Kurt Moll--bass
Cord Garben--piano
1982
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"Kurt Moll, the imposing German bass whose theatrical flair and cavernous low notes allowed him to plumb the serenity, humor and ferocity of a wide array of operatic characters created by Mozart, Strauss and Wagner, died on March 5 in Cologne, Germany. He was 78.
His death was announced in Munich by the Bavarian State Opera, which said that it followed a long illness. The illness was not specified.
Mr. Moll’s 6-foot-2 frame was made to measure for many of the basso profundo roles he came to own on the stages of the world’s leading opera houses. He was his generation’s pre-eminent Baron Ochs in Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier,” mixing humor with a distinct tinge of menace in his portrayal of the character, a boorish lecher who gets his comeuppance.
Mr. Moll’s Ochs is preserved on a number of acclaimed recordings and videos, in performances led by conductors including Carlos Kleiber, Herbert von Karajan and James Levine.
“Well, it took me forever to do it properly,” Mr. Moll said in a wide-ranging interview with The New York Times in 1979. “It’s probably the hardest role in the bass repertory, and what’s hard is capturing the infinite number of nuances of both the language and the music. No doubt about it, Ochs is a real killer!”
But Mr. Moll was equally persuasive in other, quite different parts. He made a spiritual, magisterial Sarastro in Mozart’s “Die Zauberflöte.” Reviewing a 1991 performance, Donal Henahan wrote in The Times that he “not only projected Sarastro’s mystic nobility and humanity, but also, more solidly and audibly than any basso profundo in years, the role’s subterranean F’s and F sharps of his two arias.”
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Mr. Moll was a comic, scene-stealing Osmin in Mozart’s “Die Entführung aus dem Serail” and a stentorian Commendatore in Mozart’s “Don Giovanni.”
And he sang a wide range of Wagner’s fathers, cuckolds, giants and monarchs. He became especially known for his Gurnemanz, the old knight in “Parsifal.”
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Mr. Moll, right, was the comic, scene-stealing Osmin in Mozart’s “Die Entführung aus dem Serail” in 2003.
Mr. Moll, right, was the comic, scene-stealing Osmin in Mozart’s “Die Entführung aus dem Serail” in 2003.Credit...Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
Mr. Moll once offered an insight into his approach to singing opera while discussing how, in Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde,” he tackled the part of the melancholy King Marke, who loses his bride to his would-be heir.
“His monologue contains some of the most ravishing music ever written, but it’s also very long and very inward,” he said. “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,” he added. “That’s what keeps the audience listening.”
He did not initially set out to become a singer. Born on April 11, 1938, in a small town near Cologne, he studied the cello as a child but planned to become a businessman or industrialist. It was a school chorus master who first recognized his vocal talents and persuaded him take up singing seriously. He enrolled in Cologne’s conservatory, and set out on a career.
“To begin with, my voice was rather small and very light,” Mr. Moll later recalled, “but it always had depth, and the depth and resonance developed with the years.”
After starting out learning his craft in regional German opera companies in Aachen, Mainz and Wuppertal, he joined the Hamburg Opera in 1969. He sang 70 different roles there within the span of five years.
He had a breakthrough as Sarastro at the Salzburg Festival in 1970, and began to develop an international reputation. Soon he was singing with leading companies in Munich, Vienna, Paris, Berlin and London as well as at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, the Bayreuth Festival in Germany and the Metropolitan Opera in New York, with which he sang 128 times.
He is survived by his wife, Ursula. Information about his other survivors was not immediately available.
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.
“What was most extraordinary was not that the cheers lasted for a good 10 minutes, but that they were so palpably felt,” Charles Michener wrote in The New York Observer. “For these operagoers, Mr. Moll wasn’t just an artist delivering his swan song; he was more like a departing relative who would be personally missed.”; nyt