Episode 46

We're back on German diction with bass Thorsten Grümbel and sopranos Netta Or and Karen Bandelow, focusing on glottals in German and some unstressed prefixes with open E (er-, her-, ver- and zer-), as well as reviewing a few things that we've talked about before, like the NG sound [ŋ], the unpronounced intervocalic H and some diphthongs. Our texts for this episode are "O Isis und Osiris" from Mozart's Die Zauberflöte (I did not link this to the Opera Guide website because there are several typos there), and "In dem Schatten meiner Locken" from Wolf's Spanisches Liederbuch. I dug through many YouTube clips in researching this episode, so I wanted to include them here. For "O Isis und Osiris" I found Rene Pape (who lives in Dresden and drops in on performances sometimes!), Kurt Moll, Gottlieb Frick and Hans-Peter König (an old colleague of mine from Düsseldorf who sings all over the world, especially the Wagner repertoire). For "In dem Schatten meiner Locken" Elisabeth Grümmer with Hertha Klust uses all of the glottals we talked about, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf has two posted clips, one with Gerald Moore and one with Wilhelm Furtwängler where she uses considerably more glottals than the other performance, and I also found a clip of Lotte Lehmann (with unknown pianist) who doesn't seem to use glottals at all. I also specifically looked for Fischer-Dieskau using glottals and found several examples--the most obvious were in Erlkönig when he says "den Erlkönig" and in "Die Forelle" when he says "Doch endlich". Enjoy this little study on glottals! I'll be in the States giving some master classes for the next few weeks, so the podcast will be back up mid-November for a few episodes before the holidays, but in the meantime, please feel free to contact me with questions, comments or suggestions here, at the Facebook page or directly at ellen@ellenrissinger.com