Blick zurück – „Das Rheingold“ 1914 - Deutsche Oper Berlin
Looking back – Das Rheingold 1914
The 30-year copyright period for Richard Wagner’s works lapsed in 1914, whereupon the Deutsches Opernhaus organised a Wagner marathon: starting with PARSIFAL on New Year’s Day, a total of six (!) Wagner premiers were held until January 1915 – a grandiose tour de force in itself, especially just before and during the first wartime play season.
DAS RHEINGOLD, under the direction of conductor Ignatz Waghalter, premiered on 26 March (just one month after DIE MEISTERSINGER). The scene photo shows the final scene of the drama, right before the Gods pass into Valhalla – and if you look closely, you can see the outlines of the castle in the top left.
“Never have I see the Rheingold shine like it did at the Deutsches Opernhaus” – the source of this quote is no less than legendary critic and founding president of the Association for New Music, Adolf Weißmann, after attending the RHEINGOLD premiere. The opera house, still young at the time, hoped to present quantity as well as quality in its marathon of six Wagner premieres in just over one year.
Director Georg Hartmann also directed the performances, while Georg Hartwig was in charge of the set design, which took full advantage of the space below the striking domes of the state-of-the-art stage: “The skyline of cupolas is the most beautiful. You can freely walk around and chat down below. The castle is a phantom,” says Weißmann.
A review published the next morning in the Vossische Zeitung was less impressed with the performance and, interestingly, says that this rendition staged by Stefan Herheim is not the first time that Loki has been used to portray the character of Mephisto at the Deutsche Oper Berlin:
Musically, the performances are contested among the mainstays in the ensemble – for example, under the direction of the first conductor Waghalter, the house prima donna Hertha Stolzenberg sings the role of the river nymph Woglinde. She can be heard here as Mimì in Giacomo Puccini’s LA BOHÈME in this recording from 1919:
The “miraculous voice” (Weißmann) of Carl Braun, a star in Bayreuth and eventual National Socialism sympathiser, who sang the role of Wotan, is also immortalised in several recordings. One of these is an extract from RHEINGOLD from the year it premiered at the Deutsches Opernhaus – however, the true force of his voice, which “at times sounds like Wotan himself” (Weißmann) does not fully come across, which is probably due to the recording technology.
Many of the singers also appeared on the big screen during the silent film era. Yet they also often performed in Tonbilder, “sound-pictures”, which involved playing a film strip parallel to a record with the sound recordings from the film, or musical films accompanied by live orchestras and singers at the cinema. Elisabeth Böhm van Endert, who sang Freia in 1914, played Elsa in Felix Dahn’s Lohengrin in 1915/16. Because this film is unfortunately not available on the Internet, here is a Tonbild from the 1908 performance of Lohengrin with a recording of Emmy Destinn and Ernst Kraus:
