At the time this recording was made Lortzing’s
Der Waffenschmied was incredibly popular in Germany. During the
late 1950s the only opera which was more frequently performed in opera
houses there was Mozart’s
Zauberflöte. Lortzing’s
work comprehensively outstripped
Carmen,
Madam Butterfly
and
Der fliegende Holländer for second place in the popularity
stakes. The original recording had limited circulation, being issued
in the UK only in the form of an LP of highlights. Although it has been
intermittently available since as an imported reissue, this appears
to be its first international release in its complete form.
This makes it all the more infuriating that as in so many of their recent
reissues EMI have given the international audience almost nothing to
help them in understanding the work. We are given a booklet note of
less than two pages by Ingo Dorfmüller which gives us no idea of
the plot of the opera beyond a statement that the work was recognised
by the recording team as containing “social criticism” and
was not just a “harmless farce”. Needless to say, there
is no translation provided in the booklet or online. Once again I was
driven to the invaluable ISMLP site for a copy of the vocal score -
it can be obtained from (
http://imslp.org/wiki/Der_Waffenschmied_(Lortzing,_Albert)
- but none of the copies of the score on that site have English translations
or include the text of the spoken dialogue. The text - again without
translation - can be found at
http://www.opera-guide.ch/opera.php?id=200&uilang=de
- but why should purchasers (and reviewers) have to undertake such research
in order properly to enjoy this excellent performance?
The performance
is excellent, deserving of better presentation
than it is given here. The presence of singers such as Hermann Prey,
Kurt Böhme and Gerhard Unger in the cast testify to the care that
was taken by the Electrola recording team over the whole production.
Their performances knock spots off what one might expect from the standard
German provincial opera houses who would normally have staged the work
at that time. The music demands a good deal of verbal dexterity, but
this poses no problems at all to these singers. The female side is not
so well represented. Gisela Litz is a rather matronly-sounding Irmenlaut.
The small-voiced and piping Lotte Schädle is a Papagena rather
than the Pamina we would ideally like to hear - for example in the delightful
and unexpected lullaby that closes the First Act - even though her notes
are always true. None of the singers need to take advantage of the alternative
vocal lines (avoiding high notes) that are given throughout the score.
A few
appogiature are inserted where they would seem to be appropriate.
The orchestral playing is fine, even the genuinely fruity cornet solo
near the beginning of the Rossinian overture. The brief fugal passage
towards the end has a real Mendelssohnian lightness of touch. The chorus
are vigorous and full-toned, not least in the opening anvil male chorus
which anticipates Verdi in
Il trovatore by some years. Did Wagner
think of the descending scales at the end when he wrote Siegfried’s
forging song? As was not unusual in German opera sets at that time which
employed dialogue between numbers, one gets the impression that actors
may have been used to replace some of the singers in these sections.
That said, the booklet makes no reference to such a procedure, so I
may be wrong. The dialogue passages are in any event not lengthy being
quite heavily abridged from the extensive original. They are separately
tracked so they can be ‘programmed out’. There are also
some touches of ‘production’ - knocking at doors, stage
placement of singers within a realistic perspective, murmuring from
the chorus - which add to the pervasive sense of theatrical vitality.
Fritz Lehan keeps everything on the move, and has an appropriately light
touch in this music. Commendably the score is given nearly complete,
without any of the cuts which one imagines might have been customary
at the time. We get all three verses of Georg’s strophic song
in Act Two, for example. Only the brief Entr’acte which precedes
the Third Act is omitted from the text as given in the 1890 Peters vocal
score. There is a small cut of some repeated music at the end of the
septet (CD 2, track 16). The best-known number in the score, the song
Auch ich war ein Jüngling, has five repeated verses including
some stanzas added by Lortzing to allow for encores. Here we are given
three verses - using different words from those in the Peters score
- which seems ample. The March written to cover the scene-change before
the brief finale is thankfully shorn of its many marked repeats. Some
delightful orchestral touches, such as the timpani solo underpinning
the vocal line at CD 1 track 12, 4.40, are well and sensitively realised
by players and recording engineers. Lortzing was never a great composer,
but his music is always tuneful. He displays such touches of originality
often enough to explain his erstwhile popularity in Germany even while
one recognises the reasons this may have waned somewhat over the last
fifty years.
Nevertheless Lortzing remains largely an unknown quantity outside Germany.
Appreciation has not been helped by the fact that recordings of his
operas have largely been represented by live and radio performances
from the 1950s in often problematic sound. We should therefore be grateful
for the few recordings we have which present the scores in an approachable
manner - one thinks of the Electrola studio sets of
Der Wildschütz,
Undine and
Zar und Zimmermann in particular. This is a
welcome addition to that regrettably small roster.
Paul Corfield Godfrey
