Christa Ludwig (1928-2021)

The great mezzo Christa Ludwig has died.  I have actually blogged about her on numerous occasions.  I see only one listing for her at the San Francisco Opera.  In 1971 she sang Octavian in Der Rosenkavalier to Sena Jurinac's Marschallin.  I think I did not attend.

I love this wonderful picture of Joyce DiDonato and Susan Graham at the Opera News Awards 2014 bowing before Christa.  What a great picture.

I'm going to post some of my favorite films, which I have mostly posted before.  Here she is with Bernstein singing "I am so easily assimilated."

 

And here at last is the perfect performance of Bach's "Erbarme dich" by the great Christa Ludwig.  The tempo and the phrasing are all masterpieces.

I'm trying to cover a lot of ground in these selections.  Here is Christa singing "Nur wer die Sehnsicht kennt" by Tchaikovsky.

My favorite Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde with Leonard Bernstein and the incomparable Christa Ludwig.
Der Einsame im Herbst

 

Von der Schoenheit


Abschied part I

part II

part III

We are currently doing Fidelio in different incarnations.  Here is Christa.



My heart leaps. Doch. Die Liebe wirt's erreichen. This is the most rubato in Beethoven I've ever heard.
She was a very great artist.  Spend some time listening.

Three Mezzos

And they are Christa Ludwig, Joyce DiDonato and Susan Graham at the Opera News Awards 2014.  What a fabulous picture.

I imagine Joyce and Susan to be singing, "Reverenza!"

Always on the Lookout

I'm always on the lookout for the great performance, here of Tchaikovsky's "Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt" with the original Goethe poem.

The Christa Ludwig version has gone now, so I replaced it with this one of Schwarzkopf. Ludwig is back.

Adventures in YouTube

First I was listening to this film with Kirsten Flagstad talking.



I especially like the parts where she talks about building your body up gradually to prepare for Wagner.  In the Met archives is the story that she was sent to Prague in her thirties to study with Georg Solti.

Then came this performance of "Elsa's Dream" from a radio broadcast in 1949.  It sounds as natural as breathing.  It is her depth of understanding that makes her the best.



Then I happened on this performance of Flagstad singing Bach.  Who knew?  The tempo is quite slow.  For my taste a bit too slow.




And here at last is the perfect performance of Bach's "Erbarme dich" by the great Christa Ludwig.  The tempo and the phrasing are all masterpieces.





Or perhaps the best is this one with Marilyn Horne. You can hear her spectacular control of the phrase at its very best.

Which is best? I can't decide.  One can get lost for hours.

Pronouncing R

Norman Lebrecht has gotten himself involved in a discussion of how to pronounce "R."  (Here for French, here for German.)  This sounds like the sort of silly stuff I write about.  My fanaticism is the pronunciation of the unpronounced neutral vowel in French.  If it isn't pronounced, how are you supposed to tell how to pronounce it?

When native speakers speak both French and German, they often use a uvular or gutturalized R (back of the throat) instead of a rolled or flipped R (tip of the tongue).  When I lived in Germany, my Spanish friend  would laugh that she could do a guttural R only on the word "Brod."  Then she would demonstrate.  I couldn't do it on any word at all, so I was very impressed with this.  My uvula refuses to do anything but just hang there.  The fanatical German speech coaches fussed with a lot of things about my German but never once brought up how I pronounced R.  Perhaps they simply assume that foreigners have no hope of achieving this.  Or perhaps the uvular R isn't considered correct in opera singing.



I like to use certain models for these things. In French I think of Edith Piaf as the supreme model.  Watching this again I can see her tongue rolling those R's.  I am surprised by this.
 

For my money Régine Crespin and Edith Piaf are rolling with the tip of the tongue.  This is what singers are taught.  And you will please notice that neither one of these women use the silly super-rounded neutral vowel you are constantly hearing from coached non-French singers.



And Fritz Wunderlich is definitely using his tongue.



Christa Ludwig rolls with her tongue.  The idea here is that you do nothing with your pronunciation that interferes with your tone because tone is king.

When the man in Brussels asks for a uvular R, he is trying for a theatrical effect.  He wants Carmen to sound common.  Here is a link to comments from the singer on this situation.

Curiously, if you go back a few posts to the film of Victoria de los Angeles, the word "chagrin" sounds the most likely to be guttural of anything I've found.

The only singer I am absolutely certain consistently uses a uvular R when singing is Gisela May.



At one point in the song she even sings it with her mouth wide open.  No tongue.  She was one of Brecht's favorites.  We prefer to approach these subjects using the empirical method.

Christa Ludwig

I apologize for the snail's pace of my journey through Christa Ludwig's autobiography.  Charlie Chaplin, and a lot more celebrity types, wrote an endless "and then I met" name dropping list.  Christa writes about the business.

She writes about her take on each of her major roles, of her own particular style in creating characters. She tells us that somewhere there exists a score where she and Gottfried von Einem rewrote the opera Der Besuch der alten Dame to suit her voice. She thinks it is unfortunate that this opera is no longer performed.

We learn in a footnote that there is a privately printed newspaper by and for the standees of the Vienna State Opera. This is now called Der neue Merker and, of course, is available on line here. Who knew?

She writes the most amazing things about Lady Macbeth from Verdi's opera Macbeth. It wouldn't have occurred to me that a mezzo would sing this. She tells a wonderful story about studying this with Zinka Milanov. They agreed on a bel canto approach to the role. Perhaps this is the problem. This is SOOO interesting.

I promise to finish eventually.
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Another Christa Ludwig

I posted this before but it deserves a whole entry on its own. She will never be the same for me after this.

Christopher Raeburn

Christopher Raeburn, the soul of Decca records, has died. He was Cecilia Bartoli's discoverer and producer. Read more here.

Here he is with some artists.


These are: Raeburn, Hans Hotter, Christa Ludwig. I believe they're recording the Ring.


These are Raeburn, Evans Mirageas, Riccardo Chailly.

Solti's Ring

Ever since I posted this as a review of Life and Death, I have wondered how it could be that a recording of Wagner's Ring, even one by so great a conductor as Georg Solti, could possibly sell so many records, 25 million as I recall. Perhaps they are counting each disk one at a time. Even if you buy it now on CD, it's 14 discs. Maybe one purchase counts as 14.

It's a great recording. Where else could you hear Kirsten Flagstad and Birgit Nilsson on the same recording? And Hans Hotter as Wotan. And James King. And Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. And Christa Ludwig. And Regine Crespin? Have we missed anyone? Even the Rhine maidens include Lucia Popp and Gwyneth Jones.

One of the Amazon comments notes that it has been released in various media, so maybe the number is real. It's just hard to believe.
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