Customer Reviews

Lebendige Vergangenheit: Wilhelm Hesch

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I admire enthusiasm as much as the next man, but some reviewers let it get the best of them. If you are going to give Wilhelm Hesch five stars, you will have to give Frick, Greindl, Alsen, and Böhme seven to eight, and Pinza, Kipnis, Siepi and Pape nine or ten.

I remembered I had a couple of old L/P's of Hesch that I hadn't listened to in 10 or 15 years; when I went back to see why I hadn't retained a more favorable memory, in keeping with the descriptions of the five star review, I was reminded. Herr Hesch had a solid but unremarkable Bass voice; it rolls off in volume towards the lower end, and gets pinched and hollow at the upper end of his fairly limited range. His diction was about average and I failed to note any emotional content to his singing. His style was slightly stiff and lugubrious, and in fast passages he had a tendency to bark.

Fortunately, since Amazon has been kind enough to provide small snippets, you can judge for yourself. His best performance (predictably) is as Sarastro; his worst - perhaps Figaro.

Obviously, the review below wound up here by mistake.

This is not a Julius Patzak cd, but a compact disk dedicated to Wilhelm HESCH (1860-1908) one of the most scintillating stars of the Mahler era [from 1895] at the Kaiserliche-Königliche Hofoper Wien (The Vienna Imperial and Royal Court Opera.)

Hesch had a large, majestic, "black" bass voice of imposing timbre and breadth, and excelled in a huge repertoire encompassing Mozart, Meyerbeerian Grand Opéra, Wagner, Verdi, German Komische works of the Martha and Barbier von Baghdad stripe and a variety of "modern" works by the likes of Smetana, Dvorak, Goldmark et al.

He died of a rare blood disease when only 48, but not before creating an impressive legacy of Grammophone & Typewriter disks made between 1903 and 1907. The large number of these testifies to his great popularity, the breadth of his repertory and the dizzying company he kept: all the leading lights of a particularly brilliant era of the Hofoper: Selma Kurtz, Franz Naval, Leo Slezak, Elsa Bland, Elise Elizza, Hermine Kittel, Leopold Demuth....

If you know basses like Gottlob Frick or Josef Greindl you know the type, but Hesch had a tonal vibrancy, a perfection of placement, a clarity of attack that bespeaks an earlier era. He remains, in a real sense, the unbeatable prototype. Listen to his LA JUIVE items (sung, like everything else here, in German) as emblematic of this very major singer from the forever lost (and deeply regretted) Austro-Hungarian Raum. Felix Austria!

Preiser's remastering of the increasingly rare originals is predictably superb.

This CD of operetta items and Viennese songs contains some of the most charming and delightful singing ever recorded.

Just sample the Goldsmith of Toledo aria (not Viennese - by Offenbach!). If that has no appeal for you, it is unlikely that the remainder of the music would be of interest either.

Julius Patzak, although lacking that warmth of tone so much the property of Richard Tauber, nevertheless runs his great colleague a near race for the position of most genial, winning tenor in presenting lovely, romantic, lilting melodies.

Only some slight harshness in the sound of these transfers precludes what otherwise would be a very well-deserved, 5 star rating.