclusively became an opera singer. When she migrated to the US her competitors were no longer German sopranos but singers like Ponselle, Bori, Rethberg and a MET career was out of the question. After the war she returned to Vienna and I slightly gasped to learn she gave masterclasses at the Austrian Pavillion at the Brussels World Exhibition in 1958. I didn’t know she was the lady I watched as a 14 year old boy during one of my visits.
Novotna’s chapter is interesting though due to her many recordings we have a lot of information on her. She played a small part in the blockbuster The Great Caruso (most visited movie in Flanders in 1951). I do not agree with the author who claims she was the most prominent Violetta Valery at the MET at that moment. In reality she sang her last Violetta in New York in February 1947 and was soon eclipsed by Albanese, Kirsten and Rigal. Leo Riemens once told he heard the première of Giuditta (1935) with Tauber and Novotna on radio. So far only “Meine Lippen sie küssen so heiss” of the world première has surfaced, Tauber’s “Du bist meine Sonne” is from a performance in 1935. The chapter on non-Jewish Käthe Dorsch filled a gap. She was the first Friederike Brion in the Singspiel I consider to be Lehar’s finest score; the first one to sing that heart wrenching “Warum hast du mich wach geküsst? “ though her small and thin voice cannot compare in the slightest with Helen Donath’s and especially Lucia Popp’s. (By the way, Friederike was forbidden “ins Reich” but performed during the German occupation in Flanders).
The author on elusive Rita Georg wonders why Lehar accepted a small soubrette as Sonja in Der Zarewitch? The photographs prove her to be an exquisite beauty. Maybe Lehar fell for her charms but her few recordings are not a thing of joy to listen to; especially for one who admires Schwarzkopf’s “Einer wird kommen”. Together with her husband Georg she was arrested in 1943 and freed after 4 months though their Jewishness (His name was Bloch-Bauer) couldn’t be contested (as Hilde Güden did). They were released and even migrated to Canada. Was there a command from higher on? Did they offer a fortune to a corrupt official? We don’t know the answer. With Gitta Alpar (in reality Regina Klopfer) we are once again on firm vocal grounds. Her opera and operetta recordings are available. She literally is the antipode of Vera Schwarz as from 1930 on she no longer sang in opera. Opera’s loss was operetta’s gain as her records show us a high soft grained and charming voice. She was Lehar’s first Lisa in the new version of Die gelbe Jacke (Das Land des Lächelns) and created his reworking of Endlich Allein (Schön ist die Welt). Her live and loves should be made into a movie. She had to leave Germany in 1933 and Austria in 1938 and escaped to the US. She did try to rekindle an operatic career over there. The editor of this site possesses copies of MET audition cards and twice Alpar tried to enter the house with arias from Traviata (in Hungarian) and Rigoletto. Her card reads: “Did not please. Old voice. Sings without style. Not for Metropolitan.” The chapters on Fritzy Massary (Jewish) and Henny Porten (non-Jewish) are of particular interest for German and Austrian readers. The first one almost was the symbol of operetta due to her triumphs in Vienna and Berlin. She is a legend who appears in every book on operetta history but for non-German speakers not aware of glowing stories told by grandparents she is just a nasal soubrette. Porten was a silent movie actress and later on a star of German talkies.
Tauber’s first wife Carlotta Vanconti (née Martha Wunder) gets short shrift though she is an acceptable Elisa Bonaparte in their Paganini duet. For more details on this lying, cheating, blackmailing partner see Tauber’s best biography by Martin Sollfrank. The tenor’s next full time companion for five years is more interesting. Russian Jewess May Loseff too is a soubrette but she and Tauber recorded two duets from his operetta Der singende Traum and I cannot agree with critics who called it ersatz-Lehar. I’d love to hear a recording of the piece. Loseff was an alcoholic and replaced in Tauber’s life by British non-singing actress Diana Napier who wrote an untrusty biography of the tenor in 1949. Sopranos who sang a few performances with the tenor in Vienna in 1937 and 1938 get a few pages: Rosette Anday, Adele Kern and the best of them Maria Müller. Three sopranos get more attention though they only sang one single performance with the tenor: the “Don Giovanni” (auf Deutsch) of the 27th of September 1947 at Covent Garden. Tauber was already mortally ill and sang with one lung only but the performance was broadcast. The names of Maria Cebotari, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Hilde Güden still ring a big bell and their careers and lives during the thirties and the forties are an opportunity not to be missed. Cebotari was already struck with cancer when she performed and she died two years later. Schwarzkopf’s relations with the NSDAP and opera’s big shots are once more rehashed. Interesting and new to me was Güden’s story. Hulda Geiringer was Jewish. In a 1960 interview she said her mother died young at 45 due to illness. The author has found proof that she was a victim of the Shoa. During the war Güden’s Jewish roots became known. I once heard the story Vienna’s Gauleiter Baldur von Schirach warned her to flee but his name is not mentioned by the author. The soprano resorted to a well known subterfuge. She pretended her real father was an Aryan who had died comfortably early so he couldn’t confirm her story. It gave her time to flee to Rome as -unbelievably as many a claim to non-Jewishness sounded- Deutsche Gründlichkeit demanded a prolonged examination.
Recommended.
Jan Neckers