"A Remembrance" from Donald Arthur, December 10, 2003, as posted on the Moderated Classical Music list. --- 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 -- Lesson 9: "Nobody Knows the Suffering That Farmers (and Students) Do." --George J. Stigler,How to Pass Examinations in Economics --

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