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."

Jess Thomas vs. Siegfried

I heard the American Heldentenor Thomas three times in the opera house, as Tristan opposite Birgit Nilsson in '72, a year or two later as Siegfried, and finally at his farewell as Parsifal in 1982. As Tristan and Siegfried I had found Thomas vocally unsatisfying, very rough and with a badly compromised upper voice. In fact, I thought he was in such trouble that he might not make it through the first act. Obviously I was wrong--he sang for another ten years--but it was widely believed at the time that this great Parsifal and Lohengrin had done himself irreparable damage moving into the heaviest Wagner repertoire. Since he'd been singing the young Siegfried at Salzburg and recording the part under Karajan, the latter received much of the blame for destroying yet another voice by luring a hapless singer into a role beyond his ability. Karajan had a preference for lighter voices in traditionally dramatic roles, and the title role of "Siegfried" (as well as the role of Tristan) is a notorious voice-killer. Siegfried is onstage for the entire first act except for the 20 minutes or so during which Wotan, disguised as "the Wanderer", interrogates Mime; it ends with the very long, heavy scene in which the title character forges the broken shards of his father's sword, Nothung. He has plenty to do in Act 2 besides just kill a dragon; and in Act 3 he has a very strenuous duet with Wotan (his grandfather). Then he plunges, still singing, through the wall of Magic Fire to wake up Brunnhilde, who's had nothing to do all night except wait for their final, roof-raising duet. She's fresh and rested, he's been working as hard as a tenor can work for four hours; seems almost unfair in a way. A tenor needs amazing strength and stamina just to get through the role, never mind sounding like a young Ubermensch, and most Wagner tenors leave it alone. If a tenor does sing it, he gets to come back a couple of nights later to throw himself against the "other" Siegfried, in the even-longer "Die Gotterdammerung". Casting this part is almost impossible. Jess Thomas had chosen to enter the lists and become the world's leading exponent of the role, but like many before him, he found himself in over his head. Like more than a few other Wagner roles, Siegfried is at the very edge of what's humanly possible.

After recording "Siegfried" under Karajan, Thomas had withdrawn from the "Gotterdammerung" recording, replaced by Helge Brilioth, whose own Heldentenor career was a very brief one. (I heard Brilioth at the Met as Parsifal in 1970, opposite Christa Ludwig, in an interesting cast that included Cesare Siepi as Gurnemanz and Ezio Flagello as Klingsor. Wagner wrecked Brilioth in no time, and he was back in Sweden singing comprimario parts after just a few memorable years. He sounded fine the night I heard his Parsifal, an interesting, resinous-sounding tenor, and not small.) Although Thomas sang until 1982—another decade—he made only one other commercial recording, singing Duke Waldemar in Schoenberg's "Gurre-Lieder" under Boulez, recorded in December, 1974. But he made several in the 60's that are justly famous, especially a complete "Lohengrin", and until that cynical siren Herbert von Karajan lured him deep into the Rhine, the voice was a very good one. Even after his vocal crisis, he was an intelligent artist who acted effectively, and his physical presence suited heroic roles well. He was musical, his intonation was very dependable, the voice was large enough to be heard over the heaviest orchestration, and he was a trooper. Without Jess Thomas, many performances of Wagner would just not have been possible. Somebody has to sing Siegfried, and it's often a thankless task. In retrospect he was much better than I thought at the time. Only a few tenors have sung the role as well since, and many have sung it much worse.