By Ralph P. Locke

Any opera lover will find much to admire and enjoy in this work, based on a famous 27-strophe poem by Friedrich Schiller that Schubert set in its entirety to music.

Conradin Kreutzer: Der Taucher

Sarah Wegener (Alphonsine), Philipp Mathmann (Ivo), Daniel Schmid (Antonio), Johannes Hill (Lorenzo), Pascal Zurek (Alphonso), Barbara Stoll (Narrator)

Stuttgart Chamber Choir and Hofkapelle/ Frieder Bernius

Carus 83536—64 minutes

Frieder Bernius is gradually becoming one of the most-recorded conductors in the world, and for good reason: he is equally adept with a chorus and an orchestra, and he makes a special point of digging up important and gratifying works that have not been previously set down on disc. For decades, he has been leading live performances for radio broadcasts (often the Southwest German Radio), and many of these recordings are now being released commercially, sometimes after having been locked up in a station’s computers since the ’90s.

The recent flood of Bernier releases continues here with a two-act opera, on a single CD, by Conradin Kreutzer (1780-1849), a composer who was born a decade after Beethoven, six years before Weber, and seventeen before Schubert and who, like Beethoven and Schubert, was active in Vienna (but he then left for various cities in Germany). One often reads his name in histories of German opera, yet most of us don’t know a note of his music. I sometimes confuse him with Rodolphe Kreutzer, a French violinist and opera composer from around the same time, to whom Beethoven dedicated the great violin sonata Op. 47. From now on I won’t.

The one work of Conradin Kreutzer that has been recorded often is a Septet in E-flat Major, Op. 62. Several other chamber works, a trumpet concerto, and some songs have also appeared on disc (and thus now on the various streaming services). Wikipedia gives a good summary of his career, and the German Wikipedia supplies a lengthier one, with a fuller worklist that is, however, riddled with typos, such as “sexter” for “Sextett” and “et” for “air.” CK wrote dozens of operas, one of which, Das Nachtlager in Granada (“The Night Camp in Granada”), stayed in the repertory of German theaters into the early twentieth century. So it’s good finally to be able to hear an opera of his, even if it isn’t the famous Nachtlager.

The recording was made in 2023 at two performances in a modern 745-seat hall built within a centuries-old mansion (known as the Bürgerhaus) in Backnang. The sound is clear and well balanced. The chorus feels appropriately sized — neither skimpy nor massive. The orchestra here uses 43 players (period instruments), and, to judge by their names, they are mostly Germans or Austrians, with a few from other countries (including Israel, Italy, and Japan).

Together, the chorus, orchestra, and conductor have made much-praised recordings of major works by world-renowned composers (Bach, Mozart, Mendelssohn) but also have focused on composers from, as their blurb puts it, “the southwestern region of Germany,” including Kalliwoda, Knecht, and Holzbauer. I praised their rendering of Holzbauer’s one-act Tod der Dido. I also greatly enjoyed them in unusual works by Hasse (three of his operas!); Holzbauer; Reicha; and Schubert.

The libretto of Der Taucher (“The Diver”) was written by Samuel Gottlieb Bürde, freely drawing from a famous 27-strophe poem by Friedrich Schiller that Schubert set in its entirety to music. (At 24 minutes, it is his longest song.) More or less the same libretto had already been used, in Berlin, by J. F. Reichardt.

The plot is quite different from that in Schiller’s “ballad,” but they both end with a ruler (here Lorenzo, the Duke of Messina) throwing a golden goblet into the sea and a young man diving into the waves and retrieving it.

Composer Conradin Kreutzer. Lithograph by Joseph Kriehuber, 1837. Photo: Wiki Common

In Kreutzer’s opera, the young man (Ivo) is the son of a hermit (Alphonso), and the latter is actually the rightful Duke of Messina but was dethroned by his brother Lorenzo. Ivo, naturally, falls in love with Lorenzo’s daughter (confusingly named Alphonsine). The bulk of the action includes various twists and turns: Ivo meets Alphonsine by chance in the forest and brings her back to Lorenzo, who trains him to be a knight; Alphonso (Ivo’s father) appears at Lorenzo’s court in the disguise of a monk and announces that the Duke’s brother (himself) is still alive; Alphonso (the hermit/monk) pulls out a sword from his robe, crazed with anger at the report that his son has died; and so on.

The action culminates with Ivo becoming “the diver” of the title, thereby proving his mettle and gaining the hand of Alphonsine. Much of this is not musicalized, but I wish the spoken text had been given in the booklet so we could at least imagine a full performance. (Nobody records Mozart’s The Magic Flute anymore without including most of the spoken dialogue and printing it as well!)

Der Taucher was first composed (and possibly performed — the booklet is unclear) in 1813. Reworked to include a bigger part for Ivo’s father, it reached performance in two different Viennese theaters, in 1824 and 1834. The reviewers, on these later occasions, praised its “very sweet flow of melodies,” gratifyingly written for the singing voice. It helps that, at least in 1824, some of the performers were enormously skillful, including two future stars: Henriette Sontag and Caroline Unger.

The work’s extensive use of spoken dialogue was typical of nearly all German operas at the time, including Beethoven’s Fidelio and Weber’s Der Freischütz. Here, as I mentioned, we are given only the musical numbers (and possibly not all of them); a brief synopsis in the booklet helps us (but just barely) to fill in the gaps. Alas, the sung words and the very few snippets of speech are given only in German and of course are not easily found in translation anywhere else.

Still, the music is so well characterized, much in the manner of Der Freischütz (1821) or the early (German) operas of Meyerbeer (Alimelek; Jephtas Gelübde), that any opera lover will find much to admire and enjoy here. Among other things, the wind instruments in the orchestra (e.g., solo clarinet) sometimes give interesting commentary as a singer carries on about her or his feelings.

The performance is alert and sharply characterized, just as I by now expect from anything that Bernius and his crew touch. A few moments of inaccurate intonation can be excused, unless you insist on the total perfection that can be achieved only in a studio recording, with its possibility of multiple retakes.

Soprano Sarah Wegener, a staple of Bernius’s recordings, is pure-toned and expressive. The role of the young Ivo, originally conceived for tenor but ultimately given instead to a mezzo “in trousers” (like Mozart’s Cherubino) is here sung, touchingly and with a “straight” tone, by a countertenor (or was he a boy soprano?), Philipp Mathmann, though I’d rather have heard a woman who could handle the coloratura with greater aplomb and could enrich her tone with some tasteful vibrato.

The baritone Johannes Hill is eloquent as Duke Lorenzo, and baritone Pascal Zurek and tenor Daniel Schmid carry out their briefer tasks very capably, as does the actress Barbara Stoll, in two passages, one of which is correctly labeled “melodrama” (in the technical sense: spoken lines, over orchestral music), for the kindly Fairy Morgana. Readers may recall a sneakier version of this same character from the Broadway musical Camelot, where she is known as the sorceress Morgan le Fay.

Frieder Bernius — slowly becoming one of the most recorded conductors in the world. Photo: courtesy of the artist.

The “melodrama” passage actually uses a summary, apparently concocted for the listener’s sake, explaining what is at that moment seen happening on stage. The booklet, instead, shows what Morgana, in a staged production, would say directly to Ivo (but doesn’t say here): namely, that he will soon meet the woman of his dreams.

Two complaints: First, the booklet-essay, by musicologist Till-Gerrit Waidelich, though very informative, is sometimes translated too literally, creating word fog. Second, somewhere we should have been told which version of the opera we are hearing. The Carus website proudly claims that it’s the “original, early” 1813 version rather than the “best-known” Vienna revision (though “best-known” is an odd phrase in regard to CK). Waidelich’s essay makes clear that, in the 1824 version (for Vienna), Alphonsine was given an additional suitor, Antonio, Duke of Calabria (tenor); that this led the tenor role of Ivo to become instead a mezzo pants role; and that two important roles were removed: Alphonsine’s governess (contralto) and a basso buffo. (A pause for one of my pet peeves: the names of three characters here begin with the same letter, adding to a listener’s confusion.) On this recording, Ivo is sung, as mentioned, by a (male) mezzo, Duke Antonio is briefly heard (in the extensive finale), and the governess and the comic bass are entirely missing. So I assume that Bernius has given us the 1824 revision, without the spoken dialogue and perhaps also minus certain musical numbers (or with cuts in the ones we’re hearing).

Still, it’s an engaging 63 minutes, and well worth getting to know, reminding us that opera took many directions in the past and can of course do so again today.

Ralph P. Locke is emeritus professor of musicology at the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music. Six of his articles have won the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for excellence in writing about music. His most recent two books are Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections and Music and the Exotic from the Renaissance to Mozart (both Cambridge University Press). Both are now available in paperback; the second, also as an e-book. Ralph Locke also contributes to American Record Guide and to the online arts-magazines New York Arts, Opera Today, and The Boston Musical Intelligencer. His articles have appeared in major scholarly journals, in Oxford Music Online (Grove Dictionary), and in the program books of major opera houses, e.g., Santa Fe (New Mexico), Wexford (Ireland), Glyndebourne, Covent Garden, and the Bavarian State Opera (Munich). He is part of the editorial team behind the wide-ranging open-access periodical Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal. The present review first appeared in American Record Guide and is included here by kind permission.