Wagner News No. 222, August 2016

Wagner News

Number 222 August 2016

CONTENTS

2 Alberto Remedios C.B.E Paul Dawson-Bowling

4 Editors note Ray Godson

5 The Wagner Society Neil King

8 A message from the Chairman Richard Miles 10 Peter West Karen West Masterclass with Dame Gwyneth Jones, Katie Stevenson 11 Katie Barnes and Adrian Muller 14 A visit to Bayreuth Dame Gwyneth Jones 16 From 45 and 50 years ago The artistic development of the Deutsche Nothilfe 1933 19 stamps– Scenes from Wagner Giles du Boulay

28 Review – The Opera North Ring Cycle – Leeds Robert Mitchell David Nice, Peter Quantrill and Alexandra Coghlan by kind 29 Review – The Opera North Ring Cycle – Festival Hall permission of THEARTSDESK 39 Review – Tristan -The ENO David Ross 38 An evening with Stuart Skelton Ray Godson Hilary Reid-Evans 40 Reviews – Tannhäuser - Longborough Paul and Elizabeth Dawson- Bowling 42 Review - Tannhäuser - Covent Garden Katie Barnes 45 Wagner Society Contacts 46 Forthcoming Events

Cover :Remedios in Twilight of the Gods, ROH CREDIT: REX

Printed by Rap Spiderweb – www.rapspiderweb.com 0161 947 3700

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ALBERTO REMEDIOS 27 February 1935 (Liverpool) - 11 June 2016 (Sydney) Paul Dawson-Bowling

Alberto Remedios was quite simply the greatest all-round Wagner tenor of the era, live or recorded. Jon Vickers may have managed a rapture and an agony without parallel, but Vickers only performed Tristan, Siegmund and Parsifal, whereas Remedios was just as remarkable in almost the entire range of Wagner’s tenor heroes, and as Loge.

I met Alberto Remedios almost 25 years ago, at the time of his Reginald Goodall award from the Wagner Society. Shortly before the event, he had written a piece for Wagner News describing what seemed impossible: he had once been turned down for Bayreuth. As he described it, he had sung a number of the grand Wagner tenor scenes for an audition with Wolfgang Wagner, and he knew he had done them well. He felt happy and confident, but then Wolfgang Wagner had come over and started umming and ahhing; Well, yes, ah yes, Remedios was very good, but they still had a number of fine German tenors to audition, and as this prevarication rambled on, Remedios eventually realised that he had failed. I could scarcely believe my eyes when reading this, and shot off a letter to the committee, thanking them for honouring Remedios and asking, “What tenor did Wolfgang Wagner ever have at Bayreuth who could hold a candle to Alberto Remedios? What other tenor had his sheer beauty of voice? What Bayreuth tenor combined such beauty and such power?” I was soon delighted that when the award ceremony took place (at the Royal Overseas League) Jim Pritchard, then the Society chairman, read my letter as the citation for the award. It went on to describe to the sheer thrill that he could command from his timbre, equalled only by Jon Vickers. But then there was also what Remedios did with his voice, using it to give expression to a heaven-sent musicality. He could command and vary a fluid line in the Act II duet of Tristan, and he could spin it out endlessly in harmony with Goodall’s far flung vision. It was a line that embraced outstanding clarity and point of diction. It was a line that revealed an incomparable stamina, the stamina to sing Tristan uncut, as Vickers never would, not in the theatre.

Additionally he had a consummate actor’s ability to present Wagner’s great figures as real and engaging people. If we had met his heroes we could have asked them what they had for breakfast. His sweetness, his power and interpretative gifts fused ideally in his Lohengrin, as broadcast from Sadlers Wells in 1971. There his farewell to the Swan was ravishing and yet he had the scale and edge to stand out naturally, without obtrusiveness, in the immense ensemble, “Welch’ Ein Geheimnis”, in a way that almost never happens.

Such giant size portrayals, such vocal stamina came easier because he was a big man, powerfully built. His Spanish surname came from his grandfather, a Spanish seaman who had settled in Liverpool. His father, Albert, had also been a seaman, but with the British merchant navy, and like Alberto his father became pure ‘scouse’. Alberto was born in Liverpool on February 27 1935, the eldest of three children. His Irish mother, Ida O’Farrell, worked both in a Chinese restaurant and in a green grocer’s, to pay for such luxuries as singing lessons for her two sons. Her other 1980 Ring Seattle Seattle Opera son, Rámon, also became an opera singer and took the

2 leading tenor roles in an Emmerich Kalman Festival at Sadlers Wells in 1983. On Sundays Alberto was a choirboy at St Saviour’s Church. His vocal talents attracted attention and his parents were advised to have him taught by Edwin Francis, a well-known local teacher who also taught Rita Hunter, the co-star of his later triumphs.

After he left school at 15, he became an apprentice welder at Cammell Laird shipyard on the Mersey, but he continued with his singing lessons. At his Wagner Society award he described how one day he simply took a bus for London and the stage door of Sadler’s Wells, and asked for an audition. Norman Tucker, the general manager, happened to overhear this request and invited him in. He sang three arias, including the Flower Song from Carmen, and Tucker said he would sign him up and support him after National Service. Tucker then helped him enter the Royal College of Music where he won the Queen’s Prize in 1957. After joining Sadler’s Wells Opera, he sang numerous roles, including Don Ottavio (Don Giovanni), Max (Der Freischütz), Alfredo (La Traviata), Des Grieux (Manon) and Erik (The Flying Dutchman), but his big breakthrough came with the celebrated Mastersingers of 1968, which also had Norman Bailey as Sachs and Reginald Goodall as its conductor. Edmund Tracey of Sadler’s Wells said that when Remedios first sang the Prize Song with the chorus present, “it was so beautiful, so moving” that many were in tears.

Sadlers Wells Opera soon moved to the London Coliseum and transformed into English National Opera, and the company was now ready to take on The Ring, in performances that have become the stuff of legend. It was above all as Siegfried in this Ring that Alberto Remedios was simply incomparable. It was impossible not to like this Siegfried. He brought something appealing to the role with his very timbre, a touching innocence that his gifts as an actor fulfilled; he really embodied Wagner’s vision of unsullied nature and unwitting charm. Paradoxically his recordings of the Forest Murmurs are about the most reflective and sensitive imaginable; here as so often, he brought out the lyrical, the arioso, in what often comes over as dry recitative. As the Remedios version of Siegfried matures in Götterdämmerung, he remains convincingly a figure of laughter and unthinking good nature, too little capable of seeing the dark side, too ebullient and resilient for any understanding of the damage and pain he comes to inflict on any one less resilient than he is (some-one like Brunnhilde!) Remedios really made Siegfried work. There are broadcast recordings available of his Siegfried, both in the Glen Byam Shaw production at the Coliseum and for Götz Friedrich at Covent Garden. The Covent Garden recordings show how easily he could adjust to Colin Davis’s swifter, springier approach, so different from the magnificent reach of Reginald Goodall. Not that many other tenors had the breath control to sustain the tempi of Goodall’s vision as he did.

At his Wagner Society award, he declared with disarming modesty that he had always struggled for recognition across the Atlantic and in Germany. Presumably many German critics remained addicted, then as now, to the brackish mix of mud, rust and decaying leather that constitute the timbre of so many German Heldentenors. He said poignantly that hearing himself so praised and appreciated now brought tears to his eyes, and it was manifestly true. It did not help him that as a mature artist he never had a good memory, even though he had memorised arias from records as a teenager, nor that the German language was always a particular problem. The Metropolitan Opera at New York did not take him to their hearts, but evidently his Siegfried at Seattle Opera was a different matter. The triumph he scored there must have been in the first ever Ring of a company which was to become a Wagner beacon throughout the Western World. As a whimsical fact, he was eventually heard at Bayreuth, after a fashion. Penny Scantleberry, a long-standing pillar of the London Wagner Society was so enraged with his mistreatment that she took his Ring recordings to Bayreuth and played them at full blast on

3 her car radio, windows down, as she drove round the town at dead of night. He inspired that kind of quixotic loyalty.

In retirement he lent valuable support to ‘The Mastersingers’, the remarkable enterprise of Malcolm Rivers and Paul Crook which still helps establish young British Wagner singers in the face of British opera and concert managements which maintain the ludicrous belief that foreign is always better. (this presumably is why ENO audiences in June were privileged to enjoy an ‘amazing’ American as Isolde while the Parisians were fobbed off with mere Rachel Nichols at the precisely same time). Eventually Remedios migrated to Australia, along with his second and supportive wife Judy Hosken whom he had met on an Australian tour in 1965. His tour of Australia materialised because he had been dining in London at an Italian Restaurant and the proprietor did not believe that he was an opera singer but offered him a free meal if he could make good his claim. Thereupon Remedios did so, not knowing that Joan Sutherland was also in the restaurant. She liked what she heard, and invited him to join her and a certain Pavarotti, on their forthcoming Australian tour. His Australian second wife was one of the reasons for his eventually settling there, where she survives him.

Alberto Remedios - the greatest all-round Wagner tenor of my life! When shall we see his like again?

Editor’s Note Ray Godson

All change again in the continuing search for a long-term successor to Roger Lee. Andrea Buchanan stepped into the breach for Edition 221 but has found that her commitments to the Verband the singing competition and the editorship of Wagner News were too great for her. As the most recent and portfolio-less recruit to the Committee, I felt I had to take on the responsibility. I was born in the Wagnerless London of 1944 and so am treating my main function as the identifying of my successor in this post (and on your committee!).

The task of putting together this issue has been fascinating and I am very grateful to the help provided by Andrea, Jan Leigh and Paul Dawson Bowling. It is difficult to read reviews with which one disagrees and one sometimes forgets that the purpose of criticism is to criticise, Negative reviews (of which there are a couple in this issue) must be part and parcel of the development of cultural history. Remember the first night of Becket’s Waiting for Godot.

New departures in this issue are ‘50 and 45 years ago’ items and what I thought was an absolutely riveting and scholarly article by Giles du Boulay on the postage stamps produced at the commencement of the Third Reich to commemorate Wagner.

I must also mention our Chairman, Richard Miles who was responsible for my involvement in the multifarious affairs of the Society a couple of years ago. I am pleased to report that his heart operation was successful albeit very draining – he has entered the second stage of his convalescence and I am including his description of the cultural highlights of his enforced vacation in this edition.

Once again, the assistance of John Baildam as the quality controller of the copy in yet another edition has to be recognised. Many thanks -

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The Wagner Society – Neil King Acting Chairman and Treasurer

At the July committee meeting, we were all sitting round my dining table, drinking a refreshing Sancerre rosé and mulling over potential content for this edition of Wagner News. We don’t really have editorial conferences since Roger’s editing of Wagner News was very much a one-man operation but since then we seem to have, rather like the Today programme at Christmas, a series of guest editors and so Wagner News has a more collaborative feel these days. That said, our gratitude to this edition’s editor, Ray Godson, is redoubled given that he stepped up (temporarily as he fondly thought) to the committee to save us from constitutional embarrassment and now has taken on another arduous role. One of the ideas we mooted were more regular series of contributions and the suggestion that each committee member in turn writes a personal piece was felt to be a good one and for some reason I elected to go first. I wildly promised that my subject would be something along the ‘why I like Wagner’ lines but with holiday and work (bloody Brexit) intervening, I’ve had to rather curtail my ambitions and so am writing about the current state of the society since I have been acting as Chairman in Richard’s absence.1

A continual theme at committee meetings is the workload that we all take on voluntarily: currently I am also covering membership and tickets secretary roles, the endless work on organising events falls squarely to Jan, Cormac keeps the website going, Ray is editing Wagner News, and David handles the formal secretarial side of things. Only Geoff has no onerous role as archivist although even he is scouring the back numbers of this magazine for articles potentially interesting to today’s readers.2 As Jan pointed out recently, if one of us falls ill or leaves, things will grind to a halt. So I can only reiterate Richard’s previous appeals: this is your society and if it is to flourish, we need more members willing to serve on the committee since we do not wish to suffer the potential fate of the Strauss society that looks likely to fold later this year due to lack of committee members and a generally aging membership profile.3 However, I cannot promise any committee member much thanks – beyond my Sancerre rosé at any rate - since committee membership does seem to be a largely thankless task. In the course of taking on the role of membership secretary, I have been astonished at the attitude of some members who obviously think that we are paid representatives of a large multi-national such are their demands or, on a few occasions, their breath-taking rudeness. That said, these occasions are far outnumbered by some delightful conversations with others members only too happy to chat over Wagner past and present, Bayreuth visits, earlier events and so on. This is what makes committee membership rewarding, the knowledge that we are all working to a shared goal and that it is appreciated by the majority of members.

Rather like attending a company’s AGM as a director, the society’s AGM is sometimes viewed by committee members with trepidation and apprehension. As it happens – and we’ve certainly had our fair share of stormy meetings - I very much enjoyed this year’s AGM since it had a generally practical and constructive atmosphere, and real and useful business was transacted. Long may this continue. The draft minutes of the AGM are now on the website, but to recap on some of the main points:

1 By the bye, I had lunch with Richard last week and he is looking remarkably fit and well – a month on holiday in France will often do this I find – and looking forwards to returning to his duties from the September committee meeting onwards. He also sends warm thanks for members’ good wishes. 2 He brought a copy of the first number of Wagner News from 1971 to a recent committee meeting; very interesting it was too, and I think some of it is reproduced elsewhere in this edition. 3 All Strauss Society members are welcome to join us, maybe with preferential introductory subscription rates!

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i. Payment of speakers

Following the non-binding AGM discussion, the committee also debated this issue since there were obviously strong feelings on the topic and it was felt that the current society policy of not paying speakers (only their actual receipted expenses) was probably not in line with normal practice. Therefore, we resolved to offer a modest fee to all speakers in future as well as their expenses although we anticipate that some speakers will waive their entitlement to fees. It should also be noted – and this was not pointed out at the meeting – that accompanists for singers have always been paid as have some singers. However, the new policy is that fees will be offered for all involved in each event in future.

ii. Tendering for material contracts

As I said at the meeting, this is absolutely standard in public companies and is a control with which the committee is comfortable. As yet, no material contracts have been awarded and so the policy has not yet been tested but we are fully resolved to do on.

iii. Membership renewal reminders and member numbers

We now have a procedure whereby all members will be notified two months in advance of subscriptions falling due (remember these can now be paid at any point during the year and membership runs for a year from the payment date not just from 1st January). A reminder will also be sent out once the actual anniversary has passed. Hopefully this will encourage members to re-join and so keep membership numbers up (see other comments below)

iv. Minimum number of committee members

The constitutional change was not passed – presumably because members felt that the minimum number of committee members was a good rule and would avoid decisions being made by very small numbers of committee members – and so I would again state our gratitude to Ray for helping us out over this problem by joining the committee. He may have said he wanted as short a tenure as possible on the committee but we all rather hope he will stay for far longer!

Although there were few questions addressed to me concerning the financial statements – perhaps because the management accounts are published each month and so queries are dealt with as they arise – I did receive several questions by email that, in the event, were not put to the meeting. One member was concerned by the level of financial resources held by the society and how we proposed to spend these funds. Since these resources belong to all members, I thought it might be useful to reprint my response to that member here.

Why does a non-profit Charity such as the Wagner Society hold such considerable reserves at the bank?

There are many elements to this although I appreciate the sentiment behind the question. The current reserves are not really that high – much the same as in 2012 but higher

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than after the disastrous 2013 losses on events. We’ve also recovered all our Gift Aid refunds that has helped augment resources.

The basic point is that we need reserves to cover the future risks that we might be taking – events that will lose money and so forth. I would also highlight that at times of falling membership, reserves will allow us to continue our activities without curtailing the programme nor raising subscriptions (which has been discussed at committee meetings and which I am currently against).

Looking forwards, I think if we found more opportunities to spend more members’ funds on worthwhile activities, events that we know will lose money, properly targeted grants, and so on, then the committee would welcome this. We’ve decided to spend some of these funds on giving free membership to students and also free entrance for students to events. I’d also like to see some introductory Wagner events that are completely free to all, hopefully attracting new members. We could also think about lowering the ticket prices if we got more attendances, and we also intend to advertise more widely in future to gain more members, not only for the financial benefit, but just to be a more successful larger society.

The agreed budget shows us breaking even in 2016 and, whilst it is not our aim to increase reserves unnecessarily, we do not want to reduce reserves unless in a worthwhile cause. I also continue to believe in economy and savings in some areas as well as financial efficiency and hopefully this will also add to our funds. 4

Another point raised concerned the expenditure on the website: a significant item in 2015 and this year. Let’s be in no doubt, the website is here to stay and will become the main method by which the society stays in touch with its members. It can be used to join the society (by PayPal or credit card, including recurring online payments), renew membership, make donations, and buy tickets for events. All our membership records are now online and are updated automatically for online payments, which is why we now favour this as a payment method for subscriptions above all other methods.5

As I mentioned above, since Margaret left the committee, I have taken on membership secretary role in addition to being treasurer. Since then I have been busy piecing together the records from her card index, mailing lists, the ‘old’ database and correcting the ‘new’ database. This has all been rather painstaking and time-consuming but will result in far more accurate records and mailing lists than we have had before, will maximise our Gift Aid income6, and allow us to increase retention of members (personalised reminders for subscriptions, for example) and so build the membership back to former levels. Apologies if I have pestered you by letter or email asking for details of your membership, or have accused you of not paying, our previous records were far from streamlined, but I hope to have a single complete database before too much longer.

4 We’ve recently recruited fifteen student members as part of the free membership programme and hope for many more once the music colleges are back and we can advertise to them although we should stress that it is ALL students, not just music students, that are welcome as free members. 5 Members wishing to renew by cheque, standing order or bank transfer are naturally very welcome to do so but I do urge people to consider switching to website payments (recurring credit card payments are available); this is also particularly true with regard to event tickets, where attendance lists are also automatically produced helping with the management of events. 6 Please, if you haven’t already done so, complete a Gift Aid declaration and return it to me, this is a hugely valuable source of income for us.

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By the time this edition goes to press, I should be in Bayreuth where I am seeing, possibly unwisely, everything on offer this year including two Parsifals! I’m very much looking forwards to seeing last year’s Tristan again – I found it hugely enjoyable both in terms of the music and the production - and also to seeing Klaus Florian Vogt as Parsifal. This will also be a great treat and the reports and reviews of the new production seem hugely encouraging. I heard him sing a fabulous Walther in Munich a few years ago (on an evening otherwise characterised by his subsequently trying to steal my pudding when we found ourselves next to each other in a restaurant that night) and also as Lohengrin many times at Bayreuth in the excellent Neuenfels production with the colourful rats, so his Parsifal will now satisfyingly complete this trio of Wagnerian heroes. Frankly, I might be slightly mad to be seeing the Castorf Ring for the third time (my mother certainly thinks so although I note that she still accepted the invitation to join me) but I simply must know what happens to the crocodiles in Siegfried this year.

Finally, and Ray may have mentioned this elsewhere, we really do want to know what members think about the society and what they want from it. A questionnaire was suggested at one AGM but this has been tried in the past and the results were not encouraging. In future editions we intend to publish ‘letters to the editor’ so please do write in, all our email addresses are shown at the back of this magazine. We’d all love to hear your suggestions, contributions, complaints and, hopefully, offers of help.

From the Chairman Richard Miles

My enforced three month break from my duties as Chairman followed open heart surgery at the end of May. It seemed a little strange to check into hospital for a major five hour operation when I felt fine, but a routine examination had revealed that my mitral valve was leaking: I was advised that it was best to repair it as soon as possible, before it caused long term damage. Had I been born 100 or even 50 years earlier, this congenital defect would have led eventually to increasing breathlessness; gradual heart failure, dropsy, and a probable early death. So I’m deeply grateful for modern medicine.

Being able to choose the timing of the operation gave me the luxury of planning how I was going to spend a rare six weeks on the sofa, unable to drive, fly or lift anything heavier than a cup of coffee, and with no work, travel or gardening to distract me (the second six weeks, which I'm about to embark on, are supposed to be a bit more active).

I was due to be in Intensive Care for a couple of days after the operation, and the nurses laughed when I tried to take a couple of books with me. They were right: I didn't have the concentration span to read at all. Although the feeling of having been hit by a truck passed after a few days, it wasn't much better for the rest of my week in hospital - the morphine still in my system affected my sleep, produced frightening and sinister dreams, made food taste strange and unpleasant, and temporarily destroyed any desire to listen to music. I watched TV indiscriminately.

Once back at home, everything improved rapidly and life started to return to normal.

My plans included two DVDs of The Ring which I had never got round to seeing all the way through - both with obvious Wagner Society connections: the Chereau Ring, with Gwyneth Jones, and the

8 subsequent Barenboim recording, with Anne Evans, Graham Clark & John Tomlinson. I have always found it frustrating that if my musical education at school had included Wagner, I could have seen both - and indeed the Goodall Ring in English - but it didn't, and I didn't. So near, yet so far.

I also wanted to remedy some shameful gaps in my historical knowledge. In the history I was taught at school, German-speaking Europe was a shady presence, providing a succession of obscure and exotically-named wars which gave the opportunity for famous British victories against the French. The wider context was not explained. Of course, I knew that it was really Britain which mostly played a walk-on part in European history, but I needed to know more. My reading list included a mixture of history (some hard, some lighter) and fiction: Iron Kingdom (Christopher Clark), Vanished Kingdoms (Norman Davies); Danubia & Germania (Simon Winder); and The Radetzky March (Stefan Zweig). All are highly recommended in helping to build a factual and atmospheric picture of this totally vanished - but not very remote - era. Vanished Kingdoms in particular - and other books by Norman Davies - are especially valuable in providing a wider context for European history.

The highly entertaining Simon Winder books included lots of suggestions for further reading and listening: musically, he's more of an enthusiast for Bartok, especially Bluebeard's Castle, than for Wagner. However, he likes Siegfried, seeing Act II, intriguingly, as a historical analogy for Habsburg Austria. (Like Fafner, the Habsburgs occupy their vast territories with little idea what to do with them or ability to defend them, surrounded by various mutually antagonistic adversaries awaiting their opportunity to get their hands on the treasure. The Tarnhelm represents the shape-shifting undergone by the empire as the Habsburgs experimented with different ways of administering their vast, inherently unmanageable legacy.)

The third part of my mission (mostly nothing to do with Wagner) was to catch up on the vast, embarrassing backlog of great films I have never seen. Compared with opera, this is of course a limitless task, but I have made a start and have begun to understand the art of cinema. Thanks to the recommendations of various friends, this includes Italian, Japanese, Iranian, French, British and Chinese cinema, and I have not watched a single film that did not teach me something. There is so much more to discover. I have also started to watch the nine hour epic on Wagner, starring Richard Burton (yet another on my ‘no, I’m afraid I haven’t seen it’ list) - one DVD down, three to go.

I naturally assumed that any live performances would be out, and that my tickets to Longborough, Glyndebourne and the Royal Festival Hall would have to be surrendered. But the surgeon told me I might be up to an opera or two before long, and as it turned out, I will have seen Tannhauser, Meistersinger, The Ring and Tristan within six weeks of the operation - sometimes tiring, but well worth it and with no ill effects.

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No-one would choose to have major surgery, but I have been very fortunate that it was a purely mechanical issue and not prompted by immediate illness. It has truly been - in the best sense - a life- changing experience.

From Bishop’s Waltham to Bayreuth - remembering Peter West 15 February 1936 to 9 May 2016

Karen West

Peter used to claim that his ears were opened to Wagner in the early 1940s when, at his rural Hampshire school, he heard the overture to the Flying Dutchman broadcast as part of a school’s music radio programme. More likely his serious lifetime’s devotion to the works of our musical hero resulted from a night time call to a young Oxford City Police Constable to attend a reported break-in at the University’s Gramophone Library. So grateful was the Librarian for the police’s swift attention that he offered Peter a choice of records to borrow (not that such a thing would be allowed these days!) and being unsure what to borrow, his eyes alighted on that memorable Decca cover of the recently released Solti Rheingold. ‘Good choice’ said the Librarian and the rest, as they say, is history.

Eventually Peter was to acquire his own copy of the entire Decca recording, courtesy of spotting an advert in the Southampton Evening Echo, following the sad demise of a young man killed in a motorcycle accident whose mother was delighted that the records were going to such a good home, since seemingly he had saved for weeks to buy them. I’m not so sure that Margaret, Peter’s wife and their neighbours were equally delighted as they were played at great volume over the months and years that followed on loudspeakers that seemed to get larger and larger with every new model of Quad Electrostatic that was released onto the market!

Karen West Through a combination of various circumstances Peter was fortunate enough to combine his passion for music of all kinds (both Wagner and Pink Floyd were played at his memorial service!) with a love of hi fi and photography that both made him an income at different times in his later working life. It was at a meeting of the Wagner Society in something like 1995 that I volunteered him to take photographs – I think for a visit by Wolfgang Wagner – and for almost the next 20 years he captured many of the Society’s events and performances. He was especially excited by rehearsals and performers caught ‘in action’ and, though I know I’m biased, I think you can see his passion for the music in the pictures themselves.

It was not at all surprising that as his daughter I caught the Wagner bug early in life – I went to my first Gotterdammerung at the age of 13 and now almost 45 years later, simply hundreds of amazing musical experiences since, I’m now facing these without Dad at my side – a huge hole indeed, but there are so many shared highlights of our shared passion for Wagner that will undoubtedly sustain me – too many to list here, but which include several visits to Bayreuth; including a memorable Lohengrin from the sixth row), regular performances at Covent Garden and wherever else in the UK Wagner was being performed and a pilgrimage to Tribschen to mark my ‘golden’ birthday.

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We were huge fans of Bernard Levin and used to regularly share lines from his great monologue on Wagner and his music (broadcast in something like 1974) until the very end of his life. We had an audio cassette of the talk which soon became worn-out by its playing and, unable to retrieve a copy from the BBC, Peter transcribed the whole talk and was thrilled to be asked to read it, with accompanying musical extracts, to a meeting of the Society and in the presence of Levin’s long-time partner. Much more recently, courtesy of the Society, Peter was also able to fulfil another Wagner ambition and have published an article in Wagner News about one of his Wagner heroes, Anton Seidl. By this time he was living with a diagnosis of lung cancer and died peacefully in hospital last month, alas just a few days before being able to enjoy an 80th birthday treat of tickets for Meistersinger at Glyndebourne.

THE PRESIDENT'S MASTER CLASS Royal Over-Seas League, 19 May 2016 Katie Barnes

This year's masterclass was devoted entirely to Katie Stevenson, the young mezzo-soprano who swept the board at last November's Singing Competition. The original intention had been to include both winners of the President's Prize, but sadly Gareth Daffyd Morris was unavailable because Welsh National Opera had refused to release him from a chorus stage rehearsal, and Dame Gwyneth suggested to the audience that perhaps he could come another time.

Stevenson began by singing through Waltraute's great narrative, Höre mit Sinn. Her intense stillness her huge, terrified eyes gripped the audience, and her tone at erlöst wär' Gott und Welt was simply lovely. She looked Richard Carter drained at the end.

Dame Gwyneth commended her beautiful voice, but noted that Stevenson is young and has a lot to learn: they could have worked for a week on this one aria. Stating that her aim was to help Stevenson and make life easier for her, she observed that she wanted the voice to be more beautiful, more round and focused. She began by improving her pupil's posture. Because Stevenson was stooping slightly as she sang, which collapses the diaphraghm, Dame Gwyneth encouraged her to "bring her shoulders up and down" and felt her abdomen to check her breathing. "The back is your reserve tank. Breathe into your stomach and fill the whole of your back with air. Stand as though you are playing with a hula hoop, Richard Carter

11 tuck your tail in and make your legs like tree trunks."

The mouth has to be round to make beautiful, round sounds and the tongue must always rest on the bottom teeth so that the voice can come up and hit the "Bayreuth decal" in the palate, enabling the sound to resonate around the mouth before emerging. "For the lower notes, make your mouth like an anteater," with the sound at the front of the mouth. Dame Gwyneth warned that a wide mouth puts a strain on the vocal chords and causes the low notes to be lost at the back of the throat. The mouth must be used to shape the consonants.

It is vital for the singer to know what every word means. Dame Gwyneth put the aria into context: "How are you feeling when you come on? You have just ridden in on a horse and are desperate to get your message to Brünnhilde, but she's not really listening." Wotan has ordered his people to chop up the Weltesche. This is the end of the world, and Waltraute is absolutely desperate. "There should be more urgency at the beginning." She took Stevenson through the opening phrases in detail, stressing the need for a long, round-mouthed "o" sound on Höre and for strong consonants on mit Sinn and sage, making Stevenson speak the last word several times. "Control your lips and you form the roundness of the sound. Think of your mouth forming the actual sound. It's like playing a trumpet - focus the sound and make the mouth smaller. Get the urgency into it, be much more agitato - you're trying to stop them burning down Valhalla!... It will take a long time to get right, but it will be so worth it."

As they worked through the aria, Dame Gwyneth sang some notes and phrases to demonstrate how they should be done and how the mouth should be shaped around the consonants. "Really use the consonants at geschlagen, you have to feel the schlag. Let the jaw down on every vowel to let the inside of the mouth have the place for the tone to develop." She recalled the advice of her own teacher, Dame Eva Turner: "Rrrroll your R's, my dearrrr!"

I noticed the improvement in Stevenson's tone and voice production as the master class progressed. Dame Gwyneth continued to stress the importance of the words - "the sound of the vowels has to be covered" and demonstrated the line dann noch einmal to demonstrate how the sound is enriched Adrian Muller Richard Carter by keeping the mouth open. The breath control has to be matched with the tone to avoid gasping for breath, and bringing the tone to the front of the mouth helps the resonance.

At liegen wir Walküren, "Waltraute is absolutely terrified," and by speaking the text, Dame Gwyneth demonstrated how the singer must grip the audience's attention and look into space to see Wotan thinking of Brünnhilde. "Bring warmth to the tone at Brünnhilde and keep the mouth round at Blick to increase the warmth." They sang the passage together - Dame Gwyneth's soft, perfectly formed sound was spellbinding - and she spoke the words to show how expressive they are.

Stevenson admitted that her singing was much more focused when she followed Dame Gwyneth's advice and that her sound carried better. "You have to talk about these things to help singers to make the best of their instruments," Dame Gwyneth said, observing that singers' instruments are not just

12 their voices but "the whole of their bodies from the tops of their heads to the tips of their toes" and especially what is in their heads, the lips, teeth and tongue.

For Des tiefen Rheines Töchtern, Dame Gwyneth advised Stevenson to get the voice forward and focussed for the lower notes so that they will project over the orchestra - "then you can really play with that" - and for Träume, to bring the lower lip forward "like a shaving mug or an ape" to make the tongue rigid. "Focus the sound with your mouth and you don't need to give so much". Stevenson once again produced a most beautiful, warm, round tone for Gott und Welt, and with Waltraute's final plea, Dame Gwyneth commented, "Now we have the Wagner sound!".

They spent the remainder of the session on a complete contrast, Ottavia's aria Disprezzata Regina from Monteverdi's L'Incoronazione di Poppea, for which, as Dame Gwyneth approvingly observed, Stevenson had written her own translation. The combination of Wagner and Monteverdi may at first sight seem a strange one, but Dame Gwyneth considers it important for Wagner singers to sing music by other composers: For her own Bayreuth audition s, in addition to Senta’s Ballad she sang “D’amor sull’ali rosee” from Il Trovatore.

Ottavia is a Queen, and the aria needs a regal approach - "she will lose dignity if she doesn't look imposing". The very words must be regal: the word Regina must be emphasised - "I'm the Queen!" - and del monarco Romano must convey a sense of "How dare they despise me!" Empio must be regal too, "otherwise Nero sounds too nice". But the aria is full of changes of mood, each of which has different sound qualities, and the singer must be comfortable with all of them.

What a fascinating evening this was, one in which pupil and audience alike benefited from the teacher's advice and our knowledge of music which we thought we already knew well was extended and illuminated. And, as a teaser for the future, Dame Gwyneth remarked in passing that she has started writing her memoirs.

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A visit to Bayreuth Dame Gwyneth Jones

My husband, Adrian and I recently stayed in Bayreuth for a week as part of an extremely intensive one month trip by car around Germany and Austria researching for his PhD in Musicology. Bayreuth itself had not changed a lot except on the Festspielhügel, where massive protective measures are being taken. Metal barriers have been erected, which prevent the public from enjoying the traditional walk around the theatre during the long intervals. Children of those involved in the Festival, are no longer allowed to visit their parents in the canteen and dressing rooms and young mothers have to breast- feed their babies in metal containers without air-conditioning, outside the Festspielhaus. Everyone has to always carry an ID card. A local newspaper reported that Klaus Florian Vogt, who is singing the Parsifal in the new production, did not have his ID with him and was taken to the security control centre despite protests from his colleagues when they were coming out of the rehearsal stage building behind the Festspielhaus: he was wearing his costume which was a uniform with jump boots.

Many Members of the Society will have received, or read on our website the letter from Katharina Wagner and Holger von Berg setting out the new security measures including bans on taking almost anything into the auditorium. Apparently over 60 Security men have been employed and certainly, when we drove up to the Green Hill, they were very prominent. Some people will not be happy to have to sit for hours on the uncomfortable wooden seats without a cushion, but I agree that large bags should not be allowed; because they often contain machines for making pirate recordings and video films.

Chadors are being worn in the “Blumenmädchen” scene in the new production of Parsifal. Might this have created problems? In Parsifal, Wagner presents his own religious creation containing aspects of Zoroastrianism of the old Parsi, the Indian Religious Circle, Brahminism and Buddhism, which are all woven into Christian Faith; but Islam is not a part of it. So one wonders why Chadors are used.

It is now exactly fifty years since I made my debut in Bayreuth as Sieglinde. I continued singing there every year for almost twenty years, rejecting the invitations to sing in other more financially lucrative Festivals, because of my admiration for the genius Richard Wagner. My family spent two to three months there every summer. It was always very hard work, often very bad weather and usually one returned home with very little financial reward; because the fees were extremely low and the cost of living there very high, but Wolfgang Wagner took real interest in everything and everybody, which helped towards creating a happy atmosphere, My daughter Susanne always looked forward to being together with the Would it be allowed now? Gwyneth Jones with her daughter behind her wearing a blue dress in the children of Donald McIntyre and other colleagues. From the Cherau Ring Bayreuth 1981. age of five, she actually took part in the Chereau Ring every year.

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Things have changed. The few top singers capable of singing the heavy Wagner roles seem not interested in spending so much time there for so little reward. One hears about singers being fired and conductors leaving, which doesn’t reflect an atmosphere of joyous, harmonious working conditions under the present management.

We also visited Wahnfried and its new Museum which was reopened last year after renovation. We were escorted by its director Dr Sven Friedrich. The Siegfried Wagner house, where Winifred Wagner used to live, where I was often invited to lunch, is now practically void of furniture. Her desk, which used to have pictures of Hitler and Wieland displayed, has disappeared; but there is a film about the Nazi era which is running constantly.

There is an extensive underground area which is entirely black with a 60 seat theatre, where one can see various films which have been made at the Festspielhaus. I wondered who would want to come to sit for hours watching DVDs, when most Wagner enthusiasts probably have these films at home. A machine with buttons, enables you to read a large score, assuming you can read music and see films of Bugs Bunny, Charlie Chaplin etc. Another very dark room contained a collection of old stage set models and costumes, including my Venus costume; but there was no reference to who had worn these costumes and it was so dark that it was practically impossible to read anything at all. There was an impressive Gallery of photographs of all the conductors who have conducted at the Festspiele, including those who have only conducted a handful of performances there, but there were no photographs or names of the many leading singers, producers or chorus masters, who have faithfully given their time and devoted services for years, making it possible for the Festival to exist. This gave the impression that only the conductors are important and of course this is very wrong; because the festival exists in order to celebrate and perform Wagner’s great operatic works, which would be impossible without soloists and chorus. Richard Wagner himself was very aware that he would be unable to perform “Tristan und Isolde”, unless he found a soprano and tenor who were able to learn and sing the title roles and he literally did a hand-stand on his balcony, joyfully waving a welcome with his feet, when Malvina and Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld came to sing these roles for him for the first time.

I discussed this lack of presence of the artists who have contributed to the festival’s success with Dr Friedrich and it was obvious that I was not the first one to question this matter, so hopefully this will be rectified.

I do hope that all our members who went to Bayreuth this summer, had an enjoyable visit. I urge you to attend the events being arranged for you by The Wagner Society. I find it rather disappointing that the attendance is often not what it should be. I am thrilled that I have been able to arrange several joint events with the ROSL in their beautiful Princess Alexandra Hall and I look forward to seeing you all there on 8 November, when I get together again with my dear friend Humphrey Burton. I still remember all the happy faces and requests for us to do another interview, after the one which we did in Aldeburgh. This year our Annual Singing Competition will also be held there and there promises to be a lovely afternoon tea which will allow us to chat and get to know one another. Do come to these and other events which are planned. It would be nice to see more of you also at the AGM, taking an active interest in our Society. We exist in order to celebrate our mutual love and admiration for the great works of Richard Wagner. Let’s do this together!

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From the archives -

Fifty years ago Gwyneth Jones as Sieglinde – Royal Opera House

Forty five years ago From the archives - From Wagner News No 1

Major Harry Edmunds

“Many members have wondered at times how the Wagner Society came to be founded.

The origins go back to the days of the Zeppelin Airships. In 1936, following the success of the 'Graf Zeppelin', our shipping companies awoke to the realization that they were losing their passenger business to one small airship. The ‘Graf Zeppelin' took only two and a half days for the transatlantic journey to South America, as against the twelve to fourteen days needed by the crack steamers, and was much more economical of fuel. This led to Admiral Sir Reginald Hall, the former Director of Naval Intelligence, being asked to institute enquiries, …………….. I was asked could I go to Germany and find out all about airships?

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Nothing could have pleased me more, and I spent the following eighteen months in Friedrichshafen, Frankfurt and Berlin.

An introduction to the RING During the summer of 1936, I often spent my Sundays with the family of Captain Ernst Lehmann. Unfortunately, Captain Lehmann was killed in the disaster to the airship 'Hindenburg'. On one Sunday I was told that should I care to, I could use Ernst's seat at the Munich Opera House for a gala performance of DIE WALKURE and see it with his wife, Marie Lehmann, as he would have to be absent at a meeting. At the time I was not particularly fond of opera, though I liked classical music, and from what I had heard of Wagner, I imagined myself in for four and a half hours of long drawn-out boredom, relieved only by the presence of Marie Lehmann.

We travelled to Munich by train and as it was Sunday it had to be a ‘Personenzug' in other words it stopped at all stations. This started my real interest in Wagner, as during this long journey Ernst described to me the story of the RING, great deal of Wagner's life and history and, in particular, DIE WALURE. When eventually we reached the opera house and took our seats, I knew what was to happen and the sequence of events. I can remember now the thrill as the lights dimmed and the introduction to Act 1 started with Siegmund's flight through the forest; and then the glorious, lyrical music of that act, with Siegmund’s song the Spring. I had never thought that opera could be like this, full of the tense drama of human emotions so vividly and eloquently expressed in the wonderful music.

Wagner ‘in the wilderness’ After the war my interest in Wagner was revived in 1948 by a visit to the Royal Opera House, lately taken over by David Webster as General Administrator, in which I first saw Hans Hotter as Sachs in that year’s production of THE MASTERSINGERS, with Victoria Sladen, Constance Shacklock and with Heddle Nash as David. I can remember the conductor, Dr Karl Rankl, singing (probably shouting) to his orchestra as he conducted. In those days the orchestra was a long way from its present magnificent perfection.

I had become aware, in the years following the war, of an ostracism and prejudice against Wagner's music, which extends even to the present day. To the British public it was Nazi music. Few realised that Wagner died long before Hitler was born and it was fifty years after his death that German National Socialism became established, in 1933.

And so, as the old 78 records became fewer and the decade of transformation to the new long playing records, with the introduction of stereo, commenced; while the Promenade Concerts

17 with Beethoven, Mozart, Tchaikovsky and others were unstinted in concert performances, the name and music of Wagner remained very much in the wilderness. The desire to do something about getting the name of Wagner in music back into the repertoires and back for people's enjoyment became stronger, until at last I had a talk with a friend, Mr Hubert Fosse, then music editor of the Oxford University Press and a lover of Wagner's music. It was agreed that an attempt should be made to form a Wagner Society, in which the leading part would be taken by Hubert. This was in February 1953, but unfortunately he died suddenly within a few weeks.

A start is made In September I decided to make a move and called at the Royal Opera House to enquire whether or not a Wagner Society was in existence. The Public Relations Officer, Mr Michael Wood, saw me and called in Mr Harold Rosenthal, who was then in charge of the library. I was informed that no Wagner Society existed, as a previous society had only lasted to the early years of the 1900s.

On 23 October 1953 the following notice was inserted by me in the personal column of 'The Times': 'A Wagner Society. Are you interested? Please reply to Box No….' The happenings following this notice belong to the history of the Wagner Society after the convening of the first meeting at the Craven Hotel, Charing Cross, on 19 November 1953.

Harry Edmonds has had remarkably varied career. He is well known as a writer, but in addition, was apprentice on a sailing ship as long ago as 1906, sailed three times round Cape Horn before the Panama Canal was built, was a marine engineer and, for twenty six years, a regular soldier.”

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The artistic development of the Deutsche Nothilfe 1933 stamps – Scenes from Wagner Giles du Boulay

When the set of nine stamps, stamp booklet and special postal stationery card to be sold with a surcharge for the benefit of the Deutsche Nothilfe, were issued on 1 November 1933, there can surely be little doubt that those who had been lobbying for some philatelic commemoration of Wagner, and especially the traditionalists amongst them, must have been more than satisfied. The stamps stand out from those issued before in Germany, by their different size, and by the inclusion of stylistic elements reminiscent of the, then already dated, Jugendstil movement in their flowing lines, the mythic, dreamlike portrayal of the scenes, and even to an extent in the typeface used in the frames. The stamps have depth and dramatic impact. Quite, simply they are beautiful.

It appears that during 1932 there had been a steady flow of pleas to the Illustriertes Briefmarken Journal (IBJ) for some stamps, to be issued in 1933, to celebrate the great German composer Richard Wagner. That year was to see both the 120th anniversary of Wagner’s birth and the 50th of his death: the composer was born in Leipzig on 22 May 1813 and died in Venice on 13 February 1883. The editor of the IBJ wrote in January 1933 to the Reichspostministerium to make representations for some philatelic tribute to Wagner. On 25 January, the Reichspostministerium replied that for ‘operational

19 reasons’ it would not be possible to comply with the request. They went on to say that, after all, in 1926 (seven years beforehand !) they had issued a set of portraits of notable German cultural figures, that the 120th anniversary of Wagner’s birth was not particularly significant, and that in any event it was too late to mark the 50th anniversary of his death.

But, as the IBJ dutifully, and possibly a little fancifully, reported in their 1 November 1933 issue, a ‘refreshing breeze’ had blown through the Reichspostministerium, following the election, on 5 March 1933, of a certain, moustached, fanatical devotee of Wagner (which, of course, is not how they referred to him !). The director of the Reichsdruckerei, Franz Helmberger, was ordered by the Reichspostminister, Paul Freiherr von Eltz-Rübenach, to start the necessary preparations for production of some ‘Wagner stamps’. The IBJ implies that the order must have come following the election, but as indicated below by the dates of production of various essays for the stamps, the work must surely have started earlier. That is not to deny the possibility, however, that National Socialist influence did not concentrate the minds of the decision makers. It should also be remembered here that Eltz-Rübenach himself was a man of integrity and Christian faith, whose refusal to join the party cost him his job in 1937, and vindictive persecution thereafter until his death in 1943.

Director Helmberger commissioned Professor Alois Kolb, an Austrian, (b. 1875 Vienna, d. 1942 Leipzig), to produce the designs for the stamps. Prof. Kolb was one of the most distinguished graphic artists of the time. From 1900 to 1905 he had worked for the journal Jugend, from which the name of the German Art Nouveau movement, Jugendstil had been derived. Since 1907 (some sources say 1909), he had been teaching etching and copperplate engraving, particularly of the human figure, at the Staatlichen Akademie für Graphische Künste und Buchgewerbe in Leipzig (now the Hochschule für Graphik und Buchkunst). Kolb had also illustrated several important books, such as the 1911 German edition of Henrik Ibsen’s Die Kronprätendenten and Heinrich von Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas. More germane to the new project, however, were his masterful etchings and engravings for two magnificent limited-edition volumes: the story of Tristan and Isolde, published in Vienna in 1919, and Friedrich Hebbel’s Die Nibelungen (1924).

Kolb was not given an entirely free hand in deciding on the designs. As a first step, he and Freiherr von Eltz-Rübenach consulted Winifred Wagner, the British-born daughter-in-law of the composer, who from 1930, had directed the annual Bayreuth Festival. They agreed that the designs should portray principal protagonists at crucial moments in the unfolding of the romantic operas and music dramas, rather than, for example, an attempt to convey the sense of whole scenes from the works.

Kolb quickly set to work, and the IBJ reported that ‘by about Easter’ he had Prof. Alois Kolb, Leipzig, holding a proof page from already produced a his work Ein Abenteuer – Photo E.T. Smith from IBJ number of pen-and–ink 1933 p.329 sketches, in a slightly larger format (30x24mm) than the finished stamps, in order to determine the optimum positioning of the figures in their frames. The artist was kind enough to allow IBJ to illustrate one of them – reproduced here - Tannhäuser playing his song of love to Venus - note

20 that the harp is held here in Tannhäuser’s right hand. (Easter Sunday fell on 16 April in 1933, yet, as will be seen below, the Reichsdruckerei had already produced a first set of essays for consideration over a month before that date.)

Kolb then prepared fourteen pencil sketches on card cut to the correct size and perforated to simulate stamps. The IBJ was also able to illustrate these. The reproductions below from the IBJ illustrations of 1933 are of course somewhat indistinct, but one can immediately see many elements of the finished stamps taking shape, and others that were rejected.

The Museumsstiftung Post und Telekommunikation, Archiv für Philatelie, Bonn holds the original Reichsdruckerei-produced essays and proofs chronicling the next steps in the development of the stamps. The first illustration from their archive, is of seventeen greenish- toned photos of essays, mounted on a card with the Reichsdruckerei Direktion imprint, and dated on the back 13.3.1933. Irrespective of the scene from Wagner depicted, the essays all have the same sample frame with the legend ‘Tristan und Isolde’ and a stamp value of 15Rpf with 8Rpf surcharge for the Deutsche Nothilfe – a value not actually issued in the finished set.

Der fliegende Holländer : the Dutchman Das Rheingold : the Rhinemaidens Die Meistersinger : Hans Sachs

Siegfried : Siegfried and the Wanderer Die Walküre : Wotan and Brünnhilde (1) DieWalküre :Wotan and Brünnhilde (2)

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Essays dated 13.3.1933 22

It is not clear at what stage the decision was taken that the issue would comprise nine values. It does seem an odd decision when one considers that, simply by the addition of that 15Rpf, or another value, all ten works of Wagner’s mature oeuvre could have been represented: Der fliegende Holländer (première 1843), Tannhäuser (1845), Lohengrin (1850), Tristan und Isolde (1865), Die Meistersinger (1868), the four parts of the mighty ‘Ring cycle’ Der Ring des Nibelungen (1876) - Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried and Götterdämmerung - and lastly, Parsifal (1882). In the end, perhaps ironically, perhaps fittingly, the ‘downfall’ of the set is the lamentable omission of a stamp depicting a scene from Götterdämmerung. That decision seems to have been taken early on, and may even have been imposed on the artist, as, despite duplications from most of the other works, not one scene from Götterdämmering can positively be identified either from the above-mentioned pencil sketches or from the seventeen essays. Surely, for example, the slaying of Siegfried or the great conflagration at the denouement of the Ring cycle would have powerfully inspired the artist had he been permitted to include a scene from Götterdämmerung. Indeed, he had movingly depicted Siegfried’s dying agony as one of the 44 engravings for Hebbel’s Die Nibelungen. Perhaps, in the spirit of all good conspiracy theories, one might venture to suggest that a certain ‘Austrian corporal’, mindful of the work’s message of the doom of overweening power, let it be known that no such stamp should be issued.

Three more almost identical Reichsdruckerei cards from the Archiv für Philatelie, Bonn, each with just eleven perforated essays mounted on them, comprise the next stage - the toning was changed to sepia on one. Again, the common legend ‘Tristan und Isolde’ is used, but the typeface for all the wording is closer to that used on the finished stamps, and the charity surcharge is shown as an ‘8’ in each of the top corners. The essays are the same eleven in each case, but include variations from those on the card of seventeen. The first only of the three cards is illustrated below.

Professor Kolb recounted to the author, Berthold Krüger, of the article published in IBJ No.21 of 1 November 1933, the date the stamps were issued, how he had had to use much tact in defending his views against the opinions of the Committee charged with deciding upon the final designs. He submitted new drawings as one took issue with the Viking ship of the Holländer, or another wanted the position of Siegfried to be shifted more than once, and yet another criticised the form of the Holy Grail in the The eleven second-stage essays hands of Parsifal. Tannhäuser’s harp was shifted from the right to the left hand;

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Lohengrin had to be made to look ‘more triumphant’; the Rhinemaidens must be moved to the right, so that the ‘gleaming gold on the rocky reef’ could be better seen, etc. etc. The Committee clearly knew their Wagner: Kolb’s idea that the ‘Flying Dutchman’s’ ship with ‘blood red sails and black masts’ should be portrayed as a Viking ship is odd.

The Archiv holds yet another three almost identical cards, dated 20.4.1933 on the back, now with the final selection of nine essays mounted on them, sepia-toned, as the last stage in the selection process. On these, the typeface has been changed again, to a more conventional one, and the space for the

The eleven second-stage essays

Essays dated 20.4.1933 with values allocated to the nine selected designs Essays dated 20.4.1933 with values allocated to the nine selected designs. differing legends above the scenes has been left blank. The value 15 still appears on all of them, but

24 the actual values of the finished stamps have been chalked in figures above each. Wagnerian purists may have preferred the allocation to have reflected the orders either of first performances or of completion of the works, but that is not the case. Their sensibilities, however, may at least be assuaged by the fitting bestowal of the highest value upon Parsifal.

The scenes on the stamps are as follows:

3+2Rpf: Tannhäuser: from Act 1 Scene 1 – Tannhäuser plays his song of love to Venus but begs to be released from the Venusberg. 4+2Rpf: Der fliegende Holländer: from Act 1 – ‘The Flying Dutchman’ prepares to come ashore, as the ‘time is up’. 5+2Rpf: Das Rheingold: from Scene 1 – The spurned Alberich reaches out to steal the Rhinegold, to the alarm of the Rhinemaidens. 6+4Rpf: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg: from Act 3 – Hans Sachs, the cobbler, peruses the master song in his workshop. 8+4Rpf: Die Walküre: from Act 3 Scene 3 – Wotan tenderly places the Valkyrie helmet on the head of Brünnhilde, whom he has cast into a magic sleep. 12+3Rpf: Siegfried: from Act 2 Scene 1 – Siegfried wields the sword ‘Notung’ to slay Fafner in the form of a fierce dragon. 20+10Rpf: Tristan und Isolde: from Act 1 Scene 5 – Tristan takes from Isolde the cup containing a love potion substituted for a death potion. 25+15Rpf: Lohengrin: from Act 1 – The mysterious knight, Lohengrin, in gleaming armour, arrives in a barque pulled by a swan. 40+35Rpf: Parsifal: from Act 3 – Parsifal, transfigured, holds forth the Holy Grail in the growing light from above.

The insertion of the allocated values to the individual stamps and the production of engraved colour trials came next, now with the chosen typeface. The colours selected were not part of Prof. Kolb’s brief, but in accordance with UPU provisions, were essentially the same as those used for the, then current, ‘Hindenburg Medallion’ definitive stamps.

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“Die Marke 4, 20 und 25 Rpf sind Druckreif. Berlin W66, den 21. Juli 1933. Der Reichspostminister.” (The 4, 20 & 25 Rpf are ready for production)

The Bühnenweihfestspiel (festival work to consecrate a stage) Parsifal, and especially its final scene, when Parsifal holds aloft the softly glowing Grail, imbued with medieval mysticism, is revered by Wagnerians, so it is unsurprising that special attention was paid to this stamp. Note how, as late as 21 July, approval of the 40Rpf value had been withheld. The placement of Parsifal’s hands around the Holy Grail was still troubling the Committee. Sepia- and greenish-toned essays of the individual stamp were mounted on cards, all dated 1 August, to be compared with a new version, with Parsifal’s fingers closer together, giving a sense of him holding the Grail more reverently. The Grail also has more definition in the new version – which was then turned into an engraved colour trial, and at last approved.

The rejected design On card annotated “geänderte Zeichnung” (changed drawing)

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Endgult. Muster (Final design). The final stage in the development process was the mounting of three each of the stamps printed in very slightly differing shades of the chosen colours. The differences are in the main too subtle to make out in the reproduction here. A small cross can be seen below each of the chosen shades.

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The steel-engraved stamps then went into production at the Reichsdruckerei, Berlin, to be printed on paper with, for the first time, a watermark of multiple swastikas.

Such technical matters as the sheet layouts for use at post office counters and for making up the booklets, the vexed question of the different perforations, the quantities of each stamp issued and sold, are best left to another article. The aim of this short study has been to outline the artistic development of a set of stamps, which, in the author’s view, have never been surpassed in beauty in German philately.

Acknowledgements I am most grateful to Imme Hase and Dr. Hahn of the Museumsstiftung Post und Telekommunikation, Archiv für Philatelie, Bonn for their assistance in making available for publication the images of the essays and proofs of the ‘Wagner stamps’, as well as for providing useful background information from the Illustriertes Briefmarken Journal, 1933.

Additional source for biographical details of Alois Kolb Endgult. Muster (Final design). Die Nibelungen, Max Slevogt zum 70. Todestag – catalogue of an exhibition held at Schloss Villa Ludwigshöhe, Edenkoben 24 Aug. to 1 Dec. 2002.

This article was first published in Germania Vol.46 No.2 (May 2010), the journal of the Germany & Colonies Philatelic Society, and reprinted here by kind permission of the author and the Society.

OPERA NORTH DER RING DES NIBELUNGEN Town Hall, Leeds. 23, 30 April 14, 21 May Robert Mitchell

It had to happen. At the end many of us, not too stiff or arthriticy after 4 1/2 hours of music rose to our feet to emphasise our gratitude for the gargantuan effort and result of producing the first complete cycle of Der Ring des Nibelungen by an English provincial company. Sometimes I search, usually in vain, for a Ring production to visit which will not be a rip-off productionwise. I needed to look no further than 40 miles from home down the M62 corridor. I reached the end of each of the four car journeys to Leeds with an expectation of joy and fulfilment, rather than the usual apprehension and dread.

In some ways, especially in an age of Regietheather perverts who in happier times might have been consigned to concentration camps for a spot of re-education, Peter Mumford's solution is ideal, and certainly refreshing. For here we have 3 giant screens for usually wonderful and apt projections behind the orchestra with the singers out front facing us most of the time. They take their cues from one of three TV monitors showing the conductor, located on the front wall of the balcony. All the emotions that the characters feel at any given moment are expressed facially (and vocally) direct to the audience. This usually enhances the dramatic effect, especially when seeing someone like Lee Bissett (Sieglinde) whose histrionic talent was greatly evident even when not singing. Sometimes the sheer vocal volume effect could be more overwhelming than I have ever known it in over 50 years of Wagner performances, for example at the Valkyries' farewell "Weh! Weh" which nearly knocked me off my seat.

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By now you will have heard the broadcasts from Gateshead and have a fair idea of the vocal talent on display, notably Miss Hogan's Brünnhilde. In my cycle Katherine Broderick sang a most promising Siegfried Brünnhilde in addition. Of what you will have only an approximation will be the sheer vocal impact of being present in the auditorium. This applied particularly to Jo Pohlheim's expertly characterised Alberich, and above all to James Cresswell's Fasolt and Hunding. As soon as he started singing I was mesmerised. A true Bosabalian moment (see Wagner News No 207). It was no wonder that he was singing Wotan at the Proms.

The audience were fantastically attentive as always. This Ring demands a permanent place in the repertory. It was that good.

Opera North Das Rheingold, Southbank Centre Fiery demi-god and conductor eclipse any B-casting as a Ring comes south

David Nice Wednesday 29 June 2016

They promised Wagner for everybody at the Southbank Centre, and so far they're delivering. Community events cluster around a live screening of each Ring instalment in the Clore Ballroom. We privileged few in the Festival Hall wondered how newcomers might be reacting out there, but there was no interval in the two-and-three-quarter-hour Das Rheingold to go and test the waters. I'm hoping that Tolkien lovers enjoyed the mythological gimmicks of the tetralogy's images "preliminary evening" opera even if it offers the driest speech- song and the least knock-out impact of the four in Wotan (Michael Druiett, left) and Loge (Wolfgang Ablinger- terms of human emotion. Sperrhacke, right) catch Alberich as toad (Jo Pohlheim) All by Clive Barda

One thing's for certain: there could have been no clearer delivery of the drama and the issues than Opera North's "concert staging" with its clever projections by the director, Peter Mumford. Helpful texts for first-timers, certainly, but sometimes too much background: hardcore Wagnerians might have been irritated by the past-tense summaries on the screen telling us what was going to happen, and in some cases what had happened, when Wagner's stage directions might have done just as well.

There was information overload at the start, certainly, when we just need to experience the orchestra rising from the depths of the Rhine – rippling surface only on the screen not quite right – and to trust to the narrative of Rhinemaidens guarding the gold versus dwarf Alberich deciding to grab it once repulsed in his advances. But after that so many of the effects got it just right: the descent from mountain top to Nibelheim via a sulphurous cleft in the rock and back again, the dark nature

29 background for Erda's apocalyptic warning, and of course the final rainbow bridge which has nothing to do with Saturday's glorious Pride and homes in on the word of the week – delusion. Mumford wisely lets it fade to black pessimism on the screen

A strong if not entirely A-list cast of singing actors had a more difficult task on a narrow runway in front of the orchestra. The Proms Ring cycle conducted by Barenboim worked so well because the luxury of a full stage allowed singers already experienced in working with each other to relate; here, they were forced to express themselves mostly out-front, stinting a bit on the personenregie. One felt that each had brought his or her own dramatic style and gestures along rather than working as one.

So while Wagner the anti-capitalist revolutionary of the 1840s described all-too-corruptible chief god Wotan as "the sum of the intelligence of the present" – and that would seem to be our own present still – the sum of the intelligence of last night was unquestionably Loge the demi-god who stands apart from the rest in the riveting physical and vocal performance of Glyndebourne favourite Wolfgang Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke Ablinger-Sperrhacke (pictured). Entering with flickering fire-fingers, he settled into the role of intellectual political advisor who gets the gold back from Alberich but then sees events spiral out of control and finally moves back to detachment. The pause before a highly original inflection of "who knows what I'll do" at the end was endemic of this man's performing genius. He's not just a character tenor, either; on this evidence we need him in Schubert Lieder much more than several of our over- promoted native choral-scholar weeds. Top of their respective games, too, and welcome in Wagner anywhere in the world were the undervalued Yvonne Howard's poised, calculating Fricka and Giselle Allen, surely a Sieglinde in the making, acting her heart out, but never too much, as youth-and-beauty goddess Freia (both pictured). Freia is distressingly ransomed to the mafia Fasolt and Fafner of James Creswell and Mats Almgren (I'd have given them Yvonne Howard and Giselle Allan black rather than red ties and breast-pocket handkerchiefs so Loge could have worn orange, but the colour brought off a singular coup as Alberich's curse claimed the first of its victims).

Cresswell (pictured below with fellow giant Mats Almgren on the left) would have made a more rock-solid Wotan than Michael Druiett, though this more humane of the two giants could have done with a bit more tenderness invoking Freia in the only real love music of Rheingold. Druiett gave us a Wotan somewhat past his prime, which perhaps matters less in Rheingold than Walküre, where we're getting Robert Hayward tonight (not sure that will work either, but let's see). To judge from the last- minute throat catch, he may have been ailing. (UPDATE: Mr Druiett informs us he was singing with tonsillitis; so he did heroically under the circumstances. An announcement should have been made.)

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Also stretched to the limit, but pulling it off, was Jo Pohlheim's Alberich. In the first scene he played a funny, characterful and even rather cuddly dwarf to Rhinemaidens who sounded more like Valkyrie or Norns, not quite aqueous enough, but more blackness in the voice might have made us hate or fear him more than we did as master of Nibelheim, and bully to brother Mime (Richard Roberts, touching, but may be over- parted in Siegfried, when we need Ablinger-Sperrhacke to take over the role). The curse, though, was terrific and the voice held out thrillingly. There was a disappointing Erda, not nearly steady or pitch-firm enough, from Ceri Williams, but Mark Le Brocq and Andrew Foster-Williams delivered the goods as the ineffectual minor gods.

What carried the evening above all was the sumptuous but never indulgent interpretation of Richard Farnes; if we have to lose Mark Wigglesworth at English National Opera – and as in the political world, the fight's not over yet – Farnes would be the man for the MD post. He creates a similar depth of sound in Wagner to Wigglesworth, and if the biting violas are more conspicuously fine than the violins, just occasionally smothered by the brass from where I was sitting, the whole is a miracle of passion and precision. No nodal point missed its mark, special effects – including the 11 anvillists to left and right of the platform – were perfectly judged, and the final illusory pomp driven home almost frighteningly in sound and vision. Excitement is running high for the real human stuff which begins with Die Walküre tonight..

The final rainbow bridge has nothing to do with Saturday's glorious Pride and homes in on the word of the week – delusion.

Opera North

Die Walküre, Southbank Centre

The Ring's most wrenching tragedy excels with a great Wotan and Brünnhilde

David Nice Thursday 30 June 2016

Enter the human - and superhuman demands for at least four of the singers - in the second, towering instalment of Wagner's Ring cycle. It says so much for Opera North's achievement so far that no one fell in any way short of the sometimes insane vocal demands. There were only varying degrees of characterisation and commitment, none of them less than fine.

Bad luck, perhaps, that the lower, though not exactly low, temperatures came in the first act as we meet the hero Wotan has fathered as free agent, or so he thinks, and the heroine sister whose incestuous love is a case, as the chief god puts it, of "just because something unexpected happens, it doesn’t mean it shouldn’t happen". Really that fabulous storm at the start, with appropriately wild visuals again from Peter Mumford’s elemental video work, should hurl onto the stage a fugitive at the limits

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of his endurance. Michael Weinius didn’t quite suggest that in body and face; nor did Lee Bisset in her slinky evening wear impress upon us a buttoned-up, downtrodden housewife. Both (pictured) struck vocal form immediately, though, going on to find rare intimacies in the midst of their infatuation with each other. But for once, and once only so far, the magic carpet of the Opera North orchestra responsive to Richard Farnes’s every nuancing didn't take flight from Hunding’s living- room floor.

Greatness: Kelly Cae Hogan's Brünnhilde and Robert Hayward's Wotan. All images by Clive Barda These are the imponderables of large-scale Wagner performance. Experience a slight disappointment in one act, and you may hit the roof of heaven in the next. As happened here the instant we saw Robert Hayward’s Wotan intoxicated by the battle-might of his favourite valkyrie daughter, and Kelly Cae Hogan’s Brünnhilde championing at the bit. Very well, so those war-cry “Hoiotoho”s are never a marker of how the rest of her role will proceed, and those treacherous top Bs were under par. But after that Hogan never gave us a false note or gesture, pouring forth musical and dramatic generosity without any forcing.

Hayward (pictured below) was a powerful but unrefined Wotan in Phyllida Lloyd’s ENO Ring. Glastonburyites may remember him with amazement when Act Three hit the festival, a reminder that the Ring has long been “for the people”. He is now one of the greats, focused and physically relaxed enough not to need to do too much dramatically to let us know of the chief god’s exultation and deepest despair.

We were back to the crystal-clear dialectics of Das Rheingold with the return of Yvonne Howard’s adamantine Fricka, pointing out the law of marriage- customs in as gripping a husband-wife scene as I’ve ever experienced. Then the long narrative of what has brought Wotan to the point of wishing for “the end” was riveting – and if a bass-baritone can pull that off, you have no fear of him lasting through to the end, where having encircled his beloved daughter with a ring of fire Hayward's god signed off with an exultant final high E. Magnificent and deeply moving.

There were fine things from the doomed sibling lovers in the second act, too, Weinius turning a golden screw in the great “Annunciation of Death” scene where his ever more intense questioning leads Siegmund to a refusal to follow Brünnhilde to Valhalla if it means leaving behind the woman he loves

32 so much. And I wonder if the impact of 10 distinctive female voices as Brünnhilde and Sieglinde follow the Valkyries’ ride of the unrelentingly emotional last act with the urgent fallout from Siegmund’s death can ever have been more thrilling, with so much delivered direct to us.

Transfigured from beauty-goddess Freia to bad girl Gerhilde, Giselle Allen led the way – another singer who tells you everything you need to know about a character from the off – while the most amazing high notes of the evening came from Valkyrie 2 in the ensemble, Katherine Broderick, and there was clarion lower-register underpinning from Madeleine Shaw's Rossweise. A rightly climactic apostrophe from Bisset’s grateful hero-bearing mortal to Brünnhilde’s cosmic generosity was followed by an equally astonishing ensemble as the protective valkyrie sisters protect the soon-to-be- outcast Brünnhilde: when have you ever heard a septet of competing lines sound so bel canto?

And the end, arguably the most moving in all opera (though the last-minute redemption of Jenufa runs it close), crowned the work as Brünnhilde (Hogan pictured) improvises bright ideas to stop her total humiliation by the furious but desperately loving Wotan. Physical contact in this out-front semi- staging is minimal, but when Wotan blew the kiss to put his daughter to sleep, passed it over her face and Hogan’s head dropped, it was hard not to let tearfulness spill out into a sob. And Farnes’s calm authority reached its zenith in the shape of the flames and the emotion of the “Magic Fire Music”, as fine a slice of deep-level Wagnerian conducting as you’re ever likely to hear, with none of the grandiosity or choppiness of comparatively overrated Barenboim. Whatever happens as we meet a new hero and a different Wotan/Wanderer in Siegfried, thankfully Hogan will be there until the end of the world. This Walküre, at least in its second and third acts, will go down in the history books among the very greatest.

Opera North Siegfried, Southbank Centre

A star soprano shines in the Ring’s conversation piece

Peter Quantrill Saturday 2 July 2016

For some of us, Siegfried is a perfect opera. Like L.627 it stubbornly observes the Aristotelian rules of space and time to cut a generous slice of life. There are almost no set-pieces to break the flow of one-on-one conversations, accusations, confessions, arguments. These encounters are inevitably stifled by a concert staging, where singers address themselves to us, never to each other. Peter Mumford’s video projections set the scene with trees and glowing embers like a piece of slow TV on YouTube or BBC4.

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Wisdom also holds that Siegfried is the Scherzo of the Ring. Maybe not only for its position as the third part of the drama, in symphonic terms, but for its libretto, which banters with wit and irony, wordplay and sudden reversals. The surtitled translation did functional justice to Wagner’s text of Sophoclean nuance. Some of the singers swallowed their words, which didn’t help, but they were heard in solemn, all-too-reverent silence. This may be news to some, but Wagner wrote a few good jokes, most of them in Die Meistersinger and Siegfried, and none of them came over tonight. Searching for the hero inside himself: Lars Cleveman as Siegfried All images by Clive Barda On the podium, Richard Farnes was a model of sobriety and clarity, always finding a bel canto line, in an acoustic never meant for this music. From the stalls we heard much of the Opera North strings, the brass were only let off the leash at climactic moments, the winds took their chances at stylishly controlled solo moments. Having let the Ring alone for 12 years to write Tristan and Die Meistersinger, Wagner built a bonfire of vanities in the Prelude to Act 3, piling on every major motif from the Ring so far. Farnes carefully piled up each log but took too long to light the touchpaper.

On this showing, he would make a superb conductor of Liszt and Beethoven. Timbres were light and bright, but violas, tuba and timpani stood out in this most inner-part of operas. Leading to Brünnhilde’s awakening, the first violins took their treacherously exposed solo with exquisite, doubtless exhaustively rehearsed assurance.

In the title role, Lars Cleveman warmed up after a dry first scene. A likely lad who needs a stronger lower register, said Stephen Walsh of his Bayreuth Tannhäuser, and that about sums it up. A size too small for the role, he was at least a size larger than Richard Roberts’ all-too-sympathetic Mime. Only with the Act 2 confrontation between the Wanderer (Béla Perencz) and Alberich (Jo Pohlheim pictured above right) did we hear singing of Wagnerian scale. Mats Almgren brought a properly cavernous bass but also real pathos to the dying Fafner. Within the staging’s literal frame of reference, Jeni Bern made a sweet and pertly sung Woodbird. Ceri Williams found ample time and genuine contralto timbre to sing a hieratically dignified Erda, while hardly evoking the confused earth- mother brought back against her will to a life out of balance.

Only with the appearance of Kelly Cae Hogan’s Brünnhilde was the prosaic context conclusively banished. In the score’s weakest, most extended stretch, she sustained a glorious flood of old- fashioned soprano tone while bringing her character back to joyous, then richly ambivalent and finally exultant life. Hogan’s soprano is more mature, slightly wider, no less thrilling than Rachel Nicholls at Longborough: I’d listen to her again in anything.

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Appeals to contemporary relevance can be tiresome, but Simon Rees’s translation hit the spot in the forging scene. "Experts won’t help you, that’s clear," said Mime to Siegfried. "Only his folly helps the fool." The sun set in baleful orange over the House of Commons. Götterdämmerung on Sunday.

Farnes carefully piled up each log but took too long to light the touchpaper

Opera North Götterdämmerung, Southbank Centre An outstanding Ring goes out in a blaze of glory

Alexandra Coghlan

Monday 4 July 2016

Siegfried (Mati Turi) fulfils his destiny against Peter Mumford's evocative projections All images by Clive Barda

And so it ends: Hagen drowns, Valhalla burns, and the ring returns to the Rhine, while somewhere beneath – Wagner’s dawn trumpets sounding faintly in the distance – the dwarf Alberich continues his lonely scheming. It would be hard to find a more apt conclusion to a week of power-grabbing and back-stabbing than Götterdämmerung, and harder still to see its climactic conflagration as anything other than horribly prophetic. But where politics wreak chaos, so art must console, and this Ring cycle is consolation at its absolute purest and most ecstatic.

Opera North’s Ring has been such a triumph that it’s easy to forget that it was a project forged as a creative response to lack – an austerity Ring that has proved that less really can be more, if only you get your priorities right. Hopefully the powers that be at English National Opera have been taking notes from this ambitious distillation of Wagner’s gesamtkunstwerk into a cycle of concert stagings where simple projections and superb acting fill the space where elaborate design and directorial concept would normally be.

The staging may be a concert one, but the performances are of opera house intensity and conviction

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Director Peter Mumford’s deft blend of symbols and landscapes, split across three giant screens at the back of the Royal Festival Hall stage, helps not only evoke but anchor the action playing out below. Short narrative summaries (written, oddly, in the past tense) also help, minimally intrusive in the context of so much musical drama. But none of this would satisfy if the cast couldn’t carry the show. The staging may be a concert one, but the performances are of opera house intensity and conviction. Delivered directly out to the audience, and at such close proximity, it’s Wagner with the whites of its eyes visible, gloriously, intrusively intimate.

From the three glassy-eyed Norns (thrillingly sung by Fiona Kimm, Yvonne Howard, Lee Bisset, pictured right) searching for meaning somewhere above the Stalls, to the brooding Hagen (Mats Almgren), enlisting the audience as co-conspirators in his plan, we’re complicit here are we never are in the opera house. The desperate glances of Andrew Foster-Williams’s increasingly disturbed Gunther fall directly on us, pleading for deliverance from a plan spiralling swiftly out of control.

Once again, conductor Richard Farnes plays a long game, only rarely letting Opera North’s brass section off the leash, and even deploying thicker brushstrokes of woodwind and chorus colour sparingly. While this approach (sensitive though it is to the needs of the singers) has drawn criticism earlier in the cycle, here, with such a climax to build to, it makes for deliciously deferred pleasure. It also goes a long way to solving both the issues of balance and acoustic clarity in this awkward space, drawing the ear consistently to the middle of the orchestra, in contrast to the dominant texture of tenor and soprano among the voices.

A large part of the pleasure of this cycle has come from Farnes’s world-class company of singers, often returning in different roles through the sequence of operas. Here Giselle Allen (a glorious Freia earlier this week) donned her third guise, this time as Gutrune. Passionate and awkward in equal measure, she discovered all the human warmth lacking in Foster-Williams’s exquisitely chilly and self-controlled Gunther (pictured left with Allen). Mats Almgren swapped Fafner’s greedy ambition for Hagen’s, prowling up and down the thin strip of stage with simian ease and matching the Figure 2 double-basses for chalky blackness of tone.

But Götterdämmerung belongs to Siegfried and Brünnhilde, and never more so than in the hands of Mati Turi and Kelly Cae Hogan. Where Lars Cleveman couldn’t quite match Hogan in Siegfried, Turi

36 certainly can, and the result is an ecstatic, heavyweight battle of emotions and voices. Hogan’s legato spins evenly, uniting the sweetness and glow of the top of the voice with the dryer, more brittle bottom. Turi’s homespun, bonhomous hero gives her poised heroine plenty to bounce off, and there’s real poignancy in watching this Brünnhilde try to bridge the gap in the feminine softness of her Act I music.

Staged in the opera house, the Ring never travels light, laden as it is with historical, conceptual and technical baggage. Stripped of much of these, Richard Farnes, Peter Mumford and their team have discovered a lighter, more aerodynamic Ring for a new age and a new audience.

An ecstatic, heavyweight battle of emotions and voices from Turi and Hogan.

Tristan und Isolde, English National Opera - Coliseum 9 June 2016 David Ross

This was the first new Tristan at the Coliseum since David Alden’s more radical production in the mid-90s. Much was made of this production being an indicator of the future, but there were many echoes of the past.

The production was something of a curate’s egg. There was great promise when the curtain rose and four triangular walls radiated out, reminiscent of sails and beautifully lit in coppers and blues. Unfortunately, it confined the cast largely to the front of two of the three areas created (space was poorly used in all three acts). The costumes were inconsistent, though seemed intended to represent different facets of oppression: Catherine Ashmore Brangaene and Kurvenal appeared to be dressed like courtiers from Versailles, and to slowly dress Isolde and Tristan in restrictive costumes (swiftly discarded after the potion). Mark and Melot entered accompanied by futuristic storm-troopers.

The staging for act two was more retrospective. The couple were much more physically interactive than in recent British productions (apart from Longborough). They entered a rocky landscape in a hollowed-out globe representing the realm of the night, but was reminiscent of the spiral structure used in the second act in the production in the early 1980s, particularly with the monochromatic lighting. The protagonists had striking dynamic auras which flared with their passion and movement, enhancing what can be a static first part of the duet. I liked it, though it seemed to subvert the idea of light and darkness. The lighting was more sublime at Sink Hernieder; much darker.

Things took a turn for the worse with the arrival of the hunt. The crowd got on with their business with little or no respect for the protagonists: Mark was largely side-lined and seemed to have no authority, and even seemed slightly apologetic when delivering his soliloquy. The rest of the hunt were dressed as surgeons and proceeded to strap Tristan and Isolde to beds and inject them with tranquilisers, repeatedly (presumably to illustrate the depth of their passion); this seemed to be in line

37 with the oppression alluded to in act one. It made me wonder what the medical profession have done to deserve such negative depictions in modern operas since Wozzeck: the most recent productions of the Ring have shown Brünnhilde being brutally sedated by medics (at the Coliseum) and featured Alberich as a medical vivisectionist sexually abusing his patients (at Covent Garden).

The staging of act three began well: the rocky globe was partially hidden behind a two-dimensional wall (though that left little room for the actors at the front of the stage). The effect was very similar to the rock visible behind the screen in the last ENO ‘Parsifal’ (which became animated during ‘here time becomes space’), a reference to Wagner’s identification of the Tristan of the third act with Parsifal.

As the act went on, darkness began to pour from Catherine Ashmore Tristan’s wound and enveloped him, a reversal of the bright aura that had shimmered around him in the second act. It did seem a little overdone, however. One real complaint: the action after the arrival of the ships was almost invisible because the stage was so poorly lit. There was a twist to the Verklärung in that Isolde joined Tristan in the other world and they rose together.

A further link with the past was that Mark Elder had conducted the previous production, allowing passion to erupt from tight control of the orchestra; his pupil Edward Gardner returning to the ENO seemed more liberal with the tempi, though the music rose to the same peaks. This presented a challenge for Heidi Melton, who started well and was outstanding in the second act, but had little left by the end of the third. Stuart Skelton sang beautifully throughout – I think the best I have heard in this role. Karen Kargill was excellent as Brangaene, though lacking the dreamlike, dawn-light tones often deployed in Habe Ach’t. I found Kurvenal disappointing: his voice was too rough, and his depiction too crude. Matthew Best’s King Mark anchored the end of the second act expressively. The diction was generally very clear.

One welcome non-musical point: the programme had a broad range of essays and pieces (seven articles spread over 34 pages) and I felt a real effort had been made to make this opera much more accessible to new visitors. I can’t remember thinking a programme was such good value for a very long time.

An Evening with Stuart Skelton St Botolph’s Church Hall Bishopsgate Thursday 21 July

Ray Godson

After an introduction by Jan Leigh, with David Nice unavoidably delayed, Stuart himself started the evening by inviting questions from the audience.

Amongst points raised and comments made, the following stood out:

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A vote of gratitude to his early sponsors and to his time in Cincinnatti University where he secured two degrees and enjoyed the experience of conducting and to Los Angeles where many of his early performances took place.

No problems with switching from English to German and back again. Agents are very important and their advice should be taken (not always).

His Tristan at the Met had been the first leading role given to an Australian since Joan Sutherland last sang Lucia there in the 1960s. Kelvin Lim, Stuart Skelton and David Nice Leinsdorf was the conductor he most admired. Prime

A few words on luck – making the most of your breaks even if it involved singing Erik without any rehearsals and stepping on stage in the afternoon after arriving in the morning.

The stress of performing Tristan and why long intervals were essential. The move from anticipation to elation to total depression was all the wrong way round and extremely draining on the performer who was on stage for nearly the Jan Leigh whole opera.

What role would he like to take on that he had never sung – Rigoletto ! (not the Duke). He would have to abandon his current regime of not smoking cigars or drinking champagne for the forty-eight hours before a performance.

We attempted to draw him on the terrible problems at the ENO but, apart from saying everybody was doing their best and that he had no current plans to sing there, he would not be drawn. His No 1 disk to take to a desert island was Mahler’s Second (it would be one of mine as would his Sibelius Seventh) but we were all slightly surprised that there would have been no Jan Leigh singing on any of his top eight.

Eventually, relenting on his self-imposed ban on singing anywhere other than in an opera house we were treated to a rendering of Das Lied which I don’t think I have ever heard live in such a small space. Stuart did not adapt his performance but instead invited people in the three rows nearest to him to move to a more discreet distance. I was at the back and about to shut the door to cut off traffic noise when he started to sing – I didn’t need to bother – what a voice! Just a shame that we didn’t hear more of it but, if it hadn’t been for Jan, we would have had a singspiel-less evening. Usual thanks have to go to Catherine as well as Jan and obviously to accompanist Kelvin Lim and most importantly David who provoked such an interesting discourse from Stuart.

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Tannhäuser Longborough Thursday 9 June 2016 Shambling and Unkempt – No Love God He Hilary Reid Evans

John Treleaven (Tannhäuser) Alison Kettlewell (Venus) Erika Mädi Jones (Elisabeth) Hrölfur Saemundson (Wolfram von Eschenbach) Julian Hubbard (Walther von der Vogleweide) Charles Johnston (Reimar vion Zweter) Brian Smith Walters (Heinrich der Screiber) and Stuart Pendred (Biterolf). Production by Alan Privett, with the Longborough Festival Orchestra conducted by Anthony Negus

Received wisdom tells us that Tannhäuser is Richard Wagner’s most autobiographical work, widely revised during his lifetime. Here, Director Alan Privett gives us Wagner/Tannhauser as a somewhat shambling, unkempt figure, far removed from the Apollo or Adonis one would expect as the love object of Venus and the adored of Elisabeth. John Treleaven was scheduled to appear on 18 June, but due to illness we were treated instead to his alternate in the role, Neal Cooper. As one might expect from a German graduate, Cooper’s annunciation was clear and bright, perhaps a little too bright at times and lacking in the mellifluousness one has come to expect from recent interpretations. Perhaps the issue was with his direction. As he himself said after the performance ‘I’m really a much nicer character than my role.’

Using an adapted version of Wagner’s Paris-Vienna revision of the score, with a cut to the Bacchanale, Anthony Negus coached a wonderfully romantic performance from the Festival Orchestra at a fast and furious pace. Nevertheless one was left gasping for more, wishing it would never end. This was vintage Negus, his enthusiasm and knowledge shining through to give us his own original, never derivative, interpretation. Matthew Williams-Ellis The same cannot be said of the direction. One’s heart sank at the distracting mimed prologue during the overture (more than a cliché this in artistic terms). Who was the woman trying to give the composer a letter? His first wife Minna perhaps? Was the letter yet another bill? One can only guess, if one has sufficient time and energy to care.

Alison Kettlewell as Venus gave a fine interpretation of the role, both in terms of her acting and musicality. Regrettably however she was costumed as a rather wholesome saloon girl, and was introduced to us swinging a la Fragonard – more clichés here. Difficult too, as already indicated, to understand why Venus would try to persuade the dishevelled, crumple-suited Tannhäuser to remain as her chosen paramour. This Cougar could find better prey.

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The interpretation of Elisabeth, the sacrificial virgin through whose death Tannhäuser finds redemption, is always a difficult one. Here, Erika Mädi Jones, as befits a finalist in the 2015 Wagner Society Singing Competition, gave us a finely nuanced performance, hinting at the sexual awakening she would never experience. The direction hinted at an abusive relationship with her uncle the Landgrave, a venal aspect I had never previously encountered and one that I felt added nothing to the production.

Chiara Vinci’s Shepherd Boy was adequately presented, but produced none of the purity of sound a treble voice would have brought to the role.

The male chorus is worthy of special mention, their resonance and harmonies matching or surpassing those of many a larger opera house.

To return to the direction – did we really need that ladder on stage, a little used prop and a too-obvious symbol of Tannhäuser’s desire for an ascent from his sinful state? Why the shower of paper? Another writer has suggested perhaps they represented Wagner’s unused melodies? Altogether un-necessary and distracting, as was the pile of books on stage in Act III, whose sole purposed appeared to be to provide an obstacle course for the performers.

On the whole this is an exciting performance, resoundingly let down by its direction and visuals.

Saturday 18 June 2016 Another view Paul with Elizabeth Dawson-Bowling

It is becoming ever clearer to us that Martin Graham’s great coup in establishing Longborough Festival Opera as a source of amazing Wagner performances is his appointment of Anthony Negus as music director. It was owing to Negus agonised Tannhäuser of John Treleaven, a great portrayal, that the opera of the same name took the Longborough reputation yet further. There is immediacy and a vitality about Negus’s way with Wagner’s most unsettled masterpiece that cuts to the quick of the experience.

Although the decision to curtail Wagner’s huge music for the Paris Venusberg Bacchanale was briefly disappointing, it proved wise. To register its full erotic effect in line with the music, this scene might upset sensibilities, and Longborough not only draws a considerable national and even international following, but inspires a wonderfully committed local audience. Such extremes might also exceed the resources of a country house opera company, even one as remarkable as this one.

It was a great success in its own right to shift the focus John Treleaven Matthew Williams-Ellis of Tannhäuser’s enthralment from her acolytes onto Venus herself. The revision also moved the opera’s

41 front-heavy centre of gravity to the main, central action, and improved the formal balance in a way that Wagner long intended but never carried through. The song contest was also tautened by moving rapidly from Wolfram’s beautifully sung panegyric to Biterolf’s vituperative challenge. In virtue of these changes the three acts were more equal in length and dramatic consequence. Not only was Negus’s re-design a fine achievement; he also presented a feast of telling detail.

There was the delicate portamento of the trombones in the overture and the piercing chords of Elizabeth’s prayer, which went straight to the heart. The saturation of the strings in the Venus scene was surprising and quite lovely, and overall the Longborough sound seemed better than ever, more deeply grounded in the rich double basses.

Nothing would have been more agreeable than to describe the rest of the occasion as living up to its stellar musical quality, but that was not to be. Alan Privett is a gifted producer, but instead of ensuring, as he did so successfully in the Ring, that the story comes out vivid and clear, he produced a reinterpretation. This confused the events of Wagner’s masterpiece and obscured its vital lessons for humanity, without offering anything much instead. None of Privett’s stage images for Tannhäuser linger in the imagination as happened with his Ring, and after week I could recall less of it than I still can from the separate segments of the Ring – several years ago. The idea at the end, of having a rather ugly swinging censor as the emblem of redemption, was memorable enough but only in a bad sense. It replaced Wagner’s wonderful, archetypal image of a dry staff bursting into verdant Spring foliage with a bit of bombast which nut-shelled all that was wrong this time.

It did not help that on this occasion at least, the Venus and Elisabeth could neither of them demonstrate the vocal appeal or the histrionic gifts that are needed. Two squally, wobbly voices were no worthy sequel to the radiant purity of Rachel Nichols at my last Longborough experience. Worse, the indeterminate Elisabeth had nothing of the fearless radiance which makes dramatic sense of her parrying the knights bent on murdering Tannhäuser. For beauty of voice there was one singer, the Wolfram of Hrölfur Saemundson who stood out. He deserves to return to Longborough as much as did Stuart Pendred, the veteran Longborough Hagen, now successfully back as a very nasty Biterolf.

Warts and all, the final and positive point is that the Longborough Tannhäuser was still a great experience. Happily credit for this can be extended from the conductor to his excellent orchestra. The strings missed nothing in Wagnerian heft, but their more modest numbers were closer to Wagner’s own during his Dresden days, and the wind instruments could shine out with an immediacy that is difficult when they are pitched against the string body of 64 at Bayreuth. So more please; yes more from the gifted Alan Privett, but please keep in mind the affirmation that Christian Thielemann made his own: - “If we want Wagner, then Wagner is what we want!”

Two Tannhäusers for the price of one Royal Opera House, 26 April, 5 & 12 May 2016 Katie Barnes

Tim Albery's production returned to the Royal Opera House after an absence of six years with some simplifications. The sound-swallowing void in the centre of the stage during Acts I and III had fortunately been eliminated, and the Act I chorus, which previously issued from the depths like the Dutchman's crew, was sung behind the scenes, creating a wonderful disembodied, ethereal effect.

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Nonetheless I wish that the opportunity had been taken to bring the singers onstage, as we were left staring at an endless expanse of dark stage for several minutes. In another new touch, the hunting party pursued a bloodstained human quarry, who stopped to give Tannhäuser a desperate look before fleeing. Was this an enemy from the recent war mentioned by the Landgrave, or another

Peter Seiffert as Tannhäuser, Emma Bell as Elisabeth Clive Barda refugee from the Venusberg? It gave us a sharp reminder of what could have been in store for Tannhäuser in Act II if Elisabeth had not intervened. In Act III, the set was shrouded in snow, making Wolfram's comment about the fading leaves rather unnecessary, and Venus, who formerly popped up reclining on a chaise-longue, made a more dignified reappearance from behind the curtain of the inner false proscenium of the Opera House. Sadly I don't think the choreography had changed, and as before I found it profoundly unalluring. The dancers gave it admirable energy and commitment, but to me all their jumping, rolling and running around suggested nothing so much as a spot of training for the London Marathon, and the rumble of a massive table being dragged into place behind the scenes during the ballet sounded as though Tannhäuser was about to be whisked away to the farthest reaches of the Piccadilly Line.

The cast was largely new, and with one exception they were stronger than in 2010. That exception was Peter Seiffert in the title role. He last appeared here 31 years ago, and his voice is showing signs of wear. His singing was powerful but his vocal wobble is too prominent for comfort. While he demonstrated that he had all the notes, they did not always sound pleasant. He gained in confidence as the opera progressed, and the Rome Narration was strong but appeared to take every ounce of his remaining power. The final bars were a close run thing. His acting, like his singing, was strong but imbued with a sense of desperation.

Emma Bell is a heavy duty soprano for what is traditionally one of the 'lighter' Wagner soprano roles: she sounded ready to step into Brünnhilde or at the very least, Sieglinde, and the role benefited enormously from her huge, gleaming voice. She made it utterly right that this previously reticent young woman should take charge with Valkyrie-like authority in the Act II Finale, shaming the self- righteous, narrow-minded men. In Act III she was a mere wraith, and her voice took on a lovely, almost ghostly sheen in "Allmächt'ge Jungfrau". But this was still a woman of spirit, and her sudden stiffening within Wolfram's loving embrace was enough to dismiss him.

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Venus, previously presented as a hard, desperate woman past her youth, was the glorious Sophie Koch, a singer in her vocal prime. I liked her better than most of the critics. Her German was below par, but that voice was the epitome of seduction, and she looked beautiful.

Stephen Milling as the Landgrave was nothing short of magnificent. His glorious voice has such richness and incredible depth, and he gave what is often a pasteboard character deep tenderness and sympathy. The relationship with Elisabeth was beautifully delineated. It is wonderful to know that he will sing Pogner next season. Ed Lyon was an outstanding Walther. The sound of his voice soaring over the ensemble at Zweitracht und Streit sei abgetan was a moment of pure aural pleasure, and Den Bronnen, den uns Wolfram nannte was a joy. We could have a David here. The excellent Michael Krause drew maximum effect from Biterolf's solo and made the role seem all too short.

The sole, and crucial, returnee from the 2010 cast was the peerless Christian Gerhaher. Seeing him perform Wolfram is an experience like no other. This most modest of great singers has a wondrous gift for simply becoming the character and the music. This must be the role which he has played most often onstage, and must be his greatest. His quiet self-effacement conceals the fact that he is an actor of rare distinction. Every movement and gesture, every tilt of the head, said more about the character than Christian Gerhaher as Wolfram pages of text. In its unassuming way, this ROH Clive Barda was as complete a piece of operatic acting as any I have ever seen. It is simply not possible to describe the heart-lifting beauty of that voice in Als du in kühnem Sange. Every tone, every inflection, every note gave the listener such indescribable pleasure, and, as befits a master Lieder singer, each word was cherished like a jewel. Blick ich umher began in a pianissimo so exquisite that it hurt, a few minutes of pure vocal silk, and the sudden increase in volume at Und nimmer möcht was electrifying. His voice has so many colours to caress the music. What a contrast this aria was to the glorious passion of O Himmel, lass' dich jetzt erflehen. But the crowning glory of his performance came in Act III, where the perfect simplicity of O du, mein holder Abendstern was overwhelming. To see and hear him in this role is an incomparable privilege.

The performance on 12 May was transformed when, at the end of the second interval, it was announced that Seiffert was unable to continue and would be replaced by Neal Cooper, who until then had been in the audience. One can hardly think of a more testing way of singing one's first Tannhäuser than to launch 'cold' into the third act on the Royal Opera House stage at less than an interval's notice, but Cooper seized the opportunity with both hands. From his first entry, he galvanised the audience. That tall, slim figure, enfolded in its billowing black coat, contorted with fury and despair, possessed the stage. It was impossible to look away from him. His lean, bronze-hued, perfectly focused tone cut through the music like a burnished sword and gave the Rome Narration an edge of bitter sarcasm which took our breath away. He sang and acted one of the most testing pieces Wagner ever wrote for a heldentenor as though it were the easiest thing in the world. (to his credit, Gerhaher handed the scene to him on a plate by melting into the scenery as only he can). It was a total triumph, with audience and

44 cast alike giving him a massive ovation at the end. This was a night when the understudy became a star. Surely this must lead to bigger and better things for him now.

Orchestra and chorus alike were on their very finest form. Hartmut Haenchen subtly reminded us that this opera looks both forward to Wagner's later, greater masterpieces and backward to the romantic operas which inspired it. This swift, sweeping reading of the Vienna edition of the score reminded us of Tannhäuser's kinship to the works of Weber and his contemporaries. I loved the placement of the trumpets in the boxes for the fanfares in Act II, which enabled their bright, forward sound to ricochet around the auditorium. The mightily augmented chorus, splendidly drilled by Renato Balsdonna, created glorious expanses of sound, especially in Act III, where I must credit the excellent contribution by the boys of the Tiffin Choir.

Tannhäuser is not my favourite Wagner opera, but while I was watching these performances, I could believe that it was. I have never before enjoyed it so deeply. Perhaps I never will again.

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FORTHCOMING WAGNER SOCIETY EVENTS

PAUL DAWSON-BOWLING discussing “that in Richard Wagner we have more than a great, - a profoundly good man” (William Ashton Ellis) -a broadside against prejudice - against those who love to hate Wagner- Thursday 6 October 6.30 for 7.00 pm

The Farmers’ Club, 3 Whitehall Court, London. SW1A 2EL. Nearest tube station – Embankment. Tickets £15 (including a glass of wine) - Students admitted free.

DAME GWYNETH JONES IN CONVERSATION Tuesday 8 November 6.30 for 7pm

Dame Gwyneth at her Masterclass Dame Gwyneth will discuss her career with Humphrey Burton Princess Alexandra Hall, Royal Over-Seas League, Over-Seas House, Park Place, St James’ St, London SW1A 1LR. Nearest tube station – Green Park. Tickets £25/£5 students (pay bar beforehand and in the interval)

THE WAGNER SOCIETY SINGING COMPETITION 2016 Sunday 27 November 2.00 to 6.00 pm

Kirstin Sharpin who will sing in the interval The finalists (to be announced) with judges, Sir John Tomlinson, Professor Eva Märtson, Peter Spuhler and Anthony Negus in the presence of Dame Gwyneth Jones and Eva Wagner-Pasquier with an interval recital by Kirstin Sharpin Princess Alexandra Hall, Royal Over-Seas League Over-Seas House, Park Place, St James’ St, London SW1A 1LR. Nearest tube station – Green Park. Tickets £25/£5 students (including light refreshments)

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WAGNER SOCIETY CHRISTMAS PARTY Wednesday 7 December 2016 at the invitation of Neil King 15 Gibson Square, London N1 0RD 6.30 pm Members only Tickets(must be purchased in advance) £25 each (no concessions)

COMBINED SOCIETIES’ DINNER Tuesday 17 January 2017 6.30 for 7.00 pm The Forge Music Venue, 3-7 Delancey Street, NW1 7NL Nearest tube; Camden Town or Mornington Crescent Ticket price to be announced

STUDY DAY WITH ANTHONY NEGUS Date and venue to be arranged

DINNER TO CELEBRATE THE PERFORMANCES OF DIE MEISTERSINGER AT COVENT GARDEN Thursday 23 March 2017 venue to be arranged Members of all Wagner Societies welcome

Tickets for all events are available online at www.wagnersociety.org and can be paid for using a credit or debit card, or PayPal. If you do not wish to use these methods, then tickets may be reserved online and a cheque sent to the Treasurer, The Wagner Society, 15, Gibson Square, London N1 0RD. Tickets are also available on the door at all events (apart from Christmas Party). Free tickets for students may also be reserved in advance via the website or are available on the door on presentation of the appropriate identification.

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