Cornelia Franz

One of the most important composers of opera and sacred music between Mozart and Rossini, and Donizetti’s teacher, Johann Simon Mayr also composed several major oratorios, including David and The Marriage of Tobias. Like Haydn’s more famous Il Ritorno di Tobia, Mayr’s work recounts how the archangel Raphael miraculously helps the boy Tobias to cure his aged father’s blindness. Conductor Franz Hauk prepared the performing edition for this exciting new recording.

Born near Ingolstadt in Bavaria, Simon Mayr spent the greater part of his career in Bergamo, a flourishing cultural and economic centre in the early nineteenth century. An important figure in the promotion of Viennese classicism in Italy, he combined, in his own style, the legacy of Vienna with the dramatic and melodic genius of Italy, and held a dominant position in Italian opera before the emergence of Rossini. His oratorio David in spelunca Engaddi (David in the Cave of Engedi), with a Latin text, was written in 1795 for the Ospedale dei Mendicanti in Venice, one of the four great charitable institutions there, known for the musical achievements of its members. The oratorio deals with the conflict between David and Saul, and the refusal of David to harm the Lord’s anointed, in spite of the opportunity offered him.

Together with Johann Simon Mayr, Ferdinando Paër counts as one of the most important opera composers of his day, and he was unable to resist filling his oratorio on Christ’s Passion, Il Santo Sepolcro with expressive extremes. Pain and grief contrast with joy and hope, and scenes including the terrible hours of the crucifixion, frenzy of the crowd, resurrection and Last Judgment are given potently descriptive music. Originally a prelude to Haydn’s Seven Last Words, Mayr’s Invito is a call to hear Paër’s incomparable narrative.

A mysteroius childlike woman, a murder by jealousy, an orphan: Debussy’s Pelléas et Méllisande, his only completed opera, is full of magical, cryptical and deeply symbolic moments. With this work Debussy added quite literally a new dimension to the 1893 stage play of the same name by Belgian playwriter and poet, Maurice Maeterlinck, who was to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1911. Rodney Gilfry, a leading American opera baritone whos vocal excellence has been repeatedly extolled by many leading music critics, is Pelléas. Praised by the San Francisco Chronicle for his “rich, rolling baritone with a superb upper range,” as well as his “vivid stage presence,” Rodney Gilfry has established himself as a most compelling musician on the world’s operatic stages. By his side Isabel Rey, internationally recognised for her exquisite vocal technique and her sensitive acting skills, is Mélisande. Due to her crystal-clear soprano and the winterly stage setting the cold dream-world of the subconscious emerges to the audience. Because of the fabulous soloist and a distinguished cast this opera promises outstanding listening pleasure. Under Franz Welser-Möst’s fabulous conducting this production of the Zurich Opera House is setting musical standards. Welser- Möst is ecxeptionally talented and internationally known as one of the outstanding personalities in the field of classical music. In conjunction with the director Sven-Eric Bechtolf, he has developed into one of the leading teams in contemporary music theater.

The set has various virtues in its favor. Richter conducts an orchestra of modern instruments somewhat stolidly, but always with lyrical polish and sumptuous tone, and one can enjoy its lush richness, however anachronistic it may be. Nor are his tempos stereotypically sluggish; many of the sprightlier moments bounce along energetically. The soprano role of Cleopatra is sung by a young Tatiana Troyanos, who later became a celebrated mezzo-soprano (and eventually undertook the title role in stage productions, making her perhaps the first singer in history to undertake the roles of both Cleopatra and Caesar). It’s interesting to hear her in her earlier soprano incarnation. Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau makes a valiant baritone effort at Caesar’s alto arias and, while he avoids the woolly grumbling some bass-baritones make of the part, seems less than emotionally committed. His second aria, “L’empio diro, tu sei,” for example, sounds polite and cautious rather than raging and indignant.

The performance given on 21 March 1967 at Carnegie Hall in New York stems from the now outmoded tradition of casting baritones and basses in the castrato roles, and uses a special concert arrangement. Not only are several cuts made to the score, but the order of the arias is changed and the recitatives are heavily truncated and provided with new English texts, and given not to one of the characters but to a 'narrator'.