Voice of thunder.(Book review)

Hans Hotter Memoirs, translated by Donald Arthur. Northwestern University Press, 324 pages, $35

Opera-lovers are as naturally contentious as, if less homicidal than, Iraqi insurgents. Yet on one issue they speak with impressive unanimity. They all admit that, apropos Wagner performances, the two decades following World War II--on both sides of the Atlantic--constituted our last true golden era. Among those performances' protagonists, Hans Hotter reigned supreme. Those privileged to see and hear him as Wotan in the Ring cycle, or as Gurnemanz (Parsifal's biggest, most pitilessly demanding part), beheld a perfect alignment of music and interpreter. Recordings, thank goodness, disclose to us comparative youngsters much of Hotter's subtlety, flawless diction, and--the Teutonic noun is as unavoidable as it is untranslatable--Innigkeit. What they cannot convey is Hotter's often frightening theatrical presence. At six foot four, he dominated any scene where he appeared, aided by aquiline facial features that, in retrospect, implied kinship with Law & Orders Jerry Orbach. Hotter's physique, in short, perfectly complemented that astounding thunderstorm of a voice. Surely, if God sang, He would sound like Hotter.

Blessed with the stamina of three oxen, Hotter died only in 2003, aged ninety-four. That he possessed exceptional dedication, no one could dispute. But numerous exceptionally dedicated singers are almost total airheads, as soon becomes manifest if their technical powers prematurely wane. (The less said of Maria Callas during her vocal atrophy, the better. Let Aristotle Onassis's caustic reproach suffice: "What are you? Nothing. You just have a whistle in your throat that no longer works?') Hotter's memoirs, now in English--a shorter German-language version appeared eleven years back--show that he would have won his colleagues' respect as an all-round artist even if, heaven forbid, he had confined his singing to the shower.

These memoirs, most lavishly illustrated (seventy-odd photographs), explain how Hotter originally concentrated on church performance. While at Munich's chief music college, he eagerly studied the organ and Gregorian chant: pursuits incompatible with most operatic divas' governing instinct of "I want the world and I want it now." At least the organ loft provided a regular--if miniscule--salary, from which he supported his widowed mother. But his singing coach Matthaus Romer urged him to abandon this milieu, with the infelicitiously phrased counsel: "Make up your mind what you want to be: a singer or a musician?' A few provincial try-outs aside, Hotter undertook his official stage debut when twenty-one years old, at Troppau (now Opava, Czech Republic), as the Speaker in The Magic Flute.

Thence he continued triumphing. Heroic baritones--Heldenbaritonen, to use the German rubric--have always been so scarce that they can, in effect, write their own job rules, as most sopranos, for instance, cannot. Whereas young Elisabeth Schwarzkopf had to join the National Socialist Party or lose all hopes of employment, Hotter gave no comparable hostages to post-1945 fortune. As well as shunning NS membership, he cultivated a wickedly accurate vaudeville impersonation of Hitler, which came to the regime's attention, though no actual punishment ensued. Based mainly at Hamburg (which somewhat held aloof from Nazi cultural enthusiasms), Hotter also visited foreign lands, notably France, Belgium, Spain, and England. An English newspaper once caught his eye by announcing "Hotter in London, with more to come." This alluded merely to the capital's increased temperature, but the singer, with harmless vanity, assumed at first that it referred to himself.

In all other ways, Hotter remained remarkably level-headed. Those who deprecate name-dropping in his text should ask themselves how he could have avoided namedropping, given his musical eminence. Was he really meant to conceal his work with Bruno Walter, Clemens Krauss, George Szell, Hans Knappertsbusch, Herbert von Karajan, Wilhelm Furtwangler, and Eugen Jochum among conductors, or Richard Strauss, Hans Pfitzner, and Paul Hindemith among composers? (He sang in three Strauss operatic premieres: Friedenstag, Die Liebe der Danae, and the incomparable Capriccio.) Pfitzner he found ...