This reissue neatly complements Naxos’s realisation
of Muck’s 1927/28 recording of Parsifal (coupled with the Good Friday
Music with Kipnis and conducted by Siegfried Wagner and the 1913 Orchestral
Suite, hardly vital but worth having, conducted by Alfred Herz in 1913
– Naxos 8.110049/50).
This constitutes the bulk of Muck’s relatively small
but distinguished discography – doubtless some of the Boston recordings
are still available; his 1917 discs there were the first major orchestral
recordings in America. Karl Muck sported a natty set of duelling scars,
it’s said, the legacy of his Heidelberg youth and his physiognomy prompted
many a scandalous allegation that he was Wagner’s illegitimate son.
This romantic profile was hardly breached even by his more scatological
and splenetic rostrum outbursts or by his addiction to nicotine – he
smoked five packs a day (surviving despite the fury and the cigarettes
to the age of eighty). Arrested and interned in War-hysterical America
(at one stage he was even accused of attempting to blow up Longfellow’s
birthplace) he spent the bulk of 1918 incarcerated in Georgia, a signally
bizarre fate for a man who had been principal conductor of the Berlin
State Opera and who had conducted the Russian premieres of the Ring
in 1889.
It’s tempting to see in Muck’s astutely objective readings
a kind of anti-Romantic, proto-Toscaninian interpreter. Certainly even
an observer as elevated as Weingartner analysed Muck’s performances
and judged him to be the most conscientious conductor he’d known – which
is not, obviously, the same thing as inspired or revealing – but does
reflect admirable qualities in Muck’s musicianship that these recordings
bear out. His measured and long breathed approach is not devoid of rhythmic
impetus – far from it; Toscanini himself could be a notoriously slow
Wagnerian at Bayreuth – and Muck’s Parsifal, as preserved on disc, is
notably buoyant and flexible, its forward motion sounding overwhelmingly
right. The excerpts presented here are, again, indicative of Muck’s
assiduous intelligence. Orchestral sonorities are most impressive; ensemble
discipline is high, contemporary performance practices such as mass
portamenti notably absent, strings clean-limbed. Tempi are well chosen;
Lohengrin is especially successful, never over pressed and the nobility
that emerges from Muck’s performance is untainted by grandiloquence
and easy bluster. Conductor of Parsifal at Bayreuth for nearly thirty
years, Muck’s Wagnerian roots were deep, his championing authoritative
and unquestionable. These impressive sounding readings – in equally
sonorous transfers – still have much to offer to those interested in
performance style, Wagnerian conducting practice and clarity of musical
understanding.
Jonathan Woolf
Berlin State Opera Orchestra/Karl
Muck