I am in Ann Arbor, participating in a Mahler project with Ken Kiesler and his fervent University of Michigan Symphony Orchestra – the group with which I memorably toured South Africa a year ago (and about which I blogged and broadcast).
Addressing a class of young conductors this morning, I was reminded by one of them of a promotional video that I stumbled upon a few days ago. It shows Yannick Nezet-Seguin rehearsing his Metropolitan Opera orchestra in the orgasmic Liebestod from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. The student who brought it up was commenting on the orchestra’s apparent disengagement – which is here rendered both audible and visible.
The tendency of the Met orchestra to phone it in – notwithstanding its high reputation – is something I’ve felt impelled to comment upon, as have Alex Ross in The New Yorker and Joshua Barone in the New York Times. Juxtaposing last season’s Met Aida with the Aida broadcast of February 6, 1937, conducted by Ettore Panizza, I called Nezet-Seguin’s Met orchestra a “matchbox” versus Panizza’s “powder keg.” That was in the May 29, 2025, New York Review of Books (“Grand Opera’s Tribulations”).
Two nights ago I attended Tristan und Isolde at the Met and again encountered a crippling lack of urgency in the pit (in this of all operas). Upon returning home I listened to Artur Bodanzky lead the Tristan Prelude in live performance at the Met on March 9, 1935. You can hear it here.
Bodanzky’s is the most memorable reading of Wagner’s Prelude in my experience – in 10 minutes, it conveys Tristan und Isolde more potently than Wednesday night’s five hours. The opera’s preternatural gravitas registers instantly. Its vortex of feeling, its inexorable trajectory are indelibly mapped.
Any present-day listener is challenged to account for this astounding feat of music making. Certainly it can be said that the strings of Bodanzky’s orchestra command an exceptional range of dynamics and texture and inflected song compared to which today’s Met orchestra is another, more confined instrument of expression. Ultimately, however, the difference is summarized by an anecdote that came to mind upon hearing Klaus Makela conduct the Chicago Symphony at Carnegie Hall. Here it is again, from my blog of February 26:
“I am reminded of a conversation I had in South Dakota with Derek Bermel, who had composed something remarkable for the Creekside Singers and the South Dakota Symphony. Derek told me that his clarinet teacher had been a member of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. I was fascinated to learn that – because broadcast Met performances from the 1930s and ‘40s document a caliber of intense orchestral collaboration unknown at the Met today. Derek had just auditioned the February 12, 1938, Otello – the greatest Verdi performance known to me, with Giovanni Martinelli, Lawrence Tibbett, and Elisabeth Rethberg conducted by Ettore Panizza – and reported back that it sounded “fundamentally different” from any Verdi he had previously heard. Seated in a hotel lobby – I think we were in Chamberlain (population 2,600) – Derek and I spent twenty minutes debating what made that 1938 performance so special. Was it the conductor? The orchestra? The singers? Stylistic authority?
“Unbeknownst to us, the late Chris Eagle Hawk, a Lakota tribal elder I knew to be both wise and succinct, was a table away listening to it all. When there was a pause in our discussion, Chris said three words: ‘They felt it.’ That ended our conversation.”
For more on Artur Bodanzky’s Wagner at the Met, click here.
Here’s another Bodanzky Tristan… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9dYOThylao I’m sure you know the CG ones with Reiner and Beecham in much better sound than any of the old Met ones, and honestly, the interpretations are so similar to Bodanzky’s that one has to wonder if they were dictated by F&M rather than the conductor.
Also not to put too fine a point on it but… 🙂 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BYJXoQ1KTQ
There’s also a magnificent Colon excerpt broadcast from EK in ’48. Either way we have a sense of what we lost when the Met decided to have no sense in whom to hire after Bodanzky and Panizza. I’m sure you know the ’51 de Sabata La Scala which is at least as exciting as Bodanzky but whose sound makes it sound twenty years older than 30s Met.
A most challenging column! But, Joe, is there a way for us to compare the Prelude as played by the Met orchestra this season with the extraordinary rendering of the Prelude by the orchestra of the 1930s? The older one sounds much more deliberate, less shimmering as a whole and more fatefully exacting of every tone by each orchestral voice, than my memory of the way the Prelude sounded the other night. Is the older one slower, or does its effect of inevitability make it seem slower? The comparison of the 1930s Prelude and the 2026 Liebestod from Act III is a little apples-and-oranges. . . .
It’s emotional intensity and involvement that a lot of us “old timers” miss in many of today’s performances. That’s harder to find now, in an age where conductors have multiple directorships, and rush from one city to another, often one continent to another. The music needs, and must have, more. Whether one loves or hates interpretations like Stokowski’s Tristan und Isolde Symphonic Synthesis of the Love Music from Acts II and III, the intense passion and sensuality are palpable; that’s what that music is about One can hear what the great Philadelphia oboist Marcel Tabuteau talked about when he commented that, under Stokowski, “Every now and then, a brushfire goes through the orchestra, and the music goes to the stars.”
In his 1947 memoir “The Other Side of the Record” about his experience as A & R director for RCA Victor, Charles O’Connell, in his chapter about Lauritz Melchior, refers to Bodanzsky as “the most rapacious and merciless of poker players” (Melchior himself was an avid bridge and poker player).
Are there any recordings of Karl Muck conducting Wagner operas live? His recordings of music from Parsifal to me are unsurpassed in intensity of expression.