RECORDINGS IN REVIEW: VALHALLA ON THE HUDSON

1 6 7 R R E C O R D I N G S I N R E V I E W D E W E Y F A U L K N E R The ten major operas of Richard Wagner have a long and distinguished history at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, and the Met has chosen to celebrate the 2013 anniversary of Wagner’s birth by releasing Wagner at the Met, CD recordings of nine broadcast performances given between 1936 and 1954 (Sony 542717; 25 CDs). The Met has done this kind of thing before, starting in 1974 under the auspices of the Metropolitan Opera Guild, but those were luxurious limited-availability productions on LP and later CD, given in return for donations. They included broadcasts of Tannh äuser and Tristan und Isolde, both from 1941, and Die Walküre from 1944. In 2011 the Met went public: Sony was granted rights to distribute Met issues commercially, and it has released a Walk üre from 1968 and a Meistersinger from 1972. With Wagner at the Met, Sony has returned to the earlier Wagner era sampled in the Guild’s sets, five operas from the ‘‘Golden Age’’ of Wagner under manager Edward Johnson (1935–50), and four from the somewhat tarnished age of Rudolf Bing’s early seasons, from 1950 to 1954. Only Parsifal has been omitted from Sony’s big box. Wagner’s Golden Age at the Met was a product of public de- 1 6 8 F A U L K N E R Y mand, shrewd management, and a unique group of singers. Like most things German, Wagner vanished from the Met in 1917, the year our boys went ‘‘over there,’’ but by the 1922–23 season five of his operas were again in the repertory, and by the winter of 1932 eight were being performed, Depression or no. By 1935 manager Giulio Gatti-Casazza had acquired accomplished Wagner singers who essentially remained in residence for the season. His final stellar additions to the Met roster were the Australian soprano Marjorie Lawrence and the Norwegian soprano Kirsten Flagstad, both of whom debuted in 1935, the year Gatti-Casazza retired and was replaced by Edward Johnson. In 1935 Gatti-Casazza’s greatest contribution to Met history was very much in place, the radio broadcasts of matinee performances that began in late 1931 and continue to this day. Originally these were only an hour or so long, and in the winter of 1932 portions of all eight Wagner operas being performed were broadcast , two of them twice. A year later, on 11 March, Tristan became the first Wagner opera transmitted complete, with Lauritz Melchior and Frida Leider as the leads. Now not just New York but the entire country heard Wagner sung by some of the greatest voices ever to present these roles, which helped the Met’s box o≈ce weather the increasingly di≈cult days of the 1930s. One of these glorious voices, Flagstad’s, sold out the house regularly after her debut as Sieglinde in Die Walküre on 2 February 1935. Because of this she is often credited as the savior of the Met, but the public wanted to hear her in partnership with Melchior, especially in Tristan, Walküre, Siegfried, Götterdämmerung, and Parsifal. The Met obliged, o√ering the pair in the first two regularly and in the other three plus Lohengrin and Tannhäuser occasionally. Heldentenor Lauritz Melchior justifiably appears in all five of the Johnson-era broadcasts in Wagner at the Met, which omits only his roles as Tannhäuser and Parsifal. Melchior’s voice was enormous yet capable of constricting to a laser-like edge, so that it could both ride over and cut through Wagner’s huge orchestra. It was totally under control, capable of numerous varieties of tonal beauty. And Melchior was a superb actor, delivering his words with the utmost understanding, altering his voice to suit the moment , occasionally even reverting to a kind of Sprechstimme for R E C O R D I N G S I N R E V I E W 1 6 9 R emphasis. He comprehended and...