From: Donald Arthur
   Sent: Wednesday, December 10, 2003 12:54 PM
   Subject: A Remembrance

   Dear Friends;

   Last Saturday afternoon, December 6, at 5:30 P.M., my dear
   friend and wise mentor, Hans Hotter, departed this earth,
   leaving it a far better place for his having been here.  He
   was at home, well cared-for, peaceful and in full possession
   of his exceptional intellectual faculties.  In another few
   weeks, on January 19, 2004, he would have been able to celebrate
   his 95 th birthday.  He leaves a son, artist Peter Hotter, a
   daughter, Gabriele Strauss, wife of the composer's namesake
   and grandson and a co-custodian of the Richard Strauss Archives
   in Garmisch, two granddaughters, several great-grandchildren
   and a widespread collection of friends, all of whom grieve
   at his departure.

   Although born in the Hessian city of Offenbach, where his
   father was teaching at an engineering school, he always
   regarded himself as a proud native of Munich, to which he
   returned on his father's early death when he was still a young
   child.  While always interested in music, as were many other
   members of his family, he initially heeded the warning of his
   grandfather Hotter, last in a long line of Bavarian blacksmiths
   and an amateur zither virtuoso, contending that making music
   at home was a noble pastime, while making music professionally
   was something only vagabonds do.  Nevertheless, when he
   completed his academic studies, he was so drawn to the art,
   he decided to continue on to Munich's Music Academy, where
   he studied everything but singing, majoring in church organ.

   It was while he was moonlighting as an associate organist and
   assistant choir director in a church in the Munich neighborhood
   of Milbertshofen, where his high school music teacher held
   the senior post, that teacher arranged for a voice teacher
   friend, Matthaus Romer, also a PhD. philologist, who also
   served as a language teacher to Bavaria's royal family, to
   come hear Hans singing solos in church.  After vocal studies
   with no less an authority than Jean de Reszke, Dr. Romer had
   enjoyed a brief career as a tenor, even singing Parsifal under
   the musical direction of Karl Muck in a production at the
   prestigious Bayreuth Festival in Hans's birth year of 1909.
   When he heard Hans Hotter's voice he impressed upon the young
   musician that his destiny was the opera and concert stage,
   which Hans first felt inimical to his basically diffident
   nature, but when he actually managed to convince Hans's
   reluctant mother, who was also under heavy pressure from her
   own mother to relent, it was finally decided that the young
   man would continue on to enrich the stages of the world as a
   bass-baritone.

   After initial engagements in Oppava in today's Czech Republic,
   then called Troppau by its German-speaking populace, and the
   Silesian capital of Breslau, today Wroc"aw in Poland, he was
   literally on his way to audition for the State Opera in Berlin,
   when he happened to run across Dr. Paul Eger, the director
   of the German Theatre in Prague, who urged him to come to
   the Czech capital, where he would have a chance to develop
   gradually, and not get lost in the huge Berlin ensemble at
   the time.

   After honing his talents in Prague, Hans received an invitation
   to join the roster at the Hamburg State Opera, but was reluctant
   to leave Prague, except perhaps for Vienna, because Adolf
   Hitler had meanwhile seized power in his native Germany, and
   he had no desire to be involved with that country under that
   regime.  Dr. Eger, a canny Austro-Hungarian Jew, assured him
   that he had little choice but to follow his destiny, assuring
   him that the handwriting was on the wall anyway, and soon
   Hitler and his repulsive goons would be barging into Austria
   and Czechoslovakia as well, which, of course, they did.
   Fortunately Dr. Eger had a Swiss passport, which got him out
   of harm's way in time, a fate not vouchsafed to one of Hans's
   other close friends, Oppava native Pavel Eckstein, at the
   time a young Jewish law student, but later, after escaping
   the clutches of the Nazis, one of the highest-profile
   personalities on the Czech music scene.  Their post-war reunion
   was a joyous event for both men.

   In 1937, Hans was taken by surprise when his application for
   permission to leave Germany for an all-Wagner concert conducted
   by Bruno Walter at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam was granted.
   On that occasion, after a long and sad discussion of conditions
   in Germany, Dr. Walter told Hans he could guarantee him
   performances in the United States if he were simply not to
   return to Hamburg, but no man is an island, and the singer
   meanwhile had a wife, a young son, his mother and an older
   brother, the distinguished anti-Nazi Catholic theologian, Dr.
   Karl Hotter, all of whom would have been subject to repressive
   measures and indeed even criminal prosecution were anyone of
   his prominence to abandon them to their fate.  Bruno Walter
   regretfully advised Hans to stay where he was.

   But no power on earth could get him to perform at the Bayreuth
   Festival during the administration of Winifred Wagner, Hitler's
   staunch English-born advocate.  Meanwhile a member of the
   opera company in his home town of Munich, he and the company
   director, Clemens Krauss, worked out legal means to keep him
   out of the 1940 festival, which turned out to be an orgy of
   adulation for Hitler and his cronies.  As Wieland Wagner later
   told him, when he joined the post-war festival in 1952: "My
   mother never forgave you for that."

   The rest of Hans's career is so well-known, there is little
   point in going into detail in this personal remembrance.
   His career in opera and concert took him to just about every
   continent on earth and included appearances in Australia,
   Japan, North and South America and virtually every major
   theatre and concert hall in Europe.  He was lauded almost
   everywhere but New York, where after a successful 1950 debut
   in the title role of Der fliegende Hollander with local New
   York soprano Astrid Varnay, and a spine-tingling delineation
   of the Grand Inquisitor in Don Carlo, which won him accolades
   from one local music magazine as "operatic performance of the
   year", the Metropolitan's somewhat eccentric General Manager
   Rudolf Bing decided he was better suited for secondary roles,
   which meant that Hans generally made a wide berth of New York,
   although appearing there frequently in concert, a career that
   concluded with a definitive performance of the narrator's
   role in Schonberg's Gurrelieder at Zubin Mehta's farewell
   concert with the New York Philharmonic when Hans was already
   in his late seventies.

   Hans Hotter was a big man in every way.  One conductor said
   it was fortunate he had advanced to the great stages of the
   world because on any other platform, his long-armed invocation
   of whatever deities prevailed in the operas he sang would
   have sent both hands vanishing into the wings on either side
   of the stage.  While his performances often earned the
   appellation "majestic" for both his physical appearance, the
   size of his voice, and the considerable musical wisdom that
   governed his every performance, in a deeper sense, he was
   also a big-hearted man with an enormous respect for his
   colleagues and a great interest in promoting the careers of
   many young students and friends.  Gwyneth Jones and James
   King still enjoy recalling the time Hans drove them to Bayreuth
   in his own car at early stages of their careers to introduce
   them to the management and help organize their first engagements
   in that definitive theatre.

   "Spare me" was his general reaction to tales of directorial
   excesses.  The art meant too much to him to concern himself
   with the monkeyshines of theatrical poseurs eager to gain
   notoriety through audacity without any knowledge of or
   appreciation for the intricacies of the craft, nor did he
   have any time in his day to concern himself with the alleged
   intricacies of approaches by intellectual dwarves.  His
   response to the obsession on the part of many stage directors
   with contemporaneity at any price was simply: "You do not
   pervert a masterwork by using it as a cheap excuse to rehash
   yesterday's newspapers." No hard-bitten traditionalist,
   however, he was vitally interested in any new approaches that
   met his criteria of validity.

   Anything but a stranger to merriment, for all the solemnity
   of many of the roles he interpreted, he was a born mimic, who
   adored entertaining his friends with wondrous tales of musicians
   past.  A born mimic, even in languages other than his native
   German he could, for example, do some fairly devastating
   imitations of all the conductors he worked with, complete
   with their podium body language, and many was the evening
   friends howled with glee at his stories of Thomas Beecham,
   Otto Klemperer, Karl Bohm and Clemens Krauss.  As a matter
   of fact, he even had a physical resemblance to Krauss which
   prompted two members of a Munich audience to gossip that he
   was "of course" the conductor's illegitimate offspring, to
   which a lady sitting in front of them casually intervened:
   "I'm in a position to know that is not true - I'm his mother."

   His late wife, the former Helga Fischer, gave up an acting
   career to stand beside him throughout the world, and he once
   summed her up with deep affection as someone who could be
   sharp-tongued and critical without ever descending into
   personal abuse or hurting anybody.  I personally remember her
   one-syllable zinger when I asked her what the recently unearthed
   third act of Lulu was like, and she replied "long", or told
   her I looked forward to rejoining her in the audience for the
   third act of the opera we were watching together, to which,
   ever the loyal baritone's consort, she replied: "Oh, does
   Tosca have a third act?"

   The final years of Hans's life were less than enjoyable -
   dogged by a series of painful illnesses, he spent much of his
   final year in various hospitals or confined to his home by
   his inability to move on weakened, afflicted legs, but his
   mind was as keen and incisive as in his best years.  During
   his final hospital stay in the autumn of this year, he decided
   to pass the time contemplating on some thoughts he had on
   Wotan's second act monologue in Die Walkure and its meaning
   in the scheme of things both in terms of the tetralogy and
   the composer's career, as well as some tips on presenting
   that long passage without its becoming soporific for the
   audience or strenuous for the singer.

   While we were working on a passage to illustrate these thoughts
   for inclusion his memoirs, the telephone rang, and he told
   whoever called: "I can't talk to you right now - I'm working
   on my book with my friend Donald." Those three words "my
   friend Donald" were like a knighthood for me - even more,
   considering the source.  Hans was not an artist who enjoyed
   being followed around by a sycophantic entourage.  He took
   his time making friends, and once he had established a
   friendship, it was always forever.  That friendship continues
   to nurture and console me in his loss.

   If you or your friends would like a message of condolence
   passed along to his bereaved family, please feel free to
   communicate it to me, and I will see that it reaches its
   destination.

   Kind regards to you all,
   Donald Arthur

Janos Gereben/SF
www.sfcv.org
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