Max Bruch’s place in the musical pantheon is guaranteed by a single work. His First Violin Concerto regularly ranks high on lists of the most performed classical pieces, while little else from his 60-year career has achieved anything like the same popularity. Born in 1838, Bruch lived through some of the greatest stylistic upheavals in the history of European music, but remained impervious to all of them; right up to his death in 1920, he remained faithful to the Romanticism he’d inherited from Mendelssohn and Schumann.
Among the raft of his forgotten works are three operas, of which Die Loreley was the second. Premiered in Mannheim in 1863, it had a few years of success before lapsing into obscurity, and though Bruch revised the score in 1887 for performances conducted by the young Gustav Mahler, it’s hardly been heard since. This Bavarian Radio recording, taken from a performance in Munich in 2014, is the first to make it complete on to disc.
Loosely based upon Clemens Brentano’s version of the Loreley legend, Emanuel Geibel’s libretto was originally written for Mendelssohn. It’s the story of Lenore, the daughter of a Rhine ferryman, who sells her soul to the spirits that inhabit the river and its famous rock, so that she can take revenge on the aristocratic lover who has spurned her by enchanting him with her singing. Mendelssohn dropped the idea of the opera after writing only a few fragments, and Bruch took over the text. His Loreley is a number opera of set-piece arias and ensembles, with a prominent role for the chorus. The orchestral writing shows an admiration for Schumann especially, and while Weber’s Der Freischütz seems to have been Bruch’s most significant operatic model, particularly in the ambitious set piece of the second act, the Grand Scene of the Rhine Spirits, there are also several passages suggesting he wasn’t totally impervious to the attractions of early Wagner – Tannhäuser and Lohengrin – either.
Certainly, Die Loreley has the heft of mid-century German opera, with occasional hints of the memorable melodic invention that a few years later would characterise Bruch’s most enduring work, even if there are passages when that invention flags, too. The conducting of Stefan Blunier certainly emphasises the strengths, and both soprano Michaela Kaune as Lenore and tenor Thomas Mohr as her lover Otto (quaintly described in the English version of the synopsis as her “secret playmate”) seem well up to the considerable vocal demands of their roles, even though she sounds a little frail in the opening scene. While this may not be a major act of rehabilitation for a lost masterpiece, then, it does throw light on a forgotten byway in 19th-century German opera.
