Hilde Güden
Simon
limited amount of recorded material available - especially where she is the
focus of the recording. She quite often appears on other singers' recordings
playing the 2nd fiddle part so-to-speak. I know very little about her
life/career and was wondering if anyone could tell me if there is a
biography?
Thanks,
Simon.
Oliver H.
Musetta, Gilda and such.
There is a funny vignette in the memoirs of Culshaw about Gueden and Della Casa
pooshing each other to be closer to the microphone while recording Arabella...
**************
O.H.
Matthew B. Tepper
<3ab692d5$0$9036$73be...@news.be.uu.net>:
There's a 1955 Mahler 4th with Bruno Walter and the Wiener Phiharmoniker,
and Güden in the final movement; this was once available in a DGG boxed set
of live performances issued for that orchestra's 150th anniversary.
--
Matthew B. Tepper: WWW, science fiction, classical music, ducks!
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orphee
oyþ@earthlink.net says...
>
>Simon_...@hotmail.com (Simon) wrote in
><3ab692d5$0$9036$73be...@news.be.uu.net>:
>
>>I think that the late Hilde Güden had a beautiful voice although there
>>is a limited amount of recorded material available - especially where
>>she is the focus of the recording. She quite often appears on other
>>singers' recordings playing the 2nd fiddle part so-to-speak. I know very
>>little about her life/career and was wondering if anyone could tell me
>>if there is a biography?
>
Hilde Gueden
her real name was Hulda Geiringer. She studied at the Musikakademie in Vienna;
1937 debut at the Vienna Volksoper in the operetta 'Herzen im Schnee' by
Benatzky.
1939 debut as opera singer in Zurich/ Cherubino,
1941 debut at the Bayerische Staatsoper Munich, 1942 emigration to Italy;
performances under Tullio Serafin in Rom and Florence; from 1947 until 1973
member of the State Opera in Vienna.
Guest appearances at La Scala, Covent Garden, Paris, Glyndebourne ( 1948
Despina, Zerlina)
1951 debut as Gilda at the MET, during 9 seasons she sang 13 different roles,
like Ann Truelove, Zdenka, Rosalinda.
Salzburg Festival: 1946/49/53/60 Sophie, 1952 Norina, 1959 Aminta/ Schweigsame
Frau, 1954 Zerbinetta.
Recordings: Columbia/ Nozze di Figaro, Rakes Progress
DGG/ Daphne, DECCA/ Rigoletto, Elisir, Nozze di Figaro, La Boheme, Zauberflöte,
Rosenkavalier, Arabella, Meistersinger, Don Giovanni, Die Fledermaus, Die
Lustige Witwe, Giuditta.
I fell in love with this voice after hearing her as Sophie the first time.
Orphee
David7Gable
Orphée, do you have more details on the Columbia Figaro with Gueden? That's
the only item you mention that I don't know.
-david gable
David7Gable
Hilde Gueden may well be my favorite singer. It just so happens that I sent a
long e-mail message to somebody about her just the other night. We were
discussing four singers we both admire, Victoria de los Angeles, Erna Berger,
Lisa della Casa, and Hilde Gueden. My friend, however, had expressed a
preference for Rothenberger's Zdenka, to mention another singer we both admire.
Below, slightly edited, is what I wrote about Gueden and in particular her
recordings of Rigoletto, Le nozze di Figaro, and L'elisir d'amore.
-david gable
As for Hilde Gueden, I don't think she ever sang two notes in succession
unintelligently, and it just so happens that I love the odd and very slow but
gradually quickening vibrato through which the dark underside of her pure
"white" soprano is revealed. Not that she has much control over it, but I love
it anyway. On the other had, emanating from the chest cavity of a bimbo I
probably wouldn't. Her vibrato is precisely the thing that repels a friend of
mine, but not me. The sensuality of voice is a part of singing, and at the
level of sheer sound I love seeing the glimpses of the dark coloration in her
voice as she effortlessly floats a smooth sustained tone. (In the sense of
effortless and unforced vocal production technically she was a very
accomplished singer, although less so than Berger.) I love Rothenberger, too,
another intelligent singer (and Lulu without peer) but Gueden is not only my
favorite Zdenka but my favorite everything else. One of my great regrets is
that she didn't sing Fiordiligi earlier in her career and make a good
commercial recording of it. Would also love a Four Last Songs with her,
although I could never love any performance more than Della Casa's. (I don't
know Jurinac's, which could easily be on the same exalted level, but no other
performance I've heard equals Della Casa's.) The only Italian roles I've heard
Gueden sing are Adina, Gilda (two performances, one live), and Traviata
(excerpts only with Wunderlich, Fischer-Dieskau, and a mediocre conductor).
Oh, yes, and Musetta. One with Karajan and one with Tebaldi. I'd rather hear
her sing Mimi, but I don't think she ever sang it.
I find her commercial recordings of Adina and Gilda unsurpassable. I know
there's a very real sense in which Berger sings more purely, but that hasn't
the slightest relevance for me. Berger is neither more musical nor more
expressive. Coupled with the attaction I feel toward the actual sound of
Gueden's voice, the extraordinary intelligence and expressivity that Gueden
brings to Gilda carry the day for me. I can't get over the way she sings, for
example, the phrase "V'ho ingannato! colpevole fui!" prior to "Lassu in cielo"
at the end of the opera, although it's impossible to describe exactly what it
is that she does . . . except to say that what she does is not self-consciously
mannered ŕ la Schwarzkopf, whose intelligence is frequently made irrelevant by
her preciosity, self-consciousness, pretentiousness, and lack of taste. While
a singer like Sutherland never sang a note with one iota of the distinction
with which Gueden unself-consciously and un-calculatedly shapes and weights and
colors every syllable she ever sings, although, of course, Berger, De los
Angeles, and Della Casa (and Jurinac, Rysanek, Callas, Gencer, Rothenberger,
etc.) did the same thing.
You've probably seen my tortured defense of the Rigoletto with Gueden,
Simionato, Del Monaco, Protti, Siepi, and Erede on rmcr. Del Monaco is
indefensible. He sabotages the piece. Before I heard that recording I thought
it might at least be fun to hear him blast his way through "La donna č mobile,"
but I was wrong, and he ruins every single movement he sings in, but Erede is
far better than his usual comparatively bland self although without equalling
Kubelik or Renato Cellini, and Protti is actually quite remarkably sensitive as
Rigoletto if you are perverse enough to be able to ignore one of the ugliest,
coarsest, wooliest, and poorly produced voices ever recorded. Live you can
find Gueden partnered with Warren in two different recordings, the one from New
Orleans being the only one I know, but I perversely love her performance as
Gilda on the Decca set more than any other performance of Gilda I've ever
heard. Berger at least enables me to forget that fact while I'm listening to
her, although I know this preference can only seem perverse. Objectively I'm
equally in awe of both Gilda's but in fact I somehow "connect" slightly more
with Gueden.
I admire exactly the same things in Gueden's Adina in the L'elisir d'amore with
Di Stefano, Capecchi, Corena, and Molinari-Pradelli, and that set doesn't
require any special pleading. Only Corena is not operating on the same high
level as the others, although I still think he's good, and Di Stefano shows a
little too much strain in "Una furtiva lagrima" (and that depressingly early
in his career!).
First of all, I think this is by far one of the best conducted performances of
an Italian opera I've ever heard. (Molinari-Pradelli's less good, although
characteristic, in his later recording with Freni and Gedda. M-P also seems to
have been better suited to earlier as opposed to later 19th century Italian
opera, to Don Pasquale or Traviata than Forza or Turandot. On the other hand,
his Cetra Boccanegra is pretty good.) I find the unself-conscious flexibility
Molinari-Pradelli brings to every phrase while maintaining a fairly strict beat
at times literally breath taking. For one especially remarkable example of
what I mean, just listen to the way he caresses the waltz theme that
accompanies Adina's reading of the story of Tristan ed Isotta as it weaves its
spell. That kind of sensitivity and flexibility is lost forever in our age of
literalism and so-called authenticity. The older I get the more I think the
letter killeth . . .
Nemorino was Di Stefano's signature role because the character's ingenuous
earnestness perfectly matched the singer's own. He's a completely convincing
Nemorino. Capecchi is stunningly good, a canny and utterly distinctive
Belcore. Intelligence is again the thing that springs to mind. And Gueden is
well nigh ideal. I've heard amusing parodies of Gueden's Italian with every qu
pronounced qv--"Qvanto amore"--but, in reality, there's seldom even a hint of
that in her Italian roles. There are one or two points where her less than
perfect agility is apparent, but who cares? At any rate I don't. In her
performance Adina's "wickedness" is the wickedness of an intelligent woman, the
pathos that results when she gains access to her true feelings all the more
moving. (That's also the story that Donizetti told.) Literally every phrase
and indeed every syllable in this performance is characterized by the same
distinction that characterizes every Gueden performance. In that sense,
Berger, Della Casa, Gueden, and de los Angeles don't have to calculate what
they do. They just do it. It's what they are. They're intelligent, musical,
and expressive and they don't have to be calculating . . . only alert,
conscious.
Two other Gueden performances I love "beyond the point where criticism
matters," as Stravinsky once said of his love for Rigoletto and Ballo, are her
Susanna in Erich Kleiber's Figaro and her Eva in Knappertsbusch's
Meistersinger. She is in especially youthful voice in the Meistersinger, while
her interactions with, first Siepi, and then Danco and Della Casa in the first
act of Figaro reveal what a very great actress she was, and she has the brains
to go one on one with the Count. Contrasting her with, say, Roberta Peters as
Susanna, not that I have anything against Peters, throws into relief exactly
what I mean. Susanna is not the most vocally demanding role, and neither
Gueden nor Peters has the slighest problem with it. Peters is not
unintelligent and she has a certain amount of personality, but she's not as
intelligent as Gueden, and she unthinkingly falls back on the cute-sy in a way
that Gueden never would, even though she's not remotely cloyingly or
offensively cutesy. But relying on the cutesy at all is exactly the opposite
of relying on the intelligence. By resorting to the cutesy, one says "See how
cute I am" as a generic solution for getting around any problem without having
to resort to the intelligence to solve any specific problem. And that's not
what Figaro's about. Susanna doesn't set out to bewitch the Count; she's
already done that without intending to. She outwits him.
Finally, I don't know where to dump this little paragraph that sprouted up when
I was writing about L'elisir above, so I'll dump it here. Discussing the waltz
theme that accompanies Adina's reading of the story of Tristan and Isotta, I
should have said "the way Molinari-Pradelli makes the waltz theme caress YOU,
the listener, as it weaves its spell." The waltz theme weaves the kind of
spell a love potient might weave, and it's a crucial irony in the opera that
Nemorino attempts to assume the role of Tristan by pharmacological means when
he's the one who's been bewitched, an irony also embodied in the opera's title.
As Adina reads the story of Isotta's magic potient, we see that she's quite
conscious of her ability to bewitch and also amused at how easily others are
bewitched. Adina's spell weaving is embodied in the seductive action of the
waltz theme. When the opera opens, neither Adina nor Nemorino thinks there's
anything more to feeling than bewitchment. He's a victim of it while she feels
superior to it, because she's always been the bewitcher. She's also more
conscious than Nemorino, as lovable as Nemorino is, and at the end of the opera
her transformation is correspondingly more complete and more moving.
-david gable