Hans Knappertsbusch

It is unlikely that even the most ludicrously ultramontane reading of Pastor aeternus would lead anyone to the conclusion that the infallibility of the Roman Pontiff extends to matters of musical taste. The debate, thankfully, is unnecessary in relation to the tastes of the present Holy Father. Despite the absurd depiction in the dreadful Two Popes of a Beatles-loving, down-to-earth Pope Francis contrasted with a cerebral, Schubert-loving Pope Benedict, the reality appears to be quite the opposite. In his now famous interview with Father Antonio Spadaro, S.J. in September 2013, published in English in America, Francis briefly but very specifically addressed his musical preferences and revealed himself as a man of exquisite taste. He praised Clara Haskil, the great Romanian pianist, and her Mozart recordings and spoke of his affection for the Bach Passions. But perhaps the Pope’s most interesting comments related to Beethoven and Wagner. The Pope expressed his admiration for the “Promethean” Beethoven performances by Wilhelm Furtwängler, a legendary German conductor with a reputation unfortunately marred by his relationship with the Nazi regime. The Pope also identified two particular recordings of operas, one of which is a somewhat chaotic but thrilling account of Wagner’s Ring Cycle recorded by Furtwängler at Milan’s La Scala theater in 1950. The second recording was Wagner’s Parsifal, recorded in 1962 at the Bayreuth Festival.

That recording, perhaps the greatest ever made at the annual festival dedicated to Wagner’s music dramas, glows from start to finish with a spiritual intensity that is unmatched in any other recording of Wagner’s last masterpiece, the work he (with typical pomposity) called his “stage consecration festival play.” The voices alone would be enough to make many Wagnerians swoon. Jess Thomas is a stentorian but still poetic and beautiful Parsifal. Irene Dalis is a hysterical Kundry. George London is an Amfortas so tortured that it would be unlistenable were it not for that burnished golden tone. Above all, Hans Hotter, arguably the greatest male vocalist of the twentieth century, makes Gurnemanz’s interminable monologues (which can be coma-inducing in some hands) teem with color and depth. But the beating heart of the performance, the source of the warmth and glow that reflect in sound the shining contents of the grail, is Hans Knappertsbusch.

“Kna,” as the great conductor was affectionately known, was unique not only in his musical gifts. In an obituary, the critic Karl Schumann described him as “standing out like a warrior in a foreign century,” and indeed, he was a relic of the nineteenth century. His appearance was what one might imagine a great patrician of ancient Rome to look like. Look, for example, at the original cover of his recording of Brahms’s Overtures and Haydn’s Variations from 1958, where he is depicted in bust form, with the lock of hair that perennially rested on his right forehead lovingly carved into stone. He was tall and statuesque. Once described by Birgit Nilsson, the great Wagnerian soprano, as “over six feet of genius in suspenders,” he carried himself like the Commendatore in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, looking ready to drag the rakish Don to Hell. He was not a showman on the podium and not what Sir Adrian Boult would call “one of the sweaty ones.” In his element in the hidden pit of Bayreuth, he had a thinly disguised contempt for audiences (a recording of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg from Munich has him starting the overture before he has even arrived at the podium and the audience still applauding his appearance).

He was conservative in his politics, nostalgic for the days of Bismarck and the German Reich of his youth in the closing years of the nineteenth century. It was precisely this conservatism that left him bewildered by the phenomenon of Nazism. He had contempt for the party and, although he was already renowned as one of Germany’s leading Wagner conductors, he did not (unlike Furtwängler) conduct at the Bayreuth Festival during the dark days of the thirties and forties—the era of “Hitler’s Bayreuth.” At the time, the festival was run by Winifred Wagner, the composer’s Englishborn daughter-in-law, whose eyes would still light up decades later at the mention of the man she so sickeningly called “U.S.A.” (Unser seliger Adolf—our blessed Adolf). It appears that Kna’s contempt for the Nazis was reciprocated, with Hitler reportedly calling him a “mere band-master,” and he lost his position as General Music Director of the Munich opera in 1936. His career was not, however, untarnished by association with the Nazis. He did not, like other conductors such as Fritz Busch and Erich Kleiber or the great soprano Frida Leider, leave Germany and Austria at the time and was embroiled in a controversy when Thomas Mann criticized Kna’s beloved Wagner. Little mention, however, is made of a very good reason for Kna’s decision to stay in Germany. In 1934, his beloved daughter Anita fell ill and ultimately died in 1938. The conductor was left inconsolable and, for a considerable time, unable to make music. Years later, the soprano Astrid Varnay, upon saying that she had been born in 1918, saw a great shadow of sadness fall on Kna’s face as he realized that Anita would have been the same age. Wolfgang Wagner, the composer’s grandson, noting that Kna kept a “shrine” to Anita in his apartment, felt that this terrible loss was the source of the emotional shell that seemed to surround the conductor and his rather taciturn grumpiness.

Kna’s traditionalism made him an unlikely choice to partner with the enfant terrible Wieland Wagner in the resurrection of Bayreuth in 1951. With Winifred safely confined to her quarters in the house called “Wahnfried,” where, wreathed in clouds of cigarette smoke, she would bitterly decry her exclusion from the festival and reminisce wistfully about “U.S.A.,” her son Wieland was free to detoxify the festival. He did this by revolutionizing the staging of his grandfather’s music dramas, replacing the rather cluttered sets of the thirties with minimalist bare scenery and atmospheric lighting. Kna, set to open the festival with his unrivaled interpretation of Parsifal, was aghast. Instead of the gorgeously beautiful set inspired by the interior of the cathedral in Siena, Wieland created a bare disc and, horror of horrors, there was no dove descending from on high in the final moments. Kna threatened to walk out if the stuffed bird did not make an appearance and was duly treated to a rare compromise from Wieland. Wieland had the dove dangled at the appropriate point but in a place where only Kna would be able to see it as he conducted the transcendent final bars of the opera. When Kna’s wife pointed out to her triumphant husband that she had not seen the puppet, he snapped at her that “you dizzy women do not see anything anyway.” However, Kna’s increasing rage at what he saw as the desecration of the master’s works led him to leave the festival, dove or no dove, in 1953 (when he was replaced by the excellent Clemens Krauss). Only the diplomatic skills of the younger and less volatile Wagner brother, Wolfgang, coaxed the great man back.

Kna’s stubborn conservatism is perhaps most frustrating in his bizarre choice to continue using the discredited versions of Bruckner symphonies prepared by the Schalk brothers and Ferdinand Löwe, a trio of Viennese vandals, who savagely re-orchestrated, cut, and otherwise mangled Bruckner symphonies to make them sound more acceptable to the obviously tasteless Viennese audiences of the time. Long after the work of Robert Haas and Leopold Nowak unveiled Bruckner’s authentic scores, Kna refused to depart from the “traditional” versions. However, if you put the versions question out of your mind (always a struggle for Brucknerians, who tend to be fanatical on this point!), Kna’s performances can be truly great. Listen, for example, to the absolutely thrilling coda of the Fifth Symphony. Despite the Schalks’ horrendous reorchestration (vulgar cymbal clashes galore, the incessant tinkling of a triangle, and an offstage brass band!), there is simply no performance of this symphony where one gets the same sense of the Heavens opening, as Bruckner surely intended.

What was the source of this extraordinary transcendence? The answer may be the spontaneity that was the inevitable result of Kna’s notorious detestation of rehearsal. He once told the Vienna Philharmonic that “I know the score and you know it, see you tonight.” This did not translate into a tolerance for mistakes, as Birgit Nilsson found out in a Munich performance of Salome where Kna screamed at her from the pit and called her, as she tactfully put it, “a word beginning with ‘a’ and ending in ‘hole’.” Performances could vary widely, particularly in tempo. Note, for example, the significantly slower speed of Kna’s Parsifal of 1951 against the lighter, faster version of 1962. They could also vary in terms of the theatricality and excitement of the performance. Kna’s absolutely volcanic 1951 Bayreuth Götterdämmerung is the most thrilling account of that work on disc, but his later versions of 1957 and 1958 are rather dull in comparison. He was famous for his slow tempi (listen, for an amusing example, to his soporific account of the duet about “nameless joy” in his studio recording of Fidelio, which sounds like a funeral dirge) but his blistering account of Tristan und Isolde from Munich in 1950 is taken at such speed it often threatens and, at a few points, does descend into chaotic noise. The overture in his studio account of Die Meistersinger from Vienna has none of the flabbiness that can often afflict it in less skilled hands. It fizzes with electricity and the energy of a city beginning to burst with life again following a dark period, a period in which evil men stole this great opera full of the joy of life and put it at the service of a culture of death. That recording also reveals one of Kna’s greatest gifts: getting the very best out of his singers. A cast of truly wonderful Vienna State Opera stars are supported flawlessly and give performances of exceptional beauty and charm.

Though slow tempi invariably come to mind at the mention of Kna, his great skill was not directly related to the tempi he used but rather to his ability to shape the ebb and flow of the musical line. This is particularly obvious in his unmatched ability to build climaxes. Astrid Varnay said of a Kna climax that “he would start a crescendo while seated at the podium, and then, when you thought he had come to crest of the musical wave, he would gradually rise to his full height, which was considerable, and the crescendo would continue even further until you found yourself going beyond what you thought were the boundaries of your own capability.” Kna’s greatest genius, however, revealed so often in the pit at Bayreuth, is something undefinable, but we might say it is his ability to grasp and reflect the spirit and the atmosphere of the works he loved, whether it is the gates of Heaven opening at the coda of the Bruckner Fifth or the warm glow, what the Germans would call “gemütlichkeit,” of the quieter passages of Die Meistersinger. It shines, above all, in every bar of Parsifal, the work which he “owned” at Bayreuth from 1951 to 1964 and which he continues to own in the hearts of every Wagnerian.

It is impossible to explain the magic of these performances, the magic that continues to draw fans such as Pope Francis to keep coming back to them, but perhaps it comes from the times that Kna lived through. In the third act of Parsifal, Gurnemanz invites the sinful Kundry, who laughed in the face of Christ on the Via Dolorosa, to awake to the spring. Perhaps Kna saw his own role as making the same invitation to his beloved Germany. Hans Hotter, the great bass-baritone, noted that Kna would always have tears in his eyes as he would conduct the famous Good Friday Spell in this act. In this ravishingly beautiful music, perhaps Kna understood, like Parsifal, the value of purifying suffering, his own suffering at the loss of Anita, the suffering of Germany, but above all that the recognition that the suffering gives meaning to our joys. This music and the conductor shaping it invite us to acknowledge the pain, darkness, and death but to rejoice in a world that continually begins again, blessed with the gift of life. With the redeemed Kundry, we hear and understand, “Your tears too are a dew of blessing, you weep, but look, the meadows laugh.”