When I wrote about the recordings of orchestral music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart conducted by Otto Klemperer, I grouped those recordings in the same category as the performances of music by Joseph Haydn. Where opera is concerned, on the other hand, there is no need for Haydn to share the category with Mozart. In the second (and final) volume of Warner’s Klemperer anthology, there are no operas by Haydn; and Mozart is accounted for by four of them.
Three of them are the operas set to librettos by Lorenzo da Ponte. In “order of appearance,” these are K. 492 (The Marriage of Figaro), K. 527 (Don Giovanni), and K. 588 (Così fan tutte). The remaining opera (and the first of the four to be recorded) is K. 620 (The Magic Flute). K. 620 is the only opera that includes spoken dialogue. However, all spoken text is eliminated, probably to allow more room for the music, which, when it was first released in 1964, occupied the four sides of two long-playing records (LPs).
At this point I should probably provide a disclaimer in the form of personal experiences. When it came to “narrative” performances, most of the albums that my parents collected were of the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan. There were only two exceptions, both of which were Mozart operas. One of these was a recording of K. 492 from a Glyndebourne Festival performance, which incorrectly said “complete” on the cover. (This was discussed as part of my “Fritz Busch and the Origins of Glyndebourne” article on this site.) The other was K. 620, a Columbia album of three LPs, which, like the Klemperer recording, omitted all spoken dialogue. This did not matter very much, because I had purchased the Eulenburg “pocket score” of the opera; and I followed the recording with it so many times that the music is probably still embedded in my brain! More importantly, this album was my first encounter with Herbert von Karajan and the Wiener Singverein.
It would be unfair to compare Klemperer with Busch, primarily because the Glyndebourne recordings of the da Ponte operas were made in the mid-thirties. The Klemperer recordings, on the other hand, were made with far more advanced technology in 1966 (K. 527), 1970 (K. 492), and 1971 (K. 588). (K. 620 was the first to be recorded, with the sessions taking place in April of 1964.) All of these are studio recordings, all with a highly-focused account on the score pages and little regard for “dramatizing” the situation. The one opera that could have done with at least a bit of dramatics would have been K. 588, where, in most performances, Despina delivers her “disguised” roles with coarser vocal qualities. Klemperer clearly wanted the listener to pay full attention to the music itself, regardless of the dramatics!
For the most part I do not mind Klemperer’s “purist” approach. The one exception, however, is K. 620. This is a narrative in which the personalities of the characters matter a great deal, particularly when the plot-line takes them through turn-around changes.
This is the one case in which I really have to side with Karajan. Indeed, I felt strongly enough about his approach that I recently purchased the two-CD EMI release of the LP album I had enjoyed so much in my younger years! To be fair, I should say that I have probably had more experiences with K. 620 (through performances as well as recordings) than of any of the da Ponte operas (all of which I continue to enjoy). Nevertheless, there are any number of ways that I have derived satisfaction from listening to Klemperer’s approaches to all four of these Mozart operas.
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