Fascinating to hear this done in languages other than German!

Reizen has a magnificent voice, cavernous, yet beautiful and clear. The Russian pulls it back in the throat a bit unavoidably because that is where of some of the vowels and consonants are situated. Nonetheless it is a tender and profoundly introspective reading of a father's farewell to his daughter, full of sadness and pride.

Journet is one of the ancient masters with a magnificent voice, cavernous, yet crystalline clear. His technique is exemplary canon bel canto. The voice never falls to the back of the throat and sounds completely without excess glottal tension. French is more conducive to this since the language generally lies forward in the mouth. His spinning legato is liquid and sustained fabulously. It is wonderful to hear Wagner masterfully delivered with bel canto fluidity so beautifully. Journet's reading is a pain tinged paternal farewell, full of profound godly dignity and personal fatherly pride.

We have no basses like either one of these gentlemen today. Journet is my favorite here for tonal beauty, technical mastery, and interpretive characterization.

 

I beg your indulgence on this as this is a hard contest to put on as I have to remember I must cue up every performance as we already did the first part of the farewell earlier.

 

This has got to be everyone’s favorite passage in Die Walküre. It’s certainly mine - well, one of them; that melody in the orchestra is devastating. The two singers do a beautiful job of conveying the text in another language - it certainly works in Russian and French. If I prefer Journet, it’s because I’m more familiar with French than Russian, not because of any deficiency present in Reizen’s version.

 

Please Read. I predict this will be very popular as it is one of the most beautiful passages in opera. The music continues on and on in some but we are judging the 7 or so minutes of his final utterances. I have 10 and at this point am not including James Morris, who is big in some recent famous Rings, but I think more historic singers will be more interesting. I can do 12 contestants and include him if someone feels strongly. Thanks to @Shaughnessy I should be able now to do the final without mucking things up LOL. I think all 10 will be interesting to discuss. I begin with two powerful performances not in German. IMPORTANT. I am not good on multiple performances so if there is a beloved artist that has a specific performance you want please let me know. @nina foresti , this should balance out the light fare of the Vienna City of My Dreams contest LOL.

Mark Reizen: Leb Wohl in RUSSIAN

Marcel Journet sings Wotan's farewell from Wagner's Die Walkure (in French)

Serious vote to include James Morris !

 

Ok, that allows me to include someone I love that I had forgotten. This may be the only contest with 12 contestants but I think it is popular enough most of y'all won't mind.

 

Low-voiced singers probably dream of waking up one morning and finding that they've been hired to sing Wotan, as sopranos dream of singing Isolde. Or so it would seem from the variety of basses and baritones who have recorded Wotan's farewell. I wouldn't have expected Mark Reisen to do it, although fellow Russian Alexander Kipnis made a splendid recording of it in German. Reisen gives us Russian, which sounds to these ears quite odd in this music, but I suppose that was the usual practice at the time. Without much help from the scrawny-sounding orchestra and the rushed, perfunctory conducting, Reisen does well with both the lyricism and the stentorian elements of the part.

No date is given for Journet's recording, but I assume from the fact that it's an electric, not an acoustic, that it was made sometime in the 1920s when Journet would have been in his 50s. While no longer in its prime, his voice is in fine shape, though I suspect it of being a little on the light side for Wotan. He did sing it in 1910, and he had several other Wagner roles in his repertoire. The conducting presses forward rather urgently when Journet isn't singing, no doubt to save time and get all the music onto a 78rpm record side. French sounds to me a bit more compatible with the cadence of Wagner's vocal writing than does Russian (though that may simply be a result of my relative unfamiliarity with Russian), and since I enjoy both of these singers I'll let the language difference determine my choice.

 

Low-voiced singers probably dream of waking up one morning and finding that they've been hired to sing Wotan, as sopranos dream of singing Isolde. Or so it would seem from the variety of basses and baritones who have recorded Wotan's farewell. I wouldn't have expected Mark Reisen to do it, although fellow Russian Alexander Kipnis made a splendid recording of it in German. Reisen gives us Russian, which sounds to these ears quite odd in this music, but I suppose that was the usual practice at the time. Without much help from the scrawny-sounding orchestra and the rushed, perfunctory conducting, Reisen does well with both the lyricism and the stentorian elements of the part.

No date is given for Journet's recording, but I assume from the fact that it's an electric, not an acoustic, that it was made sometime in the 1920s when Journet would have been in his 50s. While no longer in its prime, his voice is in fine shape, though I suspect it of being a little on the light side for Wotan. He did sing it in 1910, and he had several other Wagner roles in his repertoire. The conducting presses forward rather urgently when Journet isn't singing, no doubt to save time and get all the music onto a 78rpm record side. French sounds to me a bit more compatible with the cadence of Wagner's vocal writing than does Russian (though that may simply be a result of my relative unfamiliarity with Russian), and since I enjoy both of these singers I'll let the language difference determine my choice.

When I looked I only saw this for Journet. He has done well here and I thought he was known for his Wagner but my memory could be faulty. Glad you still enjoyed it.

 

It is the usual dilemma, whether Wotan should be super majestic, or just a partly powerless daddy who has to choose a suboptimal solution for family troubles. This time I go for majestic. I was impressed by a voice clarity of Reizen. There was another contest (Strashnaya minuta), where he irritated me by O-like vowels, but here, he is awesome ! Maybe he had better and worse days or career stages. I like Journet too, he is on the softer side of Wotan. But Reizen wins this time for me.

 

The first 5 seconds of Reizen's had me thinking that I couldn't accept Wagner in Russian translation, but then 5 minutes later I melted. I'm not sure I can describe in words what makes Reizen so great. Like a few other singers, he just has soul. (Callas, Ferrier and Kozlovsky are the first to come to mind as others that sing with a similar incredible depth and pathos.)
This is likely to be my pick, but it's a very personal choice.

I only have passing familiarity with Journet and I like what I hear here. Whilst I really find the piece mangled in French, this is at least sung with feeling. I would love to hear Journet singing Philippe's aria from Don Carlos, but he isn't quite authoritative enough for Wotan for me.

Reizen and his ability to raise the hairs on the back of my neck win this one for me.

N.

 

I had Journet in a contest before and people really liked him. French Wagner is just.. different. I like it but I can understand people not liking it. I tend to like arias sung in Russian.. or it could just be good Russian singers can convince me to like it.

 

Can I just say I am trying my best to do some good Wagner contests but because of the centrality of the conductor to Wagner when I click on many of the arias it just says the conductor along with the many names on the album cover. Sopranos I can pick out but I am now working on a baritone aria and 80 percent say nothing about the singer because only the conductor is important. I do not run into this issue with other composers. I can pick out the sopranos and tenors but because so many Wagner operas use bass baritones I' am **. I really run into issues on baritones in Wagner and you guys love that stuff. If I lack good Wagner contests for baritones that is why. I am trying, though.

 

Wagner made good trouble in his time, and clearly he's still doing it. If the conductor sometimes turns out to be the star of the show I doubt that anyone objects. People differ in how much the conducting part matters to them, and if we want to go back in time to hear the greatest singers, we can generally expect some problem with the orchestra - e.g., rushed tempi, truncated chunks that may lack beginnings or endings, and ensembles that sound like calliopes played by hobbits. But it's all worth it, and we appreciate your efforts.

 

I think my biggest problem with Wotans Abschied in Russian is the text of the Russian translation, which to me has replaced the meaning of the German text with something different...

 

And b'sides, I can think of at least 2 out of the canon 10 Wagner operas that are built around singing contests.

 

Tannhauser not only has a song contest, but features other songs as plot elements. Tannhauser sings a song to Venus, accompanying himself on his harp. A young shepherd sings an unaccompanied song. Wolfram sings to the evening star.

 

@Woodduck and @ewilkros you both get a bow from me. Also, there is a world ... A WORLD... of difference between the Immolation of Brunhilde sung by Flagstad, Leider, Traubel, Nilsson and any of these wobbly voiced singers we've often been stuck with since 2000. To say that a great singer is not an asset to the music of Wagner implies to me you haven't been listening to the right singers. But, everyone is allowed to have their viewpoint here.

 

I wish the aforementioned had been in their primes after the 1960s. With Wagner, the orchestra is just as important as the singers, and the inability of pre-stereo recording technology to capture the essence of the orchestra takes most of those recordings off the table. We can listen to those old recordings to appreciate the singers (who were indeed vastly superior to our current roster), but for me you just don't get the rich immersion into the music itself. The sublime Karajan-Dernesch Tristan reveals the extent to which superior recording technology and conductor's interpretation can make up for a lack in vocals.

 

I'm going to disagree with you, and do it point for point. Hold on tight!

I would have been disappointed if you didn't!

1. Appreciating the variety of singing and the differences between singers tackling the same music can be fascinating and satisfying, and is indispensable to a full understanding of opera and the vocal art. This is as true for Wagner's operas as for any others.

In theory yes, in practice I have seen much commentary in these threads on the quality of the vocals, and none on how it has enhanced anybody's understanding of the opera.

2. A focus on technique is interesting to some people, but less so or not at all to others. It's possible to be occupied with the techniques of singing and to ignore the art of making music and conveying dramatic meaning, but it's also possible and useful to recognize the ways in which vocal skill is essential to effective vocal artistry. There are no rules dictating how we listen or what we say about what we hear. We are all free to emphasize whatever elements of a singer's performance interest us.

That is quite fair.

3. Showcasing singers' ability is only one thing that people listen to opera for. This is as true of Italian opera, which encompasses several centuries and many styles, as of any other. Wagner scorned superficial vocal display, but did not scorn the human voice, which he used with enormous creativity. Many aspects of his dramatic ideas and musical style were original, but he was still composing opera, an art form carried out by singing actors through words set to music. The art of setting words to communicate meaning was one of his primary concerns in Opera and Drama.

The fact Wagner insisted on not even calling his mature works "operas" should indicate the extent to which Wagner wished to break from operatic tradition. For Wagner, conveyance of the libretto and its meaning was paramount. The infamous "Bayreuth bark" prioritized clarity of diction over vocal line beauty so the libretto could actually be understood. In Italian opera, the libretto is a vehicle for the voice, in Wagner, the voice is a vehicle for the libretto.

4. Wagner grew up in the theater and was music director of a major opera company in his twenties. Opera was his world. Throughout his life he demonstrated a keen appreciation of singers. A notion that his dramatic ideas were so otherworldly as to make a concern for fine singing unimportant would have struck him as strange, and any suggestion that it was unwise for him to "call for singers" - which can only mean, to compose operas - would have had him laughing uproariously, standing on his head, and scrambling up the nearest tree. He did stuff like that, as we know.

That was mostly a joke, given that "The Ring Without Words" is a thing and Wagner's music quite uniquely holds a fascination for people otherwise uninterested in vocal music.

 

In Italian opera, the libretto is a vehicle for the voice, in Wagner, the voice is a vehicle for the libretto.

I'm going to tell myself that you don't speak or read Italian in order to grant you clemency for saying something so silly. Time and again, I listen to familiar pieces with far deeper appreciation when I come to see how the musical setting, especially the vocal line, underlines, accentuates, or embodies some idea in the text. The reason Donizetti, Bellini, and Rossini are considered the three giants is not only because they wrote pretty melodies that show off the voice; it's because they wrote characteristic vocal melodies that took texts of variable merit (and some, especially Romani's libretti for Donizetti and Bellini, had considerable merit) to their expressive extremes.
Donizetti: L'elisir d'amore / Act 1 - "Una parola..chiedi all'aura" - YouTube
This duet from L'elisir could be listened to as nothing more than a pretty melody. Look a little closer, and you will see that Donizetti is drawing out certain words over multiple notes: for example, when the flighty Adina sings about the breeze that flutters over the grasses and lilies, "senza posa", without resting, the word "posa" is drawn out so that the melody does not come to rest either, but hovers over the cadence for a moment. This is a small effect, some critics might even denigrate it as a "trick" -- I should emphasize that this hardly exhausts Donizetti's expressive techniques, even in this piece, is one tiny example -- but multiply it, and many others, over many such moments of poetry, then add in a singer who is sensitive to the expressive potential of such moments, and you have something powerful.

The simplicity of the orchestration allows the text to be heard, and bel canto technique emphasizes clarity of vowel because the text matters! The effect of light and dark shading, of soft and harsh timbre, in other words, those contrasts that Italian voices were trained to allow for, all this was essential to singing the text. In Italian opera, the vocal line is the primary means of expression -- of what? Of the emotions, dramatic situations, and characterization indicated by the text. In many cases the music exceeds the text in quality, but that's true for many of Wagner's works as well.

In Italian opera, the voice is a vehicle for the text; if they figured out how to make that vehicle a Ferrari, and if the driver threw in the occasional doughnut for fun, so much the better.