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Posted March 12, 2017
Posted March 12, 2017
Wagnerian bass Kurt Moll, notably Gurnemanz in Parsifal and King Marke in Tristan und Isolde, died on March 5, 2017 in Cologne, Germany after a long illness. He was 78.
Mr. Moll bid an emotional farewell to the opera stage in 2006 on the last night of the annual Munich Opera Festival at the Bavarian State Opera, singing the small role of the Night Watchman in Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” — a part he had sung nearly four decades earlier as a young performer at the Bayreuth Festival.
Charles Michener wrote in The New York Observer: “When the great German bass Kurt Moll came out for his curtain call after the second act of Die Meistersinger at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, the audience gave him a hero’s ovation. Mr. Moll had appeared only fleetingly as the tipsy Night Watchman in old Nürnberg, but this was the 68-year-old singer’s last performance on any opera stage and the good people of Munich were not about to let him go gently. What was most extraordinary was not that the cheers lasted for a good 10 minutes, but that they were so palpably felt. For these opera goers, Mr. Moll wasn’t just an artist delivering his swan song; he was more like a departing relative who would be personally missed.”
Mr. Moll once said of Wagners’ music: “His monologue contains some of the most ravishing music ever written, but it’s also very long and very inward, if the bass isn’t careful, he will find that his audience has fallen fast asleep by the end of it. You can stand there in your beard, and that beard will seem to get longer and longer as you sing. You have to remember to externalize what is essentially inward — to give the monologue life, variety, color, nuance. That’s what keeps the audience listening.”