Thielemann is on verge of a Bayreuth record
mainPeople who keep count of such things have reported that Lohengrin will be Christian Thielemann’s tenth opera at Bayreuth.
The only other conductor who ever managed a full hand of Wagner operas at Bayreuth died in 1911.
His name?
Mottl
Barenboim could have done it too, but never went back to conduct Dutchman.
Karl Muck?
Oops. Missed the died in 1911 part. So of course it has to be Felix Mottl.
Hermann Levi?
Go Christian!! Do do that voodoo that you do so well.
Felix Mottl (1856-1911)
Not much of a quiz. If you right-click the photo, it says Mottl
Mottl suffered a heart attack in 1911 while conducting his 100th performance of Tristan
#Familysecrets Perhaps my greatgreatgranddaddy?
🙂
Whilst sorting my vast music collection recently I wondered if I ever happened to be ship wrecked on a desert island with chest of CDs, which ones would be treasured and which ones would not be worth salvaging from the waves. As I have only a few Karajan, they would not be much of a loss. They all seem rather superficial with that tacky Mantovani gloss of his, (everything sounding the same from Albinoni to Zelenka) when compared to say Furtwangler, Kleiber, Gunter Wand , Rudi Kempe and dear old Sir John Barbirolli who once said amusingly “ Modern music is three farts and a raspberry orchestrated”
I recall what Sir Isaiah Berlin said after attending two concerts Karajan gave with the VPO at the Salzburg Festival in 1948.
“Karajan seems to conceive music as a series of self-contained episodes and these he articulates one by one with a clarity of detail and a strictly calculated imperious organization of tempi and dynamics which moves with the remorseless accuracy of a Stuka dive-bomber intent upon its prey”
I must say that there certainly is something of the dive bomber about Karajan, in contrast, Sir John Barbirolli’s Halle Rolls Royce Merlin V 12 sounds miles better even if he has no fuel injection.
Once I heard about the compulsory wig order Karajan gave to the BPO when filming himself pretending to conduct it confirmed what I suspected all along.