100 Singers - FERDINAND FRANTZ

Ferdinand Frantz, Bass-Baritone (1906-1959)
Richard Wagner: DIE MEISTERSINGER VON NUERNBERG
'Lilacs Monologue' - "Was duftet doch der Flieder" (Fliedermonolog)
Conducted by Kurt Schroeder

My personal opinion: Richard Wagner is considered as a serious composer, but in reality his operatic world is a terrible madness full of abnormal characters: Antiheroes and cowards, physical and mental cripples, promiscuity and even incest, illogicalness and absurdity. It is exactly as Hans Sachs pondered in DIE MEISTERSINGER VON NUERNBERG: "Wahn, Wahn, überall Wahn ..." Most of Wagner's own libretti are abstruse, and it was no less a figure than Igor Stravinsky, who once said to his students: "There is more substance and true invention in the little aria "La donna è mobile" than in the entire vociferation of the complete RING DES NIBELUNGEN."
To survive as a listener the sheer foolishness of Wagner's excessive operas, we need a down-to-earth singer with heart and mind. Such an interpreter was the German bass-baritone Ferdinand Frantz, who humanized many Wagner roles with the tonal harmony of his imperious voice. When Rudolf Moralt recorded in concert 1948/1949 the RING, Wilhelm Furtwaengler sat in the audience. After the last performance he engaged some of the main singers for his own planned RING production the following year in Milan (remade three years later in Rome with the RAI orchestra). Moralt's Wotan, Ferdinand Frantz, became also Furtwaengler's favorite father of the gods. Frantz' Wotan/Wanderer is captured in not less than thirteen studio and live recordings of the three RING operas RHEINGOLD, DIE WALKUERE and SIEGFRIED (in GOETTERDAEMMERUNG, Wotan no longer appears). It is typical for some German critics to adopt the opinions of international colleagues. A well-known specimen of this type wrote in all seriousness, that Ferdinand Frantz was a singer with a rough and rasping voice; a judgement he stole from Kenneth Furie. Can there be a greater nonsense? If at all there is a reason for complaining the sonorous voice of Frantz, it is the almost fatherly tone in the sinister HOLLAENDER monologue, in "Scintille, diamant" from Offenbach's HOFFMANN or even in Iago's "Credo in un dio crudel" from Verdi's OTELLO.
The Wotan of Ferdinand Frantz is indeed a dominant father figure. With his voluminous voice and the weighty lower register, he was predestinated to express both clemency and sterness. The monologue from MEISTERSINGER ("Was duftet doch der Flieder") is a magical moment of self-reflection, an intimate soliloquy. Sadly, his Hans Sachs in the second Kempe recording (1957) obviously came a little bit too late: Ferdinand Frantz was ill and his voice showed signs of wear and tear. His Telramund in LOHENGRIN under Eugen Jochum, recorded only four years earlier, is virile and strong, especially in the duet with Ortrud (sung by Ferdinand Frantz' wife Helena Braun). As Jochanaan in Kurt Schroeder's 1952 live recording of SALOME his sizable voice sounds from the depths of the cistern like a resonant organ. Frantz is the best singer in an all-star cast with Max Lorenz, Margarete Klose and Inge Borkh as the princess, whose tones are sometimes as sharp as the executioner's sword.
Remarkably self-trained, from 1943 onwards Frantz switched from a low bass to the roles of a heroic baritone. He began in 1927 with the small part of the soapmaker in MEISTERSINGER in his home town Kassel. After engagements in Halle, Chemnitz and Hamburg, he came to Munich in 1943, where he remained as a member of the Bavarian State Opera until his untimely death in 1959. Guest appearances brought him to Vienna, Dresden, Milan, London, Naples and to the Salzburg Festival as Beethoven's Don Pizarro in FIDELIO. 'Musical America' wrote, he was "a solitary newcomer" when he sang his first Met Wotan in WALKUERE next to Helen Traubel and Lauritz Melchior in 1949. Irving Kolodin summarized that Ferdinand Frantz "made a deep impression with his excellent bearing strong voice and mastery of the Wagnerian style."
Born in 1906, Frantz was too old when the rediscovery of Wagner for the longplayer era began in the late 1950s. What a discophile dream, imagine him in Solti's monumental RING project or as Sachs in Kubelik's magnificent MEISTERSINGER recording of 1967. After all, Frantz recorded the role twice under Kempe - and even if the second version is the testimony of an impaired singer, Ferdinand Frantz is still one of the most human Sachs' in the entire discography of Wagner's only comedy.

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