Wagner – The Mastersingers of Nuremberg (in English): Norman Bailey/Alberto Ramedios/Margaret Curphey/Gregory Dempsey/Derek Hammond-Strou/Sadlers Wells Chorus and Orchestra/Reginald Goodall
Chandos
SIR REGINALD GOODALL was a strange mixture. He was a widely experienced musician, gifted singing coach and a thorough musical director who demanded extensive rehearsals, yet maintained the lasting affection of performers. He was also a supporter of Oswald Mosley and an anti-Semite.
At Covent Garden from 1947, he was overshadowed by Karl Rankl. Although Goodall was a vastly superior Wagnerian, Goodall prepared opera performances for Karajan, Furtwangler and Klemperer. With the ascendancy of George Solti at Covent Garden, he left the Royal Opera and went to Sadler’s Wells. The Garden’s loss was the Wells’ gain. Goodall conducted premieres of Benjamin Britten’s operas, including Peter Grimes.
His reputation in Wagner was well established here. What made him such a tremendous Wagner conductor? He was able to combine a rich, revealing leisurely pace with an incredible sense of dramatic shape, and movement and purpose. Solti is undeniably a dazzling exponent of Wagner’s intensity. Few match his orgasmic climaxes – the great moments in Der Ring, such as the “Descent into Nibelheim”, “Entry of the Gods”, Magic Fire Music and “Brunnhilde’s Awakening” are unforgettable. Goodall’s complete cycle is some three hours longer than Karl Bohm or Daniel Barenboim. But with Goodall, you seem to have been taken deeper into Wagner and been further enriched.
This set of the BBC live broadcast from Sadler’s Wells on February 10 1968 is by no means technically perfect, but its musical and historical importance is beyond question.
On the face of it, Wagner’s Die Meistersinger is so very German that it would defy being rendered into English. The central action is quite specifically located in the medieval guilds of Nuremberg in the time of the Emperor Charles V and it premiered during the period of Germany’s emergence as a nation state in the late 1860s.
Hans Sachs’ words at the close of the opera are: “We live in threatening times…the German empire and German people are in danger of collapse, when all that’s genuinely German may no longer endure, replaced by trashy foreign value.” The Mastersingers is not just about a sage old cobbler, a pedantic town clerk and a young knight who wins a local beauty in a singing contest. It’s about the importance of living cultural traditions being valued and handed on to succeeding generations as part of the search for meaning that holds society together. Core values, anyone? All human life is here: love, hope, idealistic optimism, pedantry, pride, ceremony, tradition, progress, enmity and reconciliation.
The soloists are all outstanding, Norman Bailey especially. I adore the way Goodall seems so gently and inevitably to launch the quintet (Act III) into flight and the final moments of the opera will bring you sheering to your feet, I promise.
Die Meistersinger would be my desert island opera. But which recording would I take? Kubelik? Knappetsbusch? Keilberth? Karajan? And now Goodall? I give up.
Robert Giddings
