Scintille diamant

Heinz Rehfuss, Bass-Baritone (1917-1988)
Jacques Offenbach LES CONTES D'HOFFMANN
Scintille, diamant!
Conducted by Pierre Michel LeConte
Recorded 1958

My personal opinion: One couldn't ignore, in the eerily beautiful "Scintille diamant" from LES CONTES D'HOFFMANN, the voice has difficulties in the expansion ("... attire-la"), and in Mephistophélès' famous rondo "Le veau d'or" from Gounod's FAUST, the singer does not even try to compete with the stunning opulence of Boris Christoff. And yet in both cases there's satanic magic, a vague menace, caused by refined accentuation, each word underlined by the slightest shift of vocal expression, syllable by syllable. The singer delivers almost a spoken monolog that makes one shudder due to slight tonal nuances. He avoids every danger of exaggeration as we know it from Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, whose scholastic tone reduced natural expression. Unlike him, the Frankfurt born but naturalized Swiss bass-baritone Heinz Rehfuss never became a first row artist, even if he is renowned in France as a superb singer of numerous mélodies.
I heard the jewish singer for the first time in the rare FAUST recording with Leopold Simoneau and his wife Pierrette Alarie; a concert performance from 1963. I still remember my surprise and delight. I didn't know this production, and even today it is not listed in most discographies. Maybe one reason is the critic's focus at the time on Simoneau, who sang as usual very nice. But the great Canadian tenor did only justice to the difficult Faust role in moments of lyric poetry since expressiveness was never a strength of him; he always projected passion with almost shy reluctance. The high C in the cavatine is, compared to other tenors, a sweet little something...
Perhaps these restrictions robbed sympathies from the performance, and other participating protagonists were unfairly ignored; for example Liliane Berton in her signature roles as Siebel. Rehfuss' intelligent designing of the Mephistophélès character was overlooked not at least because of Boris Christoff's dominance in two Cluytens recordings made some years earlier. Rehfuss, against usual expectations, gave an elegant and ingenious devil. He never tried to pretend superficial Satanism. The menace arose from apparent normality with which Rehfuss surrounded the figur. This Mephisto was less obvious, more enigmatic, and some sentences Rehfuss presented with casual viciousness, for instance "Et Satan conduit le bal...", or the ill-omened "Tu ne chanteras plus?" in the HOFFMANN recording under the baton of Pierre Michel LeConte (which has the best of all Nicklausse's, Swiss born Nata Tüscher). Simoneau as Hoffmann is, almost embarrassing to admit it, once more at less to his best and inclined to blandness. Rehfuss steals the show with his impressive personifications of the four villains, but it's not enough to save the unfortunate recording.
We can't close without referring to two other Rehfuss recordings. The first is Karajan's conducting of Bach's magnificent MASS IN B MINOR, made in the years 1952/53 in Vienna and London, and played, most unusually, by two orchestras. A moment for the desert island is Rehfuss almost priestly singing of the bass-solo "Et in Spiritum Sanctum Dominum" from the 'Credo'; a performance which brought british critic Steane to the following praise: "He compensated deficits with the warmth of his timbre and the instrumental use of his voice. His recitatives are object-lessons, intelligently enunciated and beautifully rounded. This is, what singing essentially is: A beautiful voice trained to sing beautifully, and a brain and heart to guide it, but the beauty comes first."
The second one is PELLÉAS ET MÉLISANE under Ansermet with Suzanne Danco. Rehfuss gave one of his most haunting portrayals, and showed all the Janus-faced character of the wayward Golaud. An intuitive and multifarious interpretation: Simultaneously imperious, vulnerable, erratic and uncanny; perhaps the best on records despite great French Baritones such as Gérard Souzay and Gabriel Bacquier.