Schmidt: Notre Dame
Soloists
Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra
Christof Perick
Schmidt's 4th symphony was one of the stand out pieces from last year's project so I wanted into include something by him in this year's project. Although the opera itself is a great rarity its name remains familiar because the intermezzo in Act 1 is a favourite orchestral showpiece. Karajan recorded it among many others.
The work is very much in a post Wagnerian style with some Straussian elements but it is not as heavyweight or harmonically advanced as the Strauss operas of the period. Indeed there is a little f the Hungarian/gypsy element in some of the music. The opera has a curious back story. Apparently Schmidt wrote most of the music instrumentally (basing some of it on an earlier work for piano and orchestra). He wrote indications in the score showing where the voices would go but didn't actually write the vocal parts until the orchestral score was finished. This is thus very much operas as extended symphonic poem. If you didn't know the back story you might not have detected that the vocal parts were written later but you would probably feel that the voices played a secondary part in much of the opera - Schmidt really seems to have put his heart into the various extended orchestral passages. I enjoyed the opera but this recording (the only one other some very old off air performances) suffers from having the main parts (tenor and soprano) sung by singers at the ends of the careers. They don't convince as young lovers and this definitely got in the way of a full appreciation of the opera. The plot is based on the hunchback of Notre Dame - i.e the phantom of the opera - but Quasimodo himself is very much a secondary character and the opera is centred up on the lovers. There are as you would expect some melodramatic moments, including use of the organ, which seems almost obligatory when demonic forces are unleashed in opera.
This was an early work and doesn't have the depth of the 4th symphony (written 25 years or so later) but it is impressive in its own right. You can see why the intermezzo was such a hit - Schmidt obviously thought so himself because the main melody keeps coming back later in the opera.
