We have the first of Wagner's four 'Ring' operas, 'Das Rheingold', coming up this summer at the San Francisco Opera, so I'm taking a break from my series about the overall health of classical music. (The three latest installments in the series can be found here in Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.)
We're much closer to the musical Romantic era than we think. Richard Wagner, Bayreuth, and the Ring Cycle probably seem quite far away, relics of an distant age illuminated by flickering gaslight. And yet we can reach out and touch the late Romantic era without much effort; Richard Wagner's grandson (Franz Liszt's great-grandson) Wolfgang Wagner is still living, for example.
Those scratchy, tinny early recordings from the late 19th and early 20th centuries offer some wonderful glimpses into the past. Some of them are downright haunting, such as hearing Brahms play the piano (almost inaudibly) or the voice of Verdi's original Otello, Francesco Tamagno. There are pianists on record who were born as long ago as the 1830s (Francis Planté), as well as legendary instrumentalists such as Brahms's colleague Joseph Joachim, or the celebrated singer Adelina Patti.
The very first performances of the Ring Cycle inaugurated the Bayreuth Festspielhaus in 1876 in what the modern world would call a media frenzy. At the beginning of the entire cycle, the curtain rises on 'Das Rheingold' with three Rhine maidens floating about (or walking about, depending on the production.) One of those original Rhine maidens was 28-year-old Lilli Lehmann, who from her debut in 1865 to her retirement in 1920 enriched the world with a brilliant career as both performer and teacher.
Lilli left us a nice legacy of recordings, bless her heart. We don't have her singing the Rhine maiden, but we do have her singing 'Du bist der Lenz' from 'Die Walkure'. I've made a short clip on YouTube with a few pictures of the lady (including Lilli as Rhine maiden in the original Ring) accompanying several phrases of the recording, which you can access here.
Lilli was also one of the great Mozart interpreters of the age. Here she is performing 'Porgi Amor' from Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro.
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