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Richard Tauber
Note by Nigel Douglas |
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| Tauber is one of those artists who confuse people.
The most highly regarded Mozart tenor of his day; the matinee idol for whom Franz Lehár wrote his last five sentimental operettas; the conductor who took over from Sir Thomas Beecham for a tour with the London Philharmonic Orchestra; the composer who appeared countless times in the leading roles of his own works; the popular entertainer whose renderings of 'We'll Gather Lilacs' and 'Sleepy Lagoon' made purists' flesh creep; the Lieder singer whose classic recording of Schubert's 'Winterreise' cycle was completed in a morning with one coffee break - how do you find a neat pigeon-hole for a person like that?
Tauber's debut in this world was not an auspicious one. He was born in Linz on May 16th 1891, the illegitimate son of a forty-three year old soubrette, and a straight actor who was touring America at the time, and did not even know that a baby was in the offing. Both parents, however, played entirely honourable and responsible roles in Tauber's life. As a child he was inevitably shuffled from pillar to post, sometimes accompanying his mother on tour, at one time boarded out with a farmer for nearly a year, then taken under the wing of his father, and sent to schools in such varied places as Linz, Prague, Graz, Berlin, Salzburg and Wiesbaden. From an early age, though, Tauber showed an unwavering ambition to be a singer. As he idolised the Heldentenor Heinrich Hensel in the Wiesbaden Theatre, where his father now had a settled contract, Tauber was misguidedly determined to wrestle with Wagner, and various early attempts to impress influential 'cognoscenti' ended in disaster. He was entered by his father into the Conservatory at Frankfurt, where he prospered, studying piano, composition and conducting, and eventually he was accepted as a pupil by the distinguished singing teacher Carl Beines. Beines convinced Tauber that his was an essentially lyrical voice. By the time he was 21 Beines considered him ready to audition, and he was offered a contract by Wiesbaden. This was turned down, so that he could study further, and eventually, on March 2nd 1913, he made his operatic debut as Tamino in Die Zauberflöte in the Neues Stadttheater, Chemnitz, where his father was now installed as Intendant. Only a few days later Tauber followed his Tamino with the even more demanding role of Max in Der Freischütz, as a result of which he was offered a five year contract with the Court Opera, Dresden, and his career was well and truly launched. In Dresden Tauber began to reveal the quality which set him apart from his rivals, namely his quite extraordinary musicianship. Musicianship comes in many forms. Singers with an exceptional facility for reading music often have trouble with memorising, and singers who can read and memorise do not always possess the gift of bringing the music to life when they perform it. Tauber, however, had it all. He soon built up a reputation for being able to undertake any new role at 48 hours' notice. One famous instance of this was his first Bacchus in Ariadne auf Naxos in Berlin in 1915, conducted by Richard Strauss himself, who luckily had no idea of the circumstances. Another was Tauber's rescuing of the German premiere of Turandot in 1926, when he agreed to the assignment on a Wednesday evening, sang the performance on the Saturday, and was unanimously praised by the critics for his total musical and histrionic mastery of the role. Though Tauber, both through the circumstances of his troubled life (being partly Jewish he was hounded by the Nazis first out of Germany, then out of Austria), and through his own personal inclination, later became best known to the general public for his activities in lighter music, he never deserted the operatic stage, and the recordings on this CD give a comprehensive picture of his wide repertoire, during the period in which he graduated from Dresden to the State Operas of Berlin and Vienna. Apart from the highly individual quality of his timbre, Tauber possessed the priceless virtue of singing everything as if he meant it. By the time he made the two Mozart recordings he was regarded as having little competition in the roles of Tamino and, most especially, Don Ottavio. He made over 700 recordings, and on all of them, irrespective of the level of music involved, he is constantly using his own musical imagination, and constantly communicating with the listener - for which reason, I cannot ever remember hearing a Tauber record which I would call dull. The voice itself was what is known in German as 'eine kurze Stimme', 'a short voice', never really happy in 'forte' above a high A flat, but Tauber compensated for this with magically sustained 'piano' singing, which was to become something of a trademark of his, and which is superbly demonstrated in the Carmen Flower Song and the Hoffmann titles. The Verdi and Puccini tracks, though sung in German, reveal an undeniably 'bel canto' technique, the 'legato' immaculate and the breath control sometimes phenomenal, while numbers such as Lenski's aria give full play to that certain 'yearning' quality, with which Tauber makes such a deeply touching effect. |
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