The New Criterion

Hans Hotter Memoirs,
translated by Donald Arthur.
Northwestern University Press,
324 pages, $35

Opera-lovers are as naturally contentious as, if less homicidal than, Iraqi insurgents. Yet on one issue they speak with impressive unanimity. They all admit that, apropos Wagner performances, the two decades following World War II—on both sides of the Atlantic—constituted our last true golden era. Among those performances’ protagonists, Hans Hotter reigned supreme. Those privileged to see and hear him as Wotan in the Ring cycle, or as Gurnemanz (Parsifal’s biggest, most pitilessly demanding part), beheld a perfect alignment of music and interpreter. Recordings, thank goodness, disclose to us comparative youngsters much of Hotter’s subtlety, flawless diction, and—the Teutonic noun is as unavoidable as it is untranslatable—Innigkeit. What they cannot convey is Hotter’s often frightening theatrical presence. At six foot four, he dominated any scene where he appeared, aided by aquiline facial features that, in retrospect, implied kinship with Law & Order’s Jerry Orbach. Hotter’s physique, in short, perfectly complemented that astounding thunderstorm of a voice. Surely, if God sang, He would sound like Hotter.

Blessed with the stamina of three oxen, Hotter died only in 2003, aged ninety-four. That he possessed exceptional dedication, no one could dispute. But numerous exceptionally dedicated singers are almost total airheads, as soon becomes manifest if their technical powers prematurely wane. (The less said of Maria Callas during her vocal atrophy, the better. Let Aristotle Onassis’s caustic reproach suffice: “What are you? Nothing. You just have a whistle in your throat that no longer works.”) Hotter’s memoirs, now in English—a shorter German-language version appeared eleven years back—show that he would have won his colleagues’ respect as an all-round artist even if, heaven forbid, he had confined his singing to the shower.

These memoirs, most lavishly illustrated (seventy-odd photographs), explain how Hotter originally concentrated on church performance. While at Munich’s chief music college, he eagerly studied the organ and Gregorian chant: pursuits incompatible with most operatic divas’ governing instinct of “I want the world and I want it now.” At least the organ loft provided a regular—if miniscule—salary, from which he supported his widowed mother. But his singing coach Matthäus Römer urged him to abandon this milieu, with the infelicitiously phrased counsel: “Make up your mind what you want to be: a singer or a musician.” A few provincial try-outs aside, Hotter undertook his official stage debut when twenty-one years old, at Troppau (now Opava, Czech Republic), as the Speaker in The Magic Flute.

Thence he continued triumphing. Heroic baritones—Heldenbaritonen, to use the German rubric—have always been so scarce that they can, in effect, write their own job rules, as most sopranos, for instance, cannot. Whereas young Elisabeth Schwarzkopf had to join the National Socialist Party or lose all hopes of employment, Hotter gave no comparable hostages to post-1945 fortune. As well as shunning NS membership, he cultivated a wickedly accurate vaudeville impersonation of Hitler, which came to the regime’s attention, though no actual punishment ensued. Based mainly at Hamburg (which somewhat held aloof from Nazi cultural enthusiasms), Hotter also visited foreign lands, notably France, Belgium, Spain, and England. An English newspaper once caught his eye by announcing “Hotter in London, with more to come.” This alluded merely to the capital’s increased temperature, but the singer, with harmless vanity, assumed at first that it referred to himself.

In all other ways, Hotter remained remarkably level-headed. Those who deprecate name-dropping in his text should ask themselves how he could have avoided name-dropping, given his musical eminence. Was he really meant to conceal his work with Bruno Walter, Clemens Krauss, George Szell, Hans Knappertsbusch, Herbert von Karajan, Wilhelm Furtwängler, and Eugen Jochum among conductors, or Richard Strauss, Hans Pfitzner, and Paul Hindemith among composers? (He sang in three Strauss operatic premieres: Friedenstag, Die Liebe der Danae, and the incomparable Capriccio.) Pfitzner he found charming in a manic style, by no means the uniformly vitriolic curmudgeon of general repute. Strauss he esteemed for, above all, utterly unselfconscious professionalism; the old man’s diffident phone-book listing read simply “Dr. Strauss, Richard, conductor.” Hotter also achieved the near-miracle of winning three hundred marks from Strauss at cards. As partial recompense, he gave his daughter in marriage to Strauss’s grandson. He describes a treasured interaction between Hindemith and Otto Klemperer, when the latter, following a public lecture by the former, enlivened an otherwise torpid question-and-answer session with the characteristically ebullient request, “Where’s the men’s room?”

Such anecdotal downrightness is typical. Hotter’s reminiscences of backstage (and onstage) idiosyncracies have appeal—his account of how Knappertsbusch defeated a vocally giftless protégé of Göring’s would itself make the volume worthwhile—but they have no glamour. Like most great performers Hotter seems never to have been stagestruck. Much as the lighting manager had his paid work to do, so Hotter had his paid work to do—and damnably hard work it was, not least when hopelessly parochial impresarios insisted that he relearn his roles in the local language. (The worst aspect of that chore, he reveals, is not memorizing the translation but trying to forget the original.) Happily he had neither the time nor the inclination for boredom. At Covent Garden he himself designed several Wagner productions, all notable for their mercifully complete freedom from television sets, top hats, brown shirts, swastikas, nudes, and every other weapon in the “progressive” Wagner director’s arsenal. Hotter’s non-German repertoire included much Verdi and Puccini, in which he discovered—as many another executant finds—that playing villains allowed him to work off all of what few aggressive impulses he harbored. His Grand Inquisitor in Verdi’s Don Carlo never needed to burn his victims: He could simply have stomped them to death.

He found still other reverent hearers for his numerous Lieder recitals, astonishingly idiomatic, on the whole. His 1954 recording of Schubert’s Winterreise, for all its grandeur, achieves as beauteous, Fischer-Dieskau-like a tonal delicacy as can be imagined. So does his sublime 1950 version of Bach’s cantata Ich habe genug. While singing Winterreise again in Tokyo, he had the poignant experience of seeing the lips of audience members in the front row move in sychronization to the words. A conscientious Lieder-singer can scarcely know a higher tribute.

Until the mid-1960s Hotter’s laryngeal glory appeared as durable as Valhalla’s inhabitants themselves, making his subsequent decline all the sadder. By 1966, when he committed his Walküre Wotan to disc, the voice’s velvet had worn through, although his murmurs still communicated greater menace than most baritones’ screams. Once his biggest roles’ requirements overtaxed him, he moved calmly to lesser characters. Afterwards he embarked on what amounted to a new career, as the Narrator (who speaks all his lines) in Schönberg’s Gurrelieder. He reprised this part, undaunted, until 1996. Always he displayed an unfussy, sensible attitude towards the aging process. For those fading prima donnas, of either sex, who publicly compete to see who can best embody high-camp incompetence, Hotter had only glacial scorn.

He actually appears to have led a life at once cloudless and blameless, suggestive of one Australian academic’s favorite nomination for a lackluster headline: “Hero’s feet not made of clay after all.” Acknowledging his persistent good fortune, he and his translator toyed with calling this book Destiny’s Child, until Beyoncé Knowles’s cosmic éclat preempted that title. Saint Augustine’s dictum “To sing is to pray twice” summarizes the Hotter credo. “The older I get, the more grateful I become,” he writes, “for being able to love this profession of mine.” And a few lines earlier: “you must never stop thanking your Creator for what He has given you.” All of which proves that Hotter, however great an artist, incurably lacked those victim politics which have now become an indispensable adjunct to modish musical icons’ talent, or, often, an actively rancorous substitute for such talent.