"Tristan und Isolde" on Record: A Comprehensive Discography of Wagner's Music Drama with a Critical Introduction to the Recordings (review)

"Tristan und Isolde" on Record: A Comprehensive Discography of Wagner's Music Drama with a Critical Introduction to the Recordings. By Jonathan Brown. (Discographies, 85.) Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000. [xvii, 267 p. ISBN 0-313-31489-6. $79.50.]

"Tristan und Isolde" on Record is the first comprehensive discography dedicated to Richard Wagner's music drama. The work is author Jonathan Brown's second such compendium; in 1992 Greenwood published his book "Parsifal" on Record, which offers a similar treatment of Wagner's final work. The compilation of a discography such as this can be an unending task, and Brown sets practical limits on the scope of his work in the preface: he has chosen to include only performances that have been issued on publicly available LPs or compact discs. "Rumored" or otherwise unpublished recordings, and performances issued on tape by bootleg dealers--Mr. Tape of Queens, New York, was one such firm--are not discussed. Brown has excluded tapes available on a membership-only basis for research purposes, thus eliminating material issued by the Immortal Performances Recorded Music Society based in British Columbia. He notes that more than twenty of the thirty-five complete recordings listed in the discography were originally labeled "Private Recording" or "Not for Sale" and issued by enterprising pirates, the most famous of whom was the late Edward J. Smith. Brown's decision to include these significant recordings was wise.

Over one-fourth of "Tristan und Isolde" on Record is an introduction with commentary on all complete recorded performances, including those captured on video, plus discussion of a generous sampling of excerpts from each of the three acts. Brown's comments reveal thorough and careful listening to the recordings in question; his views are typically well founded and often in sightful. His remark on Eileen Farrell's live 1951 performance of the Liebestod seems odd, however; in Brown's view, Farrell is "no match for the New York Philharmonic under Victor De Sabata, who combine to overwhelm her" (p. 63). To my ears, admittedly lacking in interpretive depth, the thirty-one-year-old soprano demonstrates that, had her musical interests leaned in that direction, a significant career in the dramatic Wagner roles could have been hers for the asking. Brown finds merit in Maria Callas's 1957 Athens performance of the Liebestod, yet he fails to mention her bizarre transposition: at the eighteenth measure after the key change to B major, the pitch is lowered a half step; this is not a recording defect.

The discography itself is divided into eight parts. Part 1 lists, in chronological order, all commercially issued recordings of "complete" performances. Each entry includes identification of all cast members and the orchestra, chorus, and conductor; also given is the location of the performance. Catalog numbers of all LP and compact-disc releases of each performance, at least those issued in Europe and North America, are also listed. Like most of Wagner's works, Tristan und Isolde was rarely performed in unabridged form during the first half of the twentieth century; the various Metropolitan Opera performances conducted by Artur Bodanzky and Erich Leinsdorf are among the most severely cut. Particularly valuable are Brown's detailed notes describing all cuts taken in each performance.

Part 2 lists the principal recordings of selections from the opera, beginning with the Mapleson cylinder recordings captured live at the Metropolitan between 1901 and 1903, and also including the Columbia recording made in conjunction with the 1928 Bayreuth festival, conducted by Karl Elmendorff. The Elmendorff performance is so heavily cut that it is rightly placed in this section rather than with the "complete" recordings. Parts 3, 4, and 5 are devoted to shorter excerpts from each of the three acts, many dating from the first decade of the twentieth century. Part 6 encompasses orchestral arrangements...