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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 1 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.