Artur Bodanzky
The Austrian Conductor Artur
Bodanzky was born in Vienna in 1877 and studied at the Vienna Conservatory,
before joining the Court Opera as a violinist. After making his debut as a
conductor in Bohemia, he returned to the Court Opera in Vienna in 1903 as
assistant to Gustav Mahler and then as a conductor in Berlin, Prague and Mannheim.
He conducted the first Paris performances of Die Fledermaus and the
first London performances of Parsifal, following this with appointment
as chief German conductor at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, where he
succeeded Alfred Hertz. At the same time he enjoyed a busy career in the concert-hall
in a diverse repertoire. His association with the Metropolitan opera continued.
Until his death in 1939. Over the 24 seasons he conducted 1087 performances.
Bodanzky was much admired and, at the same time, greatly disliked by some.
He was capable of giving inspiring performances, especially in Wagner, but
could appear rushed and perfunctory, anxious, as his assistant Erich Leinsdorf
recounts, to be done and back home at the card-table. At his best in the 1937
Siegfried and 1937 and 1938 Tristan und Isolde, his Rheingold
reveals his virtues and his failings, the latter particularly in his remake
of the score, breaking the opera into two acts, and its alternation of inspired
leadership and passages in which notes and phrases do not seem to be fully
sounded, in his eagerness to press forward. Similar praise and criticism might
be levelled at this 1939 Rosenkavalier, with its objectionable cut
of the imbroglio that precedes the departure of Baron Ochs. He was behind
Edward Johnston's ill-advised decision to cast Kirsten Flagstad as Leonore
in Fidelio in 1936, instead of Lotte Lehmann, a singer distinguished
in the role, who decided she would never perform it again at the Met.
A number of Bodanzky's performances of Wagner at the Met are preserved from
the 1930s. He was succeeded, on his sudden death at the age of 62, by Erick
Leinsdorf.
