Composer: Richard Wagner
Performer: Günther Treptow, Franz Lechleitner, Wiener Staatsopernchor
Orchestra: Wiener Philharmoniker
Conductor: Hans Knappertsbusch
Number of Discs: 2
Format: FLAC (tracks)
Label: Eloquence
Release: 2013
Size: 500 MB
Recovery: +3%
Scan: cover
CD 01
01. Parsifal: Prelude
02. Parsifal: Act 1 Verwandlungsmusik
03. Parsifal: Act 2 “Hier war das Tosen!”…”Ihn schönen Kinder”
04. Siegfried Idyll, WWV 103
05. Tristan und Isolde, WWV 90: Prelude to Act 1
06. Tannhäuser Act 1: Overture & Venusberg Music
CD 02
01. Der fliegende Holländer, WWV 63: Overture
02. Rienzi: Overture
03. Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg: Prelude
04. Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg: Act 3. Prelude
05. Die Walkure: The Ride Of The Valkyries
06. Siegfried: Forest Murmurs
07. Götterdämmerung: Dawn and Siegfried’s Rhine Journey
08. Götterdämmerung: Siegfried’s Funeral March
It’s Wagner’s opera: let’s present him and not ourselves!’ This remark by Hans Knappertsbusch to Hans Hotter as the singer was about go on stage as Gurnemanz at Bayreuth in 1964, was characteristic of the conductor’s attitude. Singers’ egos, directors’ concepts and designers’ flights of fancy had no place in the Knappertsbusch vision of Wagner’s stage works. Indeed, after his second season at ‘New Bayreuth’, he told Wieland Wagner: ‘As soon as the spirit of Richard Wagner moves back into the Festspielhaus, I shall be the first to return’. And yet it would be hard to find a more flexible and spontaneous exponent of the conductor’s art than Hans Knappertsbusch, or ‘Kna’ as his friends and colleagues called him. No two of his performances were alike which made him a difficult conductor to ‘capture’ in the clinical environment of the recording studio. He was notoriously averse to rehearsals, preferring to take inspiration from the moment when everything came together in the crucible of a live performance in the theatre or concert hall. Frequently the result was magnificent as this collection testifies.
This collection brings together the bulk of his Wagner orchestral recordings for Decca (with the Wiener Philharmoniker) with scenes from Parsifal with members of the Wiener Staatsopernchor and the ‘Forest Murmurs’ from ‘Siegfried’ with Franz Lechleitner in the title role – in all, more than two-and-a-half hours of music recorded for Decca between 1950 and 1959. Australian Wagner scholar, Peter Bassett, contributes the illuminating notes for this release.
Knappertsbusch died in October 1965 in Munich, following a fall at his home. In a long musical life, he explored the works of the great classical composers with intelligence and imagination; but as he himself said, it was to Wagner’s music dramas that he devoted ‘his most and his deepest.