Karajan on Decca: 19th-Century Opera

In my last dispatch concerning The Complete Decca Recordings anthology of performances by conductor Herbert von Karajan, I observed that the “lion’s share of repertoire” consisted of music composed during the nineteenth century. I thus felt obliged to divide that category into “Instrumental” and “Opera” subcategories. The latter is the larger collection; and, for that matter, the opera albums constitute a healthy majority of the entire anthology, 21 of the 33 CDs.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 492, The Marriage of Figaro, was discussed as the only opera representing a First Viennese School composer. At the other end six CDs have been allocated to the three most-frequently performed operas of Giacomo Puccini, La bohème, Tosca, and Madama Butterfly; and they straddle the division between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As a result, I shall deal with them in my final report on this anthology. That leaves twelve CDs accounting for five nineteenth-century operas.

Given that this is a relatively modest number, Giuseppe Verdi is limited to only two operas, Aida and Otello. The other opera that consistently draws enthusiastic audiences is Georges Bizet’s Carmen. That leaves two operas, neither of which I would have associated with Karajan’s comfort zone: Modest Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov and Die Fledermaus, composed by Johann Strauss II.

That last selection was the most surprising. Karajan has always struck me as being serious unto an extreme; and, for those that like to niggle over extremes, opera lovers tend to emphasize that Fledermaus is an operetta, consigning it to a repertoire that is “merely entertaining.” Nevertheless, there is no end of imaginative inventiveness in Strauss’ score. Furthermore, any performance worth its salt is likely to play fast and loose with weaving familiar excerpts by other composers into the overall fabric of the score. (My favorite example can be found in the Covent Garden staging, which is a New Year’s Eve tradition. When the husband takes leave of his wife, concealing the fact that he will be having a night on the town with an old drinking buddy, the orchestra of the Royal Opera House strikes up a few measures of “Wotan’s Farewell,” from Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre.)

Karajan’s conducting on this recording could not be more spirited, and the cast he assembled for the recording sessions of June of 1960 collectively got into the the fun of it all. Ironically, baritone Erich Kunz, known for such comic roles of Papageno in The Magic Flute and Dr Falke (the aforementioned drinking buddy), was recruited, near the end of his career, to take the role of the drunken jailer Frosch, a role that allows for considerable improvisation, both verbal and physical. The second act is devoted to the raucous party attended by Falke and the philandering Gabriel von Eisenstein. It is held by the Russian Prince Orlofsky, and another Fledermaus tradition is that this scene includes a gala performance by some of Orlofsky’s special guests. The guests on this recording include Leontyne Price (an anachronistic delivery of “Summertime” from Porgy and Bess), Birgit Nilsson singing the equally anachronistic “I could have danced all night” from My Fair Lady, and the venerable Ljuba Welitsch singing “Wien, Wien, nur du allein.”

Just as unexpected was the inclusion of Boris Godunov. I never thought of Karajan as a Russian opera conductor; and Boris is particularly problematic, since it had to endure efforts of other composers to “correct errors” in the score. In addition, there are different versions which include some of the scenes and exclude others. Back in the Eighties there was a trend towards performing the score as Mussorgsky wrote it in 1869, which consists of only seven scenes. Subsequently, the number of scenes was bumped up to ten. Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov edited nine of them, trying to “correct any errors” in Mussorgsky’s manuscript. That became the “authorized revised version” of 1872. The missing scene was the so-called “St. Basil’s Scene” from the 1869 version, which Rimsky-Korsakov chose to eliminate. However, that scene was restored and added to the nine-scene version when Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov was commissioned in 1925 to “repair” the Mussorgsky original. In other words Karajan presents what is probably the most thorough account of the opera, the only shortcoming being that it is situated some distance from the original composer’s intentions.

Mario del Monaco as Otello (from the Amazon.com Web page of this particular Decca recording)

While the Carmen was recorded in Vienna, it was originally released by RCA to highlight major Metropolitan Opera performers. Those performers included Price in the title role, Franco Corelli as Don José, Robert Merrill as Escamillo, and Mirella Freni as Micaëla. (There was a similar Viennese release of Mozart’s Don Giovanni conducted by Erich Leinsdorf with Price singing Donna Elvira.) The leading vocalist in the Verdi recordings, on the other hand, is Renata Tebaldi, singing both Aida and Desdemona in Otello. She is partnered with different tenors however, Carlo Bergonzi as Radamès and Mario del Monaco as Otello.

Taken as a whole, this subset of the Karajan collection left me with much more satisfaction than any of the preceding segments. Indeed, I realized that, back in my secondary school days, the only opera recording that really took over my attention was a performance of Mozart’s K. 620 The Magic Flute. This was my first-ever contact with Karajan, and I could not get enough of it. The same can be said of the nineteenth-century opera selections in this new anthology.