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Reliving one of my seminal operatic experiences - over 44 years later!

Posted by Chris from Lafayette (A) on November 23, 2020 at 13:59:04

I think I've posted about this before. In October 1976, when I was a graduate student, I was accompanying a singer at her lesson when her voice teacher suddenly got a phone call. When he finished the call, he told us that he had tickets to attend the San Francisco Opera that night, but (because of the call) he was now unable to go. He then asked if either of us could use a pair of tickets for that night's performance - Strauss's "Die Frau ohne Schatten" with Karl Bohm conducting. The singer was unable to go, but my evening was free and I gratefully accepted his generous offer. It was already late in the afternoon, and I quickly called Ms. CfL (I say "Ms. CfL" although this was almost two years before we were married) to see if she could go too and she could. By the time we left Palo Alto, we had only about an hour and a half before the performance started, and, because of traffic, we got to our seats (dress circle IIRC, although maybe it was lower balcony), it was only about 2-3 minutes before performance time.

So. . . neither of us knew the plot of this opera, and we had no time to read the synopsis in the program. I'd heard The Emperor's "Falcon Aria" from an operatic recital album sung by James King (this of course was still in my LP days) - that's all I knew of the entire opera.

The first striking thing I remember was that when Karl Bohm first walked out to the pit podium, he got a good 1-2 minutes of applause (interspersed with some folks already shouting "Bravo!") before he had conducted a single note. Then the music began and we were off taking a walk on the wild side! We had no idea of what was going on in the plot, and yet. . . the whole thing was simply overwhelming! San Francisco Opera had just installed a new lighting system at the time, and the lighting effects were incredible, as was every other aspect of the performance!

At the time, Die Frau ohne Schatten was considered a kind of falling off in the level of Strauss's writing, especially here in the US. The opera was already somewhat popular in Germany and Austria, but not so much in the rest of the world. (And it hadn't been that long since RCA executive George Marek had brought out his notorious book, "Richard Strauss: Life of a Non-Hero", which contended that Strauss kind of lost his way, with his inspiration almost completely drying up, ever since the end of "Ariadne auf Naxos" - before a final recovery in "Four Last Songs"!) So the big surprise to me was how glorious the music was - truly formidable in the mastery of its compositional gestures! I couldn't believe how sublime it all was! (And remember - we didn't even know what was going on on stage - LOL!)

And then there was the performance itself, full of the celebrated names of that era, such as Leonie Rysanek as the Empress and Walter Berry as Barak. There was also a singer whom I was so impressed by at that time in the role of Barak's wife, Ursula Schroder-Feinen. I'd heard her in a Metropolitan Opera broadcast of Strauss's Elektra earlier on, and I thought she was magnificent. Strangely enough, although she was only in her early 40's, she retired just a couple of years after the Frau ohne Schatten performance we saw - I'd love to know the reason(s) for that.

In all, the performance was truly a soul-shaking experience, which I've recalled many times since then - and I thought that, as with so many live performances, I'd never hear it again.

Not so!

I recently was able to acquire a recording of the October 15th performance of this run, and was able to listen to it last night. (I believe that the performance we attended was on the following Tuesday, October 19th.) Of course, I've heard many live air checks and broadcasts from that time, and they're rarely that impressive from a sonic point of view. However, this particular recording, although it's plain old CD quality (16/44.1), came directly from an engineer at radio station KKHI (which was doing the SF Opera radio broadcasts at that time) - not only directly from the engineer, but directly from the original open reel tapes! Given the time of the recording, I could not believe how fantastic the SQ was! You could really hear how fearlessly and brilliantly both of the main women (Rysanek and Schroder-Feinen) attack their high notes! And there's even the capture of the location's space, with the voices never too close to the microphones.

I never thought I could relive this experience - this is too good to be true! Anyone else have a similar experience?

Edits: 11/23/20

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