Feb. 20 -- A new CD/DVD release highlights the odd career of Max Lorenz, Hitler's favorite tenor. Though homosexually inclined and married to a Jew, Lorenz thrived in Nazi Germany.
Had Lorenz been a singer of Mozart, say, or Puccini, he and his wife would surely have ended up in Theresienstadt, the designated camp for the art elite.
But Lorenz specialized in the heroes of Wagner, especially Siegfried, whose lusty presence animates the last two operas of the "Ring" cycle. And he was one of the greatest, ever.
Oh, to have a tenor today like Lorenz, tall and almost slender, singing effortlessly and radiantly from underneath coiffed locks and sturdy helmet.
Our Wagner tenors often shout for hours before collapsing into heaving lumps. Last season, just for example, the Metropolitan Opera had to field a third tenor when the first Tristan conked out on opening night and his replacement seemed to die long before Isolde.
"Max Lorenz: Wagner's Mastersinger, Hitler's Siegfried" is a welcome combo set comprising a biographical DVD and a CD of highlights from a 1938 "Siegfried" performance in Buenos Aires, an interesting rediscovery (with rather poor audio). The appealing DVD includes archival footage, interviews, documents and a group of elderly singers who grow misty-eyed at his memory.
Aufwiedersehen!
He makes a vivid impression in a Bayreuth rehearsal of 1934 singing a lusty aufwiedersehen to his Brunnhilde, Frida Leider. What clarion tones! She, by the way, was soon banned from the opera stage because she refused to divorce her Jewish husband who fled to Switzerland. Germany had no shortage of Wagner sopranos and Hitler didn't miss her.
Lorenz first triumphed in Bayreuth in the fateful year of 1933, when the poky little burg also welcomed Germany's new chancellor and chief opera buff. Until 1940, when he started blowing up the real world, Hitler loved coming here to watch Wagner's proxies set the stage on fire in "Gotterdammerung."
It didn't hurt Lorenz that he also shone in Hitler's adored "Rienzi," an early Wagner epic about a medieval Roman rabble- rouser who resembled the Fuhrer.
Yet the tenor's career nearly collapsed in 1937 when he was found in flagrante and Hitler, who had butchered a lot of homosexual pals in the Rohm purge, thought he might have to jail him for cavorting with a guy. Then he thought of all those long songs without Max and made the criminal proceedings disappear.
Abomination
Despite such dangerous escapades, Lorenz loved his wife, Lotte, and refused to abandon her, thereby enraging Goebbels, the propaganda minister, for whom mixed couples were a particular abomination. He engineered to have Lotte and her mother dragged off one morning in 1943 by the Gestapo (even with Germany doing poorly in the war, he kept to his priorities).
In the hysterical machinations that ensued, both were quickly saved by the intercession of Hermann Goering, another opera nut who presided over the Berlin Staatsoper and, in his spare time, the air force. He signed a long official letter affirming Hitler's protection of tenor, wife and mother-in-law. We get a glimpse of the document during the program, along with photos and film snippets of Winifred Wagner, the chatelaine of Bayreuth and Hitler adorant.
Born in 1901 to a butcher, Lorenz continued to sing until 15 years before his death in 1975. He comes off as an openhearted, kind enthusiast, both very dapper and genuine. If he ever reflected on what it was like to sing for evil incarnate, we do not hear about it in this show.
YouTube
"Wagner's Mastersinger, Hitler's Siegfried" is produced by Paul Smaczny and Frank Gerdes for Medici Arts. Speakers include wry star baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and writer Klaus Geitel, who helped Lorenz get on his horse as Rienzi when he was a young super at the Berlin Staatsoper.
In his own memoir, Geitel describes seeing the tenor tremble one night waiting for his entrance. He had just learned that the immensely popular movie star Joachim Gottschalk and his Jewish wife had sedated their son and killed themselves just before the Gestapo arrived to take her and the boy to Theresienstadt.
YouTube has a preview of the set along with several snippets from "Tristan und Isolde."