Audio, Etc. (Nov. 1973)

By Edward Tatnall Canby

THERE IS NO opera house effect more wearing upon the psyche than what I like to call the Wagnerian hush. It comes somewhere in the middle of one of those vast five-hour music dramas and you must be there to appreciate it. After hours of massed togetherness in the dark, crowded house, there comes a long decrescendo. The music goes down and down, until time and sound are suspended and only a thread of continuity, a few faint notes, breaks into the long, pregnant pauses. Nobody breathes. It's awful. Don't think that John Cage discovered the musical silence.

Of course, these moments are but the distant prelude to some vast sonic climax, a veritable Krakatoa of music, which will arrive, say, an hour and a half later. It's all calculated--a stupendous dynamic range--and Wagner spreads it out over unthinkable lengths.

He knows exactly where he is going, though. And you will go with him whether you want to or no. Many an opera fan, overwhelmed, goes soundly asleep. It's an easy way out--you might think. Not a bit. Hours later, you wake up with a violent start, your hair absolutely on end. You've heard every note and you're just in time to be flattened by the monster climax. Asleep or awake, you can't resist, and no use trying. That is, in the opera house.

On records, Wagner is a problem. Just try the Wagnerian hush in your living room. Down goes the volume, lower and lower, right on schedule, say, the beginning of side 7. Slower and slower. Long pauses. Churn, churn, churn! That's your turntable, relentlessly pulsing its 33 1/3. Ssssr, ssssr. Tiny residue of tape hiss after Dolby, brutally exposed. Then BEEP! BLAAST! Your neighbor cuts in with his auto horn. It's in the wrong key. A roaring crescendo of drums? Nope, just a hopped up Pontiac out on the street. Faint shrieks of agony--Brünnhilde immolated? The kids outdoors, playing gangster. Kerplunk. The refrig went off. Throb, throb. The air conditioner or, maybe, the furnace, according to season. And at this moment, of course, the phone rings.

Meanwhile, back in the opera, a French horn gives a faint burp, once ... twice. Or was that a distant diesel locomotive? Not easy to tell. Poor Wagner! A thousand petty distractions, all reeking of now, hopelessly entangle his calculated silences in the rapid-fire sounds of our own age. A wholly different time sense. It's a problem common to much classical recording but never more dramatic-or non-dramatic-than in Wagner, whose musical pace is that of the eons, glacier-like, inevitable, and who demands and gets total, attention. Again, in the opera house. Where else? That was all he knew.

So why do we have whole albums of Wagner on LP? Pure human cussedness. And imagination. If we really want to, we can wrench ourselves back into that atmosphere and hear the slow silences, in spite of interference. And our recording engineers, too, can do vital things to aid the musical translation we must have in order to remove Wagner from opera house to living room. That's recording technique. Its specialty is not being literal.

With all this as background, you will marvel with me at the bravado of Philips. This big Dutch record company has been recording whole Wagner operas, one after the other, right in the opera house at live performances.

Crazy. We need every bit of flexibility that modern recording technique can devise if we are to make a workable Wagner translation and to do such an enormous, risky, expensive job other than via the recording session would seem corporate suicide. In most other Wagner recordings of recent times, the live productions are followed by separate sessions for the recording. In Wagner, these enterprises are almost beyond belief. The entire production, refashioned for the recorded result, is laid out in some vast hall, the artists spread everywhere, on the floor, in the balconies, backstage, surrounded by seas of cable, hundreds of pieces of equipment; alternative takes are taken ad infinitum, until each segment is precisely right. The continuity is as likely to start with the final scene and end with the overture as the other way around. A vast and complex ingenuity (and more and more like film production), all in the service of musical translation. From the live opera to the recorded opera! Every bit is justified, as we hear the Wagnerian drama unfold at home in a situation totally inconceivable to Wagner himself.

I am trying valiantly, you see, to tip you off on the momentousness of Philips' achievement in taking down Wagner whole and live from the stage performance--and making it work, right in the original Bayreuth opera house that Wagner himself built a century ago for his own music. Well, you mutter again, isn't that a literal hi-fi reproduction, if ever there was one? The horse's mouth! Nope. It is still a translation. Philips is successful because they take this for granted, even though the live and the recorded versions are the very same performance.

What Philips has in mind is to capture as much as possible of the human quality of a living performance, before an audience on a stage, while providing those necessary adjustments, via recording technique, which make the translation acceptable in living room terms. That's a tall order, though they had a lot going for them in the special circumstances of the Bayreuth Festival.

So many things can go wrong in a live recording. No corrections-a mistake is a mistake-unthinkable in a recording that is to be heard again and again.

A limited possibility for joining parts of live performances-they seldom match. The mood is different. The weather changes, and the humidity.

Even the pitch. So do stage movements, and hence mic balance. Singers sing louder one night than on another.

The embattled engineers can't do a thing; they must take what comes. A ghastly risk.

Miraculously, little of all this shows up in Philips' astonishingly smooth and natural productions. Mistakes? Virtually none. Very few of those minor mishaps, that usually abound in live recordings. One must assume that these seasoned productions were done over and over again and honed to razor precision. Bayreuth runs a heavy schedule and is the mother-house for the entire living Wagner tradition. Its singers, top pros, are unlikely to fall into states of nerves in the face of a "simulcast" for the live audience out in front and for posterity via the mics.

The conductor of the new "Ring" series, all twenty-odd hours of it, is Karl Böhm, another veteran pro who keeps things in hand down to the last detail. One might-if one were Philips--take a risk on these people. One did.

What of the effect of the live audience? Musically, it should enhance the impact of the singers. The excitement of such a performance is a two-way thing, a vibrant emotional circuit between performers and around audience. That is what we miss in many dramatic recordings done without an audience. Can't be helped, and we do get fine music even so. But-if we could translate the audience feel, without the audience disadvantage (most of them are noisy), it would he fine.

Can we? Too often an exciting live performance makes an anticlimactic recording, even when the audience behaves itself acoustically. Tense, hysterical, full of nerves, uneven, and often unbelievably replete with glaring mistakes, wholly unnoticed in the glory of the actual occasion. When you chop off half the circuit and toss the result, like a leg off the musical body, out into the living room, you are changing the entire musical substance--it is no longer the same performance.

A recorded live performance, then … must be extraordinarily well controlled ... perhaps even to the point of non-incandescence. The Philips Wagner is precisely that. Yes, one does sense the audience, indirectly, though it remains astonishingly silent. But the singers have that audience before them, and the strength and purpose can be heard in the music, ever so clearly. But there are no nerves-almost none. All is discipline, a maximum energy transfer into pure musical expression.

Whether these performances "took off” in the actual opera house. I could not say. I wasn't there. That is another matter altogether--a different performance, if you will.

If the audience is supernaturally quiet, what of the opera staging and the acoustics, as we hear them? I'll have to take my hat off to Philips' seasoned wisdom in this area. They understand, even the Wagnerian hush.

They make a recording that works as a recording, a true translation of the musical intent. It isn't at all what you hear from the audience.

What Philips does is, of course, to put us on the stage itself, not in the audience. So that we perceive everything in carefully exaggerated close-up impact, to carry us through in the tough living-room situation. The singers are no more than a dozen feet away, right before us. Every note, in the dry, warm acoustics of the house itself, is ultra-clear, every syllable precise.

The big orchestra is spread out behind the singers, not in front and below, as it is heard by the audience, but in a wide stereo spread-much wider, again, than the spread heard from that fabled "best seat in the house." The acoustics are indeed dry, as in most proper opera houses. But not lifeless. Far from it. I have seldom heard strings so realistically projected in recording. Topnotch mic placement.

I will admit that there are some debits. All is well when the gods and heroes and heroines are doing their long tête-á-têtes, musical conversations person to person. Or when one of them launches into a half hour synopsis of previous events. (The "Ring" cycle is well known for its endless catching up on what has happened before, and before that.) Here, the close-up vividness of the singing makes it easy to follow the dramatic sense, especially with the aid of the complete text and translation. You begin to understand that these long passages aren't really so bad. One up on most opera goers! They have to guess, if their German isn't so good.

But Wagner's characters are curiously contradictory, half god, half man, at one moment fallible and human, at another suddenly rearing forth as symbolic figures of timeless dimension.

When this happens, it is not comfortable, nor right, to be so close. Bad to feel the angry Wotan's every breath, hear his teeth click. Wagner meant these great people to stand off at a distance in a stage world of their own and that is how they are heard in the opera house.

Luckily, the Wagner orchestra rescues us. Always the direct protagonist of the voice, it rushes in to cover the too-closeness whenever the great climaxes come along. Philips knows better than to play it down in the balance.

The orchestral stereo is fully enveloping and beautifully projected. So the climaxes are climactic, and you'll love 'em.

If I were to make hours of AB tests, I think I'd favor by a small hair the Philips competition, made by the other system. Notably the Von Karajan recordings for Angel and Deutsche Grammophon. They project a smoother, more even dramatic continuity.

Greater control of the ultimate sound is the answer-via the specially set up recording session. (And what a paradox, that these recordings are put together in bits and pieces!) Von Karajan himself has a lot to do with it, an expertly dramatic conductor and a man who knows recording and respects it.

The Philips live-recorded Wagner is inevitably a bit uneven. Remarkable that it is not worse. At times we seem to lose contact with that stage production and the music drags. (But was the live audience impatient? An interesting question.) I do love the warm, dry Philips sound, Wagner's own acoustic. But, on records, I found Von Karajan's big "concert hall liveness" thrilling, even though like no opera house in existence. Why should it be? This is a recording.

So take your choice. But don't ever think that a live recording is a literal reproduction of any original. Not even a simultaneous and identical one. It is still a recording, for better or worse, and that's how it sinks or swims.

(Audio magazine, Nov. 1973; Edward Tatnall Canby)

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