In the infinite space of the operatic universe, there are many works that, though rarely if ever performed, are faintly remembered as precursors of latter-day developments. Anyone delving into the history of Wagner's ‘Tristan’ chord inevitably runs across Louis Spohr's otherwise long-forgotten opera Der Alchemyst: as early as 1908 Edgar Istel pointed to a chord in the romance No. 14 that – save the entry of one of its constituents as a changing-note – antedates the famed beginning of Wagner's ‘Handlung’.Footnote 1 Ernst Kurth included this serendipitous discovery in his 1920 book on the crisis of romantic harmonyFootnote 2 as did Hermann Danuser in an exhaustive dictionary entry on the notorious chord.Footnote 3 There was no pressing need, then, for conductor Christian Fröhlich to ‘discover’ similarities to Wagner's ‘Tristan’, as he haughtily boasts in the accompanying notes to the opera's world premiere recording. (The celebration of his archival flair apparently left no room to discuss the recording's various omissions, which will be recognized only by listeners with access to the 1830 vocal score.) In a similar vein the melodrama version of Engelbert Humperdinck's Königskinder (Munich 1897) has secured its place in the annals of music history due to its first-ever use of a notated Sprechstimme, more than a decade ahead of Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire.Footnote 4 Its second (and completely revised) operatic version premiered at the Metropolitan Opera in New York (1910) some eighty years after the first staging of the Alchemyst at the Kassel Hoftheater, where Spohr served as the court's music director from 1822 to 1857. Both operas’ concentrated use of reminiscence motifs, that are ‘not yet’ and ‘no more’ – matching Wagner's associative Beziehungszauber – neatly pulls them into the lopsided and yet unavoidable narrative of the rise and decline of the Musikdrama, the aesthetic repercussions of which are felt even in the castings of the two recordings: Bernd Weikl, a seasoned Amfortas, Holländer and Sachs lends the remnants of his voice to the (less demanding) role of Vasquez in Spohr's Alchemyst, while Klaus-Florian Vogt, Bayreuth's acclaimed Lohengrin, takes the role of the Königssohn in Humperdinck's Märchenoper.

Apart from Jessonda, which remained in the repertoire up to about World War I, Spohr's operas were – partly due to their usually contrived and hopelessly wooden librettos – no lasting success even on the German stage.Footnote 5 Der Alchemyst, Carl Pfeiffer's heavy-handed and awkwardly rhyming adaptation of Washington Irving's ‘The student of Salamanca’ is no exception to this. Don Vasquez, an alchemist in sixteenth-century Spain, finds himself entangled in a net of intrigues and jealousy that eventually lands him in the hands of the inquisition. Don Ramiro deserts Paola (a truculent hybrid of Ortrud and Armida) and vies with Don Alonzo (a lyrical tenor and therefore a handsome, exuberantly noble paramour) for Vasquez's daughter Ines (a lyrical Soprano and therefore an even more exuberantly beautiful virgin). The indispensable gypsy choruses that every now and then populate this Mediterranean setting encouraged the composer to combine castanets, fandango rhythms and a dark timbred orchestration with the chromatically enrichedFootnote 6, ‘echt’ Spohrian shifting between minor and major keys. Unlike Jessonda, Der Berggeist or the subsequent Kreuzfahrer, however, Der Alchemyst is a dialogue opera, which simultaneously employs three different modes of linking arias and ensembles: apart from the spoken dialogue (which the German Singspiel tradition shares with the French opéra-comique), there is extensive use of arioso and accompagnato passages and, finally (in the solo scenes of Vasquez), melodrama, which provides another link to this genre's post-Wagnerian revival in works such as the original version of Die Königskinder, Strauss's Enoch Arden or von Schilling's Hexenlieder.Footnote 7 The Oehms production, a live recording of a stage performance at the Staatstheater in Spohr's native town of Braunschweig, presents a mostly German ensemble, who are able to render a flawless version of the dialogue (a common pitfall for international Zauberflöte or Fidelio casts), but who vocally fall below the standard that Spohr's composition demands. Not only Weikl but also Jan Zinkler (Ramiro) and Mike Garling (Lopez) show the wear and tear of exhausted voices, while Jörg Dürmüller (Alonzo) struggles with the occasional notes above the stave – in particular, where they are part of a larger melodic line. Moran Abouloff is an acceptable Ines and Susanne Pütters courageously tries her hand (and throat) on the infelicitous Paola, whose dramatic coloratura in act two is however beyond the abilities of an average Stadttheater singer. The solid performance of the orchestra, under Christian Fröhlich, is somewhat more encouraging, though the desirable touch of the extraordinary is lacking here as well. The operas of Weber and his perceptually lesser contemporaries Spohr and Marschner partake in the simultaneous rise of symphonic musicFootnote 8 and therefore clearly benefit from a dose of the exhilarating extravaganza displayed by Carlos Kleiber's legendary Freischütz recording.

If much of the production's murky singing is acceptable, for the time being, due to its undeniable rarity and repertoire value, there is no such excuse for the Humperdinck recording. Königkinder, the swift response, in 1910, of the Met's German wing to the premiere of Puccini's La fanciulla del West some three weeks earlier, is already available in two alternative recordings.Footnote 9 The love of the naive, but good-hearted runaway prince and the Gänsemagd raised (in a female version of Siegfried's upbringing) by a sinister forest hag (Gabriele Schnaut, yet another Bayreuth battle-axe) falls prey to the selfish greed of their indifferent environment. Humperdinck endowed the slightly sentimental libretto of Elsa Bernstein (née Porges, the daughter of an ardent admirer and aide of Wagner)Footnote 10 with appealing music, that – over long stretches of the score fairly on par with Strauss's Die Frau ohne Schatten – reconciles the realm of folksong and fairy tale with the harmonic accomplishments of ‘The Meister’. Connoisseurs of orchestral splendour will fall in love with the prelude to act 3, while students of extended tonality are referred to rehearsal number 40 in the vocal score of act 1 (‘Der Wind! Hat den Kranz mir abgeweht’) and its vertical and horizontal prolongation of a (tritonic) seventh chord with a diminished fifth (a–c#–e♭–g, or 4–25 in Allan Forte's classification scheme). Far more than the librettos's quirky Jugendstil prose, the lack of adequate singing therefore underscores the marginal position of Humperdinck's unjustly neglected opera, as can easily be deduced from an impromptu comparison of the act one dialogue between Königssohn and Gänsemagd in a 1912 recording of Karl Jörn and Lola Artôt de Padilla.Footnote 11 Vogt's well focussed but sometimes monotonous voice lacks the expressive value of Joern's timbral shadings and slight volume or tempo changes. Readers (and listeners) are advised to take note of his light-flooded accentuation of ‘all eine sonnenblühn'de Herrlichkeit’, the astonished amusement of ‘Das soll ich dir sagen?’ and the superior execution of the ritardando in ‘Willst Du mein Maienbuhle sein?’. This rhetorically sophisticated and yet never over-ostentatious form of singing is a conditio sine qua non for the dialogue-oriented music of Wagner and his successors, but – in stark contrast to the bel canto renaissance – it is, for the time being at least, an almost extinct art.

Both voices in the other main roles, the firm lyric soprano of Juliane Banse (Gänsemagd) and the luxurious baritone of Christian Gerhaher (Spielmann) equally exhibit a tasteful, but largely understated style of singing and thus occasionally struggle not to be drowned out by the orchestra. The recording's undeniable highlight is the superb rendition of Humperdinck's score by Ingo Metzmacher, the Deutsches Symphonie Orchester and – last but not least – the Rundfunkchor Berlin. The vocal power and grandeur of the crowd scenes in act two (which significantly differ from the passive role of the chorus in the auto-da-fé finale of Der Alchemyst) unveils a ‘politically unconscious’Footnote 12 peculiarity of the turn of century Märchenoper. In spite of their emphatically pre-modern setting, pieces such as Humperdinck's Königskinder, Siegfried Wagner's Bärenhäuter or Zemlinsky's Traumgörge display mob and lynch scenes that transcend the uncanny humour of the Festwiese towards the weird reality of Le Bon's ‘foule anonyme’.