Freischutz's best enactment
Freischutz put into play by conductor Carlos Kleiber is allegedly the best recording. Along with the Dresden Staatskapelle orchestra, he managed to give a special sound to this famous and commonly played opera.

I've noticed quite a choice of Freischutz CDs on the web-market (even though opera is not at all trendy nowadays), I have listened to another enactment of this opera and also heard the opinion of a great listener of classical music (Thomas Wirz from Switzerland). So, when deciding to buy my own, I looked especially for this CD. The front cover is a little different to the original CD I held in my hands some 9 years ago, and it doesn't have a paper dust cover, but unless you are making up a CD collection, this is of no matter.

Enjoy it, and try to keep cool while the action moves to the Wolf's Glen... the storm will be over, forest spirits will go away (probably sensing upcoming century's deforestation), and Max will come out clean... with a promise get his hands on Agathe a year later... ;)

Der Freischütz
A beautiful and revolutionary opera. It's easy to see why the young Richard Wagner was so fond and strongly influenced by it.

Weber at his best
This is a wonderful work in a wonderful recording -- and at such a reasonable price! Weber was a delightful man, a prodigiously talented pianist who studied with the Abbe Vogler (whom Mozart, incidentally, despised) along with the young Giacomo Meyerbeer. He died quite young, in London, not far from where I live. Years later, Weber's remains were exhumed and reinterred in Dresden at a service presided over by Richard Wagner coming from Wagner, a most jealous partisan, this was praise indeed). While not the earliest of his operas, Der Freischütz is easily the best known, and it had a formative influence through its musical vocabulary and dramatic approach on the whole of nineteenth century music, from the French (through Berlioz, Gounod amd Massenet), the Italians (through Verdi and Boito), the Germans (through Meyerbeer, Marschner, Spohr and, of course, Wagner), to the Russians (through Glinka and Mussorgsky). Listeners will note Weber's characteristics: highly tuneful and affecting arias, a most unusual and inventive approach to orchestral sound -- unlike anyone else, really -- and an uncanny ability to infuse his music with dramatic tension. If you ever have the pleasure of seeing Der Freischütz on stage, this recording will serve as a wonderful preparation for the event and a memory long after.

Next stop on the introductory tour: all the piano sonatas, then the Konzertstücke, then the symphonies, before returning to the operas, Euryanthe and Oberon. All delightful and affecting music by a great master!

Kleiber's genius is the key here
For most listeners, taking on faith that this legendary recording really is great, there's nothing to be disappointed by. Before Carlos Kleiber came to the score, Der Freischutz was a comfortable staple in German opera houses, to be absorbed along with strudel and beer as an accepted thing. Kleiber set the music on fire, and it's due to him that every moment is riveting. DG's 1973 sonics, to tell the truth, are a bit edgy and thin, but the new remastering is a step forward.

The detractors at Amazon have a point about the singing. If you aren't tuned in to Kleiber as the opera's driving force, picking at Peter Schreier (too thin and screechy for the role of Max), Gundula Janowitz (cool and a bit hooty as Agathe), and Theo Adam (curdled tone, dull portrayal) comes easily enough. But no rival Freischutz is perfeclty cast, and the fiendishly difficult role of Max never found its perfect exponent in Fritz Wunderlich, who died before he could record it.

Taking all the minuses into account, the singers are imperfect but very fine, and by subsuming themselves to Kleiber's vision, they give us a Freischutz unmatched on records.

A safe choice for a recording of "Der Freischutz"
Source: 1973 studio recording made at VEB Deutsche Schallplaten, Berlin (in what was then very carefully designated as the DDR or German Democratic Republic.)

Sound: Good 1970s Deutsche Grammophon stereo.

Cast: Agathe - Gundula Janowitz; Annchen - Edith Mathis; Max - Peter Schreier; Kaspar - Theo Adam; Ottokar - Bernd Weikl; Kuno - Siegfried Vogel; Hermit - Franz Crass; Kilian - Gunther Leib; First Bridesmaid - Renate Hoff, Second Bridesmaid - Brigitte Pfretzschner; Third Bridesmaid - Renate Krahmer; Fourth Bridesmaid - Ingeborg Springer. Conductor - Carlos Kleiber with the Staatskapelle Dresden and the Rundfunkchor Leipzig.

Dialogue cast: Agathe - Regine Jeske; Annchen - Ingrid Hille; Max - Hans Jorn Weber; Kaspar / Samiel - Gerhard Paul; Ottokar - Otto Mellies; Kuno - Gerd Biewer; Hermit - Franz Crass; Kilian - Günther Leib; Royal Huntsman - Friedrich Wilhelm Junge; Royal Bodyguard - Achim Schmidtchen; Gamekeeper - August Hutten.

Reading Amazon reviews can sometimes be quite revelatory. In this case, before one listens to a single bar of the performance it is clear that there is something odd about the conducting. There is an air of protesting too much about the praise accorded to it. On the other hand, the singers seem to have attracted relatively little comment--potentially an ominous portent for an opera.

Well, on listening to the opera, I find that the singers aren't worth much in the way of comment. Janowitz and Adam are the best of the bunch and, truth to tell, that isn't particularly high praise. Peter Schreier is one of those acquired tastes that I have no intention of acquiring. He's not bad, not really, but who would go out of their way to hear him? He makes the egregious Hans Hopf on the old recordings conducted by Furtwangler and Erich Kleiber sound positively ... musical by comparison. The rest of the singing cast is appropriately competent, neither more nor less.

I specifically mention the singing cast because this is one of those lame productions in which some fool of a producer has decided that singers are incapable of speaking. Voice actors do the dialogue passages, a practice that virtually guarantees disaster, for the voices of the actors never match those of the singers and because such actors invariably overdo it by performing in what they fondly imagine to be an operatic style. Such casting costs this recording one star, all by itself. And the casting of a single voice actor to hold conversations with himself as Kaspar AND Samiel is simply perverse!

This, we are informed, is Kleiber Minor's first big-time recording, and it shows it. There are passages which are indisputably very good. There are passages which are just plain strange. What there unquestionably is not is a self-consistent and convincing vision of what "Der Freischutz"is all about, the sort of thing that is so clear in the ultra-Romantic version of Wilhelm Furtwängler and in the more restrained but equally brilliant version conducted by Carlos Kleiber's father, Erich. The elder Kleiber's "Freischutz" had been broadcast in 1955. It must have been one of the older man's last major projects before his sudden death in January 1956. Carlos Kleiber must have been familiar with his father's version of the opera, leading me to speculate that at least some of the peculiarities of this recording owe their existence to generational rivalry between father and son.

"Der Freischutz" is a far better opera than its current spotty performance frequency in North America might suggest. It has a fine overture that is followed by a slightly ponderous, scenario-establishing First Scene. The opera truly takes off in the vocally spectacular Second Scene of Act I. If two really first class sopranos from the German school of singing are present, the sequence of solos and duets make it is as good as anything written anywhere by anybody. Janowitz and Mathis are good but not great, making this scene less than it might be. The heart of the opera is the ensuing Wolf's Glen scene. Here, Weber pulled out all the stops to create the first Romantic opera. A very young Richard Wagner was bowled over by this opera. It set him on his chosen career. And we all know where that led....

The Wolf's Glen scene is jolly good fun, brilliantly constructed and it certainly had enormous impact on audiences for decades after its premiere in 1821. Its lineal descendants include Fafner's den in "Siegfried," both "Salome" and Elektra," "Wozzeck" and the musical scores of every other horror movie made in Hollywood or anywhere else. That being the case, it strikes me that the Amazon reviewers who inform us "that after 200 years the Wolf's Glen scene can still make a person shudder" and of "the really terrific sense of eerie menace" are being a bit hyperbolic. For the opera as a whole, I find myself more in agreement with this comment from the discerning Amazon reviewer, Sean Coxen: "If a record collector were to purchase only one 'Freischutz' for his library, this would be a safe enough choice". A safe choice, for the sound is (more or less) modern and the singers are (more or less) acceptable. Yes, quite safe. If, however, someone out there is looking for a GOOD performance, not just a safe one, I suggest you grab a copy of either the Furtwängler version or the Erich Kleiber. Heck, they're both cheap and they're both excellent, so buy both!

A COMMENT ON CASTING: An earlier reviewer rhetorically asked where a perfect Agathe is to be found. There is a simple answer to that: Elizabeth Grummer. She was a gloriously shining star of the post-WWII era, equally brilliant as Donna Anna in "Don Giovanni" and Eva in "Die Meistersinger." As Agathe for both Furtwangler and Kleiber, she was wonderful--there is no other word for it.

A COMMENT ON IMAGERY: A complaint from an Amazon reviewer about the most recent published state of this recording, "Even the excellent (menacing!) cover art is placed askew", leads me to ask this: Can't anybody see that the cover shows a side-by-side shotgun? This is an opera about riflemen, for Pete's sake. The most famous scene in the opera involves casting seven magic rifle bullets! So, why the shotgun?