Peter Mattei: Advent Calendar of Song: Day One
As I was composing my list of items for this calendar, it occurred to me at a late stage that I had no recordings from this century. True, there have been times when I've been a proponent of the "The only good singer's a dead singer" theory - as you will often hear during December with my choices of pre-1910 singers with lots of 78rpm whoosh and scratch around the voice - but actually I've adored a number of singers on both sides of the Atlantic since 2000. How to solve this?
On the morning of December 1, as I was thinking about including Wolfram's "Evenstar" aria from "Tannhäuser", and remembering how Wagner himself is said to have said it was ideally sung by Mattia Battistini, who recorded it c.1906, I was thinking of including that. But then I remembered how sublimely it was sung at the Met in 2015 by the Swedish baritone Peter Mattei, a large window in my mind opened. Here he is in an odd production by the choreographer Sasha Waltz but conducted by Daniel Barenboim: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8yYSMOt-0Y&vl=en-US
The words (German, then English) are:
O du, mein holder Abendstern
Richard Wagner
Wolfram:
O du, mein holder Abendstern,
wohl grüsst’ich immer dich so gern:
vom Herzen, das sie nie verriet,
grüsse sie, wenn sie vorbei dir zieht,
wenn sie entschwebt dem Tal der Erden,
ein sel’ger Engel dort zu werden!
O you, my fair evening star
English Translation © Richard Stokes
Wolfram:
O you, my fair evening star,
Gladly have I always greeted you:
Greet her, from the depths of this heart,
Which has never betrayed her,
Greet her, when she passes,
When she soars above this mortal vale
To become a holy angel there!
Translations by Richard Stokes, author of The Book of Lieder (Faber, 2005)
If you prefer a traditional production - and the Met's is sublime - here he is, but only singing one verse and (uncharacteristically) perhaps a fraction under the note here and there:
Mattei (who happens to be 6'4") strikes me as the most versatile singer alive. I never knew anyone could sing both Rossini's "Figaro" ("Barber of Seville") and Wagner's Amfortas ("Parsifal") in the same period of their career (more amazingly, in his early fifties!), let alone at so big a house at the Met, but he did: he sang Amfortas better than I've ever heard it. As here, he shows why Wagner said he wanted his roles sung in the Italian bel canto method: it's an object lesson in cantilena (cello-like) and apparently effortless diction and vocal placement. I've seen him be fabulous as Mozart's Don Giovanni, Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin, and more. After this "Tannhäser" aria, YouTube took me straight to his Bach "Matthew Passion", so wonderful that y'all nearly got that from me instead. The Mostly Mozart festival a few years ago began with a concert anthology of vocal items: the way he sang the trio from "Così fan tutte" was a lesson to everyone.
I hope you love him too.
Tuesday 1 December