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  • Kaufmann

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Wagner: Parsifal / Act 2: "Amfortas! Die Wunde!" Domingo and Kaufmann

1.6K views 26 replies 13 participants last post by  Woodduck  
#1 ·
@ScottK, @Woodduck @wkasimer I will have lots of historic singers too.
Wagner: Parsifal / Act 2: "Amfortas! Die Wunde!" · Plácido Domingo · Jessye Norman · Metropolitan Opera Orchestra · James Levine
Wagner: Parsifal, WWV 111, Act II: Amfortas! Die Wunde! · Jonas Kaufmann · Margarethe Joswig · Mahler Chamber Orchestra · Claudio Abbado
 
#2 ·
“Amfortas! Die Wunde!” is a line from Richard Wagner's opera Parsifal that translates to “Amfortas! The Wound! The Wound!”. It is a crucial moment in the opera, as it marks the beginning of Parsifal's transformation from an innocent to a character who will redeem the knights
In the opera, Parsifal cries out this line after suddenly recoiling in pain while kissing someone. He feels the wounded king's pain in his own side, and understands Amfortas' passion during the Grail Ceremony. This moment of compassion leads Parsifal to reject Kundry's advances.
I can't find a translation.
 
#5 ·
This is the critical moment in Parsifal not only for the character, who must experience crisis and transformation (albeit incomplete) in about eight minutes, but for the singer of the role. It also represents, better perhaps than any other comparably brief passage in music, the fin-de-siecle moment at which tonal instability could be stretched no further before its moorings snapped and it was washed out into the sea of atonality. The harmonic chaos induced by Kundry's kiss never fails to shock me after sixty years of acquaintance with this work. Against an orchestral turbulence in which Wagner, with Tristan's agonies as preparation, magically keeps nauseatingly vertiginous harmony under such control that Schoenberg spent a lifetime trying to one-up him (sorry, Arnold, but the tone-row gimmick is no substitute for Wagner's harmonic intuition), the interpreter of the innocent fool has to show us the young man's world being turned upside down and inside out in a collision of sexuality and spirituality that, as far as I know, stands unique in opera and in art in general.

It's fortunate for tenors that the complex emotions of this scene are so graphically depicted in the orchestra. There's no danger of our mistaking this music for a fun night at the opera no matter what the singer does. But what the singer does still matters greatly, and Wagner asks him to do many things that separate the dramatic tenor men from the wannabe boys. Both Domingo and Kaufmann could reasonably be called wannabes. I'm more disturbed here than I've sometimes been by Domingo's Spanish-inflected German, but am even more bothered by the incongruity between his lovely Latin lyric tenor voice and the psychic agony it's being asked to depict. Kaufmann's dark timbre which, at least briefly during his prime years (represented here, I think) led many of us to see him as the great heldentenor hope, sounds much more idiomatic in this music, and his German is of course unexceptionable. I very much enjoyed him in this role as heard at the Met a few years after this recording was made, but I don't hear much dramatic tension or specificity in his performance here. It's just eight minutes, but eight minutes that don't allow the tenor to relax and just sing for even a moment.

Not everyone can be Melchior or Vickers, but any number of tenors, not all of them paragons of sheer vocalism, have extracted more meaning from this music than these two. Of the two, I'll take Kaufmann, who at least doesn't sound as if he was scheduled to sing Rigoletto when the Gilda came down with laryngitis and Parsifal was substituted at the last minute.
 
#9 ·
Singing aside I don't understand why Parsifal cries out his heart is in agony, then says it is not the wound's pain (but Amfortas' wound is not in his heart) then says instead it's in his heart. Can anybody make sense of this passage?
 
#14 ·
The thingy I uploaded ^ is not to be taken as perfectly useful for word-by-word analysis, if that's what has happened. The third line, "Sie brennt mir zur hier Seite", should be "It burns me here at my side", not "...within my heart"; he goes on to realize that the spiritual agony is much worse than the physical. He's having a grand mal empathy seizure - "durch Mitleid wissend".
 
#10 ·
I find Domingo's timbre reasonably healthy, I never loved his voice, but his German is just too awful. Actually I find him excessively boring here. I'm happy he isn't ingolata, but the timbre doesn't mesh well with the orchestra. The slight tendency to nasality and forward pressing vocal focus is very latin in style and at odds with the music. It's so extremely incongruous.

Kaufmann is young and fresh and squeezing down hard on that glottis, but still has remnants of yet undamaged lyric tenor beauty in the core voice. His German is acceptable, native language obviously, makes it sound all idiomatic. He's starting to swallow the sound and overdarken it, which is what we are now used to hearing in lots of Wagner. He's got good musical sense though, I just dislike how he squeezes down the voice to achieve his phrasing intentions. I'll always be distracted by his vocal emission.
 
#11 ·
We don’t get too many contests of passages such as this. It’s very declamatory and certainly not what would generally be seen as a stand-alone aria. The lack of need for a long line of seamless legato certainly helps Kaufmann here, but he is pressing very hard and pain and sorrow becomes a blind rage. He digs into the words, but with so much effort that it sounds overdone. He is recorded close and well by Decca, but his voice is darkened rather than dark, although nowhere near as ingolata as he is nowadays. The passage, despite not demanding a seamless legato, does require a sense of shape which Kaufmann’s shouty vocal acting glosses over completely. Overall, textually he is interesting, if not really appropriate, but musically I find him disappointing.

Domingo has a more suitable voice, it is a larger sound, and where Kaufmann presents an aged Parsifal, Domingo sounds younger, more in line with the character. His vocal acting is not as specific as Kaufmann’s and his German is noticeable poorer, but it is less overdone and he seems more aware of the actual emotions of the text even if they are not quite realised with the fullest expression. His less shouty approach allows him to find more structure in the musical aspects and thus I find him more compelling though a fair way from ideal.
 
#12 ·
Good stuff people. Was Domingo ever good at Wagner? i liked him as Siegmund, but I am not good at the language part like most of you. I normally try to pick matching live/ live and studio/ studio recordings. WD thinks Kaufmann was better in the live. If you were me would you err in favor of a live over a studio released recording???
 
#17 ·
I've never cared for Domingo in Wagner. His first major recording, Stolzing with Jochum on DG, is actually well sung, but his German was pretty awful. His German got somewhat better in the studio, but when I've heard him on live broadcasts, there's a distinct de-emphasis on consonants, which is all wrong in Wagner, and there are passages which are unintelligible. The only Domingo Wagner that I listen to with any regularlity is the Sinopoli Tannhauser, but that's because the rest of the cast is pretty good, it's the Paris version, and Domingo's competition on record in the title role is mostly pretty dire.

But to be honest, I don't much care for Domingo in anything. He sings every role in an all-purpose, generic fashion, often sounding like a man passing a kidney stone.
 
#13 · (Edited)
I know we're judging singers here, but in this case I find it hard not to include the conducting and orchestral playing and Levine and his band are simply leagues ahead. Moreover, Domingo was still in good voice in 1991-1992 and in this particular case I'm less bothered by his German than the majority here; after all Parsifal is a fairy-tale populated with pure fools and evil sorcerers, it isn't exactly Wozzeck. Going by my principle of which recording I'd rather hear again, Domingo/Levine wins.
 
#22 ·
I expected to like Kaufman more and did by a considerable margin By mid career, Domingo was not the one I’d go to for Wagnerian angst and mystique, consistently musical though he was.

But Kaufman surprised me with his sound which I found, for the most part, to be much cleaner and uncovered than usual. What I wouldn’t have given to hear him instead of Klaus Florian when I heard this
 
#23 ·
I expected to like Kaufman more and did by a considerable margin By mid career, Domingo was not the one I’d go to for Wagnerian angst and mystique, consistently musical though he was.

But Kaufman surprised me with his sound which I found, for the most part, to be much cleaner and uncovered than usual. What I wouldn’t have given to hear him instead of Klaus Florian when I heard this
Though I don't remember the year of the Met's broadcast of the "blood on the floor" production - I think it was around ten years ago, but age plays tricks with one's sense of time - I found Kaufmann quite good in the role. Parsifal has to begin by sounding youthful and brash and end by sounding mature, and I was pleased with Kaufmann coming over the air. I don't doubt that he was excellent onstage. Vogt can sound boyish, but I can't imagine him assuming the kingship in Grail country. Recent productions, of course, try to make a mockery of Wagner's intentions; in at least one production the innocent fool ends as clueless as he started, making Mozart's Tamino look sophisticated. Vogt's choirboy voice might fit in perfectly there.