Emmy Bettendorf & Gerhard Husch – La ci darem (in German) (‘Don Giovanni’ – Mozart) (1932)

Emmy Bettendorf and Gerhard Husch sing ‘La ci darem la mano’ (in German), with orchestra conducted by Frieder Weissmann, recorded in Berlin in 1932.

From Wikipedia:

Emmy Bettendorf (16 July 1895 – 20 October 1963) was a German operatic soprano.

Born in Frankfurt, Bettendorf felt attracted to a career as a singer at an early age. At the age of 14 she sang for the first time at the Oper Frankfurt. At the age of 19 she received a two-year contract there in 1914 and made her debut in Das Nachtlager von Granada by Conradin Kreutzer. In 1916 she moved to Schwerin before she went to Berlin in 1920. There she was engaged at the Berlin State Opera from 1920 to 1924, and afterwards at the Deutsche Oper Berlin.

The singer expanded her repertoire in all directions, singing famous roles as both a lyrical and lyrical-dramatic soprano. Guest performances with Bronsgeest’s touring opera made her famous in Holland, Spain and all over Germany. But already in 1928 an illness put an end to her opera career. After that she only appeared in concerts (until 1934) and sang for recordings…She left more than 300 recordings.

Bettendorf married in 1931 and lived in Austria subsequently. After the death of her husband in 1938, she was in such a bad financial situation that she had to give concerts again…With the money she earned she ran a boarding house for foreigners in Garmisch. Finally, the bassist Michael Bohnen brought her to the Berlin Musikhochschule as a singing teacher. There and at the Berlin Conservatory (today both united in the Berlin University of the Arts) she taught until 1952. The once celebrated singer spent her last years sick and lonely in Berlin, where she died at age 68.

Gerhard Heinrich Wilhelm Fritz Hüsch (2 February 1901 – 23 November 1984) was one of the most important German singers of modern times. A lyric baritone, he specialized in Lieder but also sang, to a lesser extent, German and Italian opera.

Hüsch was born in Hanover in 1901. He studied acting there as a young man but later took up singing, gaining experience at a series of provincial German theatres… From 1925 to 1944, he was engaged to sing regularly in Berlin (most significantly at the Berlin State Opera) and at several other leading opera venues in Germany and Austria. Such important overseas theatres as The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London, and La Scala, Milan, heard him sing during the 1930s, when his international reputation attained its peak.

The operatic role for which he is perhaps best remembered is that of Papageno, in Mozart’s The Magic Flute…His stage repertoire, however, included most of the standard roles for the lighter baritone voice…

He partnered many of Germany’s best sopranos, mezzo-sopranos, tenors and basses of the inter-war years, while Bruno Walter completed a triumvirate of lastingly famous conductors with whom he appeared (the others being, as we have seen, Toscanini and Beecham).

Lacking the sheer vocal amplitude of his heroic baritone contemporaries Hans Hotter and Rudolf Bockelmann, Hüsch concentrated instead on investing his singing with an unfailingly smooth line, a rounded tone and beautifully lucid diction in the manner of a celebrated German lyric-baritone rival, Heinrich Schlusnus, who was his senior by 13 years. Nowhere were these exemplary vocal qualities better displayed than in his pioneering, pre-war, 78-rpm Lieder records. He performed on disc the first more-or-less-uncut versions of Schubert’s Winterreise and Die Schöne Müllerin song-cycles, and Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte; his discs of songs by Hugo Wolf, made under Walter Legge’s auspices, helped introduce that composer to thousands of music-lovers previously unfamiliar with Wolf’s output; and he released a generous selection of songs by Hans Pfitzner, these recordings bearing the imprimatur of Pfitzner himself at the piano. The Finnish composer Yrjö Kilpinen found in Hüsch a steadfast champion.

On close listening, recordings show that Hüsch chose to intentionally ‘under-sing’, never pushing his upper register or inflating his tone beyond the limits of its natural resonance. Sometimes Hüsch performed in choral masterpieces as well…

After World War II, Hüsch, whose political naïveté during the Third Reich (and, in particular, his closeness to Rosalind von Schirach, the sister of prominent Nazi Baldur von Schirach) was unlikely to endear him to the victorious Allies, mostly abandoned concert and operatic appearances, preferring to concentrate on teaching…

In 1984, at the age of 83, he died in Munich.

I transferred this side from Australian Parlophone A 3553.