Bruce Charlton's Notions

Following yesterday's musical offering, here is Fritz Wunderlich again; in the deservedly famous 'Handel's Largo' aria


What makes Wunderlich's a supreme voice for me is the combination of thrilling masculine tone and strength, with an underlying pathos, an earnest quality. This was, no doubt, partly due to his youth - he died at only 35 years old (due to an accident - falling down stairs), which is barely reaching maturity for a male singer.

Technically, Wunderlich was noted for his breath control, giving him the ability to sing long phrases and (this is much more difficult than might be imagined) to increase or decrease volume while holding a high note - without either going-off that note (losing intonation) or breaking the continuity of vibrato.

This is shown to great effect in the notoriously tricky Il Mio Tesoro from Mozart's Don Giovanni, sung live. Listen for the long, single breath passages with rapid runs up and down the scale.

This aria demonstrates the 'heroic' quality of Wunderlich's voice - which is unusual in this type of lyric tenor.


Being a live performance; Wunderlich snatches very quick breath in the middle of the very longest passage, which enables him to slow down and expand the last part of it.

Below is have a studio recording of the same aria, sung in German translation, in which he sings the phrase right through with no trouble at all - but this is usually not possible in live performance where the singer is often tired by the stage movements and acting.

If you are impatient to hear it, jump straight to 1:45. It makes me feel a bit faint just listening...

Mozart is widely known as one of the greatest of composers, yet there is a sense in which his genius is the most elusive and delicate. His greatest compositions hover very close to the trite and banal - and for much of the 19th century he was regarded as a tuneful, decorative but essentially 'light' composer - rather as moderns might regard Telemann, JC or CPE Bach (sons of JS) or Mendelssohn. 

It was due to the work of several critical champions such as GB Shaw and Alfred (not Albert) Einstein, and the work of some great conductors, that people began to see the lucid depths of Mozart - and for the late 20th century this was nailed-into-place by Peter Schaffer's Amadeus play and movie, which captured exactly this special quality (albeit marred by excessive plot emphasis on the sub-par and not-wholly-Mozartian Requiem). 

Anyway... all this is a prelude to the above tenor aria from Mozart's singspiel opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail (aka 'Seraglio') - The Escape from the Harem. 

To appreciate this requires no knowledge of the opera, nor even of the words being sung - indeed, it is a ludicrously long (over six minutes!) and elaborate solo aria for a comic opera, with a complex orchestral introduction - and is therefore nearly always omitted or severely truncated in performance - and indeed in many recordings. 

I think it best to regard "Ich baue ganz... (IBG)" as a concert aria - a miniature and self-sufficient solo work of pure music.

IBG is also omitted sometimes, because it is extremely difficult to sing: impossible for most tenors. And indeed so various are its demands on tone, smoothness, agility, range and - especially - breath capacity and control; that no tenor can fulfil all of them to the highest degree.  

Tone is especially important for Mozart tenors, as the major roles (and their music) have a special quality of youthful earnestness and purity that should be innate in a singer's vocal quality. 

Fritz Wunderlich is regarded as one of the truly great tenors of the twentieth century, and this reputation is rooted in the tonal quality of his voice. Of course not everybody will like it - certainly it is very different from the most popular of great Italian or Spanish tenors (and their South American descendants) - but most agree it is the best suited to Mozart. 

But Wunderlich had other qualities as a singer. This aria shows the fluidity of his vocal production, the way his tone continued-between the words, as if the words were being shaped-from a continuous production of lovely sound. This is unusual, and often not even sought-after, among the German tradition of operatic tenors. 

Then again his breath control was superb. This is not just a matter of being able to sing long phrases, but of maintaining the quality and control of tone throughout, without diminishment. 

His agility was remarkable for someone with such a size of voice; his voice was middle-sized (i.e. middling loud) among tenors; but most tenors who are more fully able to enunciate the florid runs and arpeggios of the middle section of this aria (i.e. separating the notes*) have small/ quiet voices, and without the heroic 'ringing' tone of Wunderlich. 

As for the aria IBG itself - well it is a superb example of Mozart at his very best, and doing something only he could do. It is light and easy to enjoy, but has such a glorious sense of spirit and joy in its phrases and touches of orchestration as to reach the sublime. 

Pay particular attention to the use of woodwinds in the orchestration, and supporting the voice. Woodwind is regarded as a specialty of Mozart's orchestral work - and here you can see just why. 

*Richard Conrad was one of these: listen from 13:55. Note particularly the astonishing, genuine trill; so rare an accomplishment among tenors. 

Not much need be said but that this is a perfect performance of a perfect gem of the operetta repertoire - once a well-known concert piece, but now I suspect not.

The tenor is perhaps my favourite ever singer - Fritz Wunderlich (I first heard this on a compilation album of his). His earnest, ringing tone, and the way his voice opens-out as a musical phrase rises, brings tears to my eyes.

Anneliese Rothenberger was a wonderful lyric soprano. The dark-voiced bass, Gottlob Frick, was best known for playing giants in Wagner's Ring; here supplying a very low bottom note in the final chord (C-sharp or D perhaps - I don't have a score).

It is also amusing how German singers of this era (1961) really 'rasp'-out the consonants in 'nacht'! Almost a national pride at work, I fancy. And so different from the Italian operatic tradition, where the consonants are so elided that it sometimes sounds as if there are only vowels. 

In the 1970s James Galway became the first classical flautist ever to reach mass public consciousness in the UK - to be invited onto chat shows, to have his own TV programme and concerts based around him. He was a household name.

At first I wondered whether this was mostly due to his engaging personality and his man-of-the-people Ulster accent; but as I explored his performances I realized that it was based on the fact that he really was the best flute player of the era - and by some considerable margin.

By 'best' I mean quite simply that he made by far the richest and fullest sound of any flute player (ever?), and also that his phrasing was extremely fluid and lyrical - and these are the qualities most valued by the general, music loving public at large (leaving aside the more various views of expert critics).

In other words, people like Galway for the same reason they like a great singer such as Wunderlich, Sutherland or Pavarotti - because they make the loveliest sound and also 'phrase' the music in a way that brings-out its beauty above all else. So by 'great' I mean 'middlebrow great' in the same way that Austen, Dickens and Frost are regarded as great, and not in the way that Joseph Conrad, Henry James or TS Eliot are regarded as great.

Anyway, if you haven't yet listened to Galway, then perhaps you should. Here he is playing JS Bach 'chamber music' - the Trio Sonatas. Although great favourites of mine, these pieces can seem quite dry and intellectual, the way most performers play them - but not Galway/ Chung!

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I was watching Tom Hiddleston playing Loki in a not-particularly-good movie called Thor: The Dark World, and this confirmed to me that he really is an actor of genius; by which I mean something quite specific. He is incalculable in his acting, and produces flashes of the uncanny - surprises which give an unpredicted jolt of rightness.

It is interesting, and unusual, that Hiddleston is presumably extremely intelligent (he apparently achieved a 'double first' degree in Classics at Cambridge) - and highly intelligent actors (a somewhat rare breed) often lack this special instinctive quality - which is not something than can be achieved deliberately, or by planning.

Once I have seen this from an actor; then even when I see it only in one performance, my genius rating of them is permanent; no matter what else they do.

(Or fail to do - after all any actor depends on the script, director, editor and many others - any of whom can sabotage his performance. This seemed to me to happen to Hiddleston when he played Henry V in the recent BBC Shakespeare series, where the direction was appalling.)

Probably only a minority of the 'great' and successful actors have this special touch of genius (although of course such a negative judgment is contingent - it may simply be that one has not observed the performance when this happened). But I have certainly seen it is the likes of Robert De Niro, John Hurt and Alan Rickman; as well as lesser known actors such as Kenneth Cranham, Bob Peck, Alan David, Fiona Shaw, Laurence Fox (off the top of my head).

Genius has nothing much to do with good looks (although Hiddleston happens to be good looking), or voice (the actors with the nicest voices are - on the whole - among the worst of actors; since they have been chosen for the vocal quality rather than the acting). Anyway, Hiddleston is one of those rare actors that I find riveting - because I never know when he might suddenly produce one of those 'moments' out of nowhere.

And, for me, it is these rare moments that define acting as an art, and indeed make it potentially one of the primary creative arts at the same level as great opera singing from (say) Joan Sutherland or Fritz Wunderlich, or great musicianship from (say) Glenn Gould or Julian Bream.

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I have just been standing outside to look at the moon and stars as the dawn comes up, and to listen to the pre-dawn chorus - which was (as I have heard before) dominated by the song of a male blackbird situated (apparently, it was too dark to be precise) near the top of an ash tree in a nearby garden.

The song of a blackbird is ridiculously beautiful - both in its tone, and the endless variety of its inventions and combinations; yet these birds are extremely common in Britain - even in the middle of cities (which is where I live - well, only about a mile from the middle).

All blackbirds are good singers, but blackbirds have their Pavarottis, James Bowmans, Bjorlings, Rogers Covey Crumps, Stuart Burrows and Luigi Alvas... This blackbird was an exceptional singer even among his kind - a German lyric tenor with clarity and power and ardency - a Fritz Wunderlich.

Twice a day, at the extremes of the day, all over the country, these common little birds are pouring-out their unsurpassed song for those with ears to hear.

I have always been affected by them - and by the gratuitousness of this beauty of their song. But as an atheist I thought it poignant and a little pitiful that I should be so moved by an evolved mating display indifferent to myself; now, as a Christian, the intrinsic beauty is enhanced by the conviction that there is meaning behind it all, albeit barely glimpsed: the blackbird, the moon and the stars.

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