Max Lorenz: Wagner's Mastersinger, Hitler's Siegfried, a film on Medici Arts

The rarest operatic voices are tenors, the rarest tenors are dramatic tenors, and the rarest dramatic tenors are Heldentenors-- Wagner tenors. Most critics and commentators consider the Dane Lauritz Melchior (1890-1973), by a wide margin, the greatest Wagner tenor who made recordings. Connoisseurs who heard all his important predecessors as well as Melchior generally agree, with a few preferring Jean de Reszke (1850-1925), the Polish tenor who dominated the fin de siecle, and who took up Wagner's heaviest roles late in his career, after many triumphs in Gounod's Faust (first performed in 1859) and other decidedly non-Wagnerian roles. Wagner himself heard only a handful of his greatest interpreters, but he consistently named Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld (1836-1865) the greatest, although that unique artist died too young to sing Siegfried. A fascinating new film by Eric Schulz and Claus Wischmann, "Wagner's Mastersinger, Hitler's Siegfried, the Life and Times of Max Lorenz", available on a Medici Arts, EuroArts Production DVD (53 minutes), offers a different candidate. In the filmmakers view, the German tenor Max Lorenz (1901-1975) deserves the title.

Lorenz is a justly famous and much-recorded artist, whose career spanned the late 20's on into the early 60's. Besides his Wagner roles, Richard Strauss (1864-1949) cast him in the brutally demanding tenor role of Menelaus in "Die Egyptische Helena", and as Bacchus in "Aridne auf Naxos", and he created numerous roles in contemporary operas. He sang at the Metropolitan Opera before and after World War 2, but it's the tenor's entanglements with the Third Reich that this film concentrates on. It's a compelling story. Archival footage shows him singing part of the second prologue to "Die Gotterdammerung" with the great Wagnerian soprano Frida Leider (1888-1975), and in numerous other parts. His is a clarion voice, coupling a kind of wild impetuosity with absolute security. It is a brilliant and theatrically compelling instrument, and he is a notably fine actor. The film utilizes a simple and very effective device: Lorenz's recording are played for several distinguished auditors, who react and comment. They include the distinguished Heldentenor Rene Kollo (b. 1937); the legendary baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (b. 1925); Hilde Zadek (b. 1917), a German-Jewish soprano who fled to Palestine, returning for a distinguished career as a dramatic soprano once the war was over; and Waldemar Kmentt (b. 1929) an important post-war tenor, all of whom sang with Lorenz. They all regard him as the greatest, and repeatedly say as much. They are joined in this view by several non-singers, including the widow of the conductor Heinz Tietjen (1881-1967), who had occasion to observe Lorenz closely when he worked with her husband at Bayreuth.

Lorenz was gay, which placed him in grave danger under the Nazis. According to Frederic Spotts in his wonderful book "Bayreuth" (Yale UniversityPress, 1996), Lorenz was caught in flagrante with an assistant conductor backstage at the Festspielhaus, an incident which threatened to end his career. Hitler, whose devotion to Wagner and closeness to the Wagner family (who called him "Uncle Wolf") is documented with agonizing detail in "Winifred Wagner: A Life at the Heart of Hitler's Bayreuth" by Brigitte Hamann and Alan J. Bance (Granta Books, 2006), informed Winifred that Lorenz was not suitable for Bayreuth. Winifred, with the candor and grit that she demonstrated throughout her life, replied "Then I may as well shut the place down, Bayrueth is impossible without Lorenz". Hitler acquiesced. What happened to the assistant conductor, I have nor been able to discover. As if this wasn't enough, Lorenz had married a Jewish wife, to whom he was devoted. The Gestapo came one night when Lorenz was away and attempted to arrest her and her mother; the tenor managed to get Goering himself to phone the would-be arresting officers and tell them in no uncertain terms that the ladies were under "the personal protection of the Fuhrer", and to leave them alone. They were not arrested, and they survived the war. This thrilling story of artistic greatness and personal courage demonstrates the complexities--and ambiguities--of so many singers' and musicians' careers under the Third Reich. To sing Siegfried and Tristan requires nerves of steel; to sing them under the eyes of the Gestapo, as a known homosexual married to a Jew—the sort of courage that requires can hardly be understood, but it is on display in this film.

The set also includes the first-ever release of 74 minutes worth of Lorentz's Young Siegfried, in live excerpts from October 4th, 1938 under Erich Kleiber (1890-1956), recorded in performance at the Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires. Most of Lorenz's Wagner roles are well documented on recordings, live and commercial, but the title role in "Sioegfried" is not, so these excerpts, Act 1 complete and a bleeding chunk of Act 2, scene 2, are most welcome. Erich Witte (1911-?) is Mime; Herbert Janssen (1892-1965), another gay singer, who managed to flee the Nazis and enjoyed a long Metropolitan Opera career, is Wotan the Wanderer; and Emmanuel List (1886-1967), a Jewish basso who also escaped to the Met, sings Fafner. The audio quality is extremely variable. Whole sections are nearly inaudible, but the sound sometimes suddenly clears to excellence. The overall effect reminds one of Samuel Coleridge's (1772-1834) comment about the great English actor Edmund Kean (1789-1833): to watch Kean, Coleridge claimed, was "like reading Shakespeare by lightning."