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| Richard Wagner, 1871 |
"Richard Wagner, I hate you - but I hate you on my knees." Thus spake Leonard Bernstein about the composer whose bicentennial (May 22, 1813) we celebrate this month, and the quote gets to the heart of a curious paradox about Wagner: that the most anti-Semitic composer in music history, whom Hitler idolized above all others, should have among his most persuasive interpreters a number of Jews, from Hermann Levi in his own time to Klemperer and Bruno Walter during the Nazi era. The set I present today offers a graphic example of this dichotomy. One-fourth of this set features the inspired direction of Bruno Walter with Lotte Lehmann and Lauritz Melchior, recorded in Vienna in 1935 (at the same time as their famous recording of Act I). The remainder, recorded three years later in Berlin (after the Nazis' annexation of Austria), features the reliable but relatively workmanlike direction of Bruno Seidler-Winkler, with a young Hans Hotter as Wotan. EMI has offered this recording as a CD reissue, but in order to fit it complete on one disc has cut out one of the orchestral interludes. I offer it complete, but with a choice of downloading one long file (82 minutes) or, for those who like to burn CDs from their downloads, in two files of 43 and 39 minutes respectively:
Wagner: Die Walküre, Act II (nearly complete)
Hans Hotter, Marta Fuchs, Margarete Klose and Lauritz Melchior with the
Berlin State Opera Orchestra conducted by Bruno Seidler-Winkler
and
Lotte Lehmann, Lauritz Melchior and Emanuel List with the
Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Bruno Walter
RCA Victor set DM-582, ten 78-rpm records
Link (one FLAC file, 218.57 MB)
Link (two FLAC files, 217.35 MB)
Link (one MP3 file, 110.10 MB)
Link (two MP3 files, 108.81 MB)
This act contains five scenes, of which 1, 2 and 4 were recorded in Berlin, and 3 and 5 in Vienna. The description "nearly complete" is necessary because five cuts, totalling 97 bars, are made in Scene 2.
