The newly available recording of the 1955 Bayreuth ‘Ring’
Unlike my fearless and indefatigable colleague, I visit the opera with reluctance, expecting the worst and usually finding it. The almost universal betrayal in recent decades of this most complex of genres by hideous design and perverted production is never so sheerly ghastly as with the works of Wagner: among these the Ring offers the widest scope for traduction.
I love and revere this colossal yet human monument so deeply (whatever passing moments of reservation or resentment) that witnessing its trials by mockery, malignity, ineptitude, inadequacy, tears a fibre from the brain like a six-lane motorway over a sacred landscape or a shocking demolition in a fine city centre.
Why suffer so? It’s easy enough to stay away! Yet not to experience this supreme drama in the theatre where it belongs is to contract the spirit. To which several generations must reconcile themselves, acquiescing in contemptuous loathing till things swing around, if they ever can.
Thus I receive my Ring from recordings and broadcasts, nose in score, ears in noise, vision charged with the imagination’s inner eye. All have been wonderfully rewarded over the past month by the much-and-justly-heralded release of performances recorded live at Bayreuth 1955 in pioneering stereo sound (now available on Testament). The complications by which this recording has been blocked for half a century make a fascinating tale (told in detail in the CD booklet), sordid at base like the action of the work itself, for all that both end in good resolution.
Over and above the seething rivalries —commercial, artistic, technological — one factor predominated: the ferocious drive behind the first-ever studio version of the Ring, conducted by Georg Solti and masterminded by John Culshaw. This masterpiece of engineering and marketing was conceived as a direct challenge to the inevitable shortcomings of live performances, with their vocal accidents, onstage noise, necessarily wavering quality of sound. It would be made under ideal conditions, with all the advantages of multiple takes, relief for orchestra, conductor and above all for singers in these superhuman roles. The works would be realised spatially in a manner beyond any theatre: depths of the Rhine, heights of the mountain-top, cavalcades of Valkyries across the thunderous sky, battle with a fire-breathing dragon; and, less spectacular but more important, choreographed positions for the protagonists in the long colloquies by which the Ring principally proceeds — loss or gain of ground as the balance shifts between Wotan and Fricka, Wotan and Brünnhilde, Brünnhilde and Siegmund, Siegfried and Brünnhilde — could be followed with physical as well as psychological precision as they crisscrossed the carpet of your front room. To this was specially added a naïve sonic literalism of gasps, clunks, splashes, thuds, tinkles, etc. that, while it stopped short of real water rushing throughout the Rhinemaidens’ scene and suchlike, showed no sense of Wagner’s flawless and economical powers of evocation, perversely resembling the stage noises of live recordings without their dramatic conviction.
Rheingold, first in the Solti/Culshaw project, came out in 1958 and caused a sensation. This work obviously offers terrific scope for just such spatial and special effects; things like the advance and retreat of the anvils in the descent to and ascent from the Underworld and the screeching screams of its myriad oppressed inhabitants remain unforgettable. And the back-to-basics idiom of this ‘preliminary evening’, with its huge blocks of plain diatonic simplicity, suited Solti’s gifts well and did not seriously reveal their radical limitations. Recording was marvellous, the Vienna Phil. played like a million schillings, the singing was by and large good, with the extra bonus of Kirsten Flagstad, supreme Wagnerian soprano of a previous era, coaxed out of retirement for the small role of Fricka, which she learnt specially and sang beautifully.
Subsequent releases (Siegfried 1962, Götterdämmerung 1965, Walküre 1967) yielded sharply diminishing returns for discriminating music lovers, whatever the hype and sales. The orchestra and its recording remained marvellous, but Solti’s inexperience with the work and the crudity of his conception revealed glaring deficiencies. His penchant for short bursts of intense excitement, together with an inability to sustain any longer view, produced a lurid garishness in which beauty of phrasing and depth of expression were lost: such incomplete musical comprehension very soon exhausted pleasure, even interest. And overall the singing declined, despite the steely Brünnhilde of Birgit Nilssen. She apart, the principals — Windgassen’s feckless Siegfried, Hotter’s woofy Wotan — were audibly, sometimes embarrassingly, past their prime.
This is the moment to return to 1955, since it is precisely these two artists who, captured at the height of their powers, evince standards scarcely achieved since, live or on disc. Windgassen here is fresh and strong, boyish in bearskinn’d youth, heroic in love and armour, beautifully capturing boyhood again in the Narration preceding his death, then — after it, so to speak — reinstating his lost heroic stature as he expires: all this with a care for rhythm and metre that, though not impeccable, is way superior to his subsequent sloppiness. And for Hotter’s earlier Wotan/Wanderer superlatives must suffice. The attention to every shade of meaning germane to a great lieder-singer combines with attention to every nuance of character germane to a great actor. When, as here, the voice is fully focused, his glorious assumption of the God in pride, in woe, in fear, in wrath, in an anguish of renunciation, in eventual hope-filled acquiescence, is beyond compare.
A third principal stands firm just below her father in the upper heights. Astrid Varnay’s Brünnhilde combines the dead-true penetration of Nilssen with what Nilssen so signally lacked — warmth and generosity of tone. In these Varnay recalls, though does not surpass, Flagstad. Long experience, total inwardness with the part, in its extremes and complex evolution the work’s most demanding, ensure absolute reliability second to none. By contrast, the fourth principal role, Alberich, is required to be constant throughout. Gustav Neidlinger, still intact and impressive for Solti, was overwhelming a few years before — an astonishing portrayal of thwarted nobility and obsessive power-lust, every word of his Curse burnt upon the brain, able to destroy all who contact his gold, however briefly, however innocent.
The one scene where Alberich requires legerity, the squabble with his brother-dwarf Mime over the treasure after Siegfried releases it from the dragon’s clutches, shows a gift for low comedy in both artists. Such moments of comic, well, ‘relief’ is scarcely the mot juste, epic grotesquerie, rather, aren’t always convincing in Wagner performances, but are extremely successful here. Another comes almost directly after, when Mime declares ever more explicitly to Siegfried, made prescient by tasting dragon’s blood, his intention to drag him, lop off his head and filch the ring. The conductor’s lightness of touch here is not the least of his qualities. Joseph Keilberth has been underrated in the past: the 1955 Ring will put this right. He doesn’t command the supreme archetectonic sublime of Furtwängler nor the simpler narrative massiveness of Knappertsbusch nor yet the expansive golden lyricism of Goodall; he is steady, musical, completely au fait with the score, keeps a taut line (no longueurs, no dead patches), turns some difficult structural and expressive corners with aplomb, can be fresh and original without eccentricity, is capable of great warmth and heady excitement: the entire wid e range of the huge work is in good hands — never less than what it deserves and sometimes approaching something like greatness.
His orchestra is steeped in these notes. Which can have its disadvantages. ‘Longevity has always been a trait,’ says the booklet (oddly) — naming inter alia a clarinettist who played in every Bayreuth Festival from 1924 to the late 1960s! Maybe it’s he who’s responsible for the slightly vinegary tone, disconcerting in solo moments (the bass clarinettist is still more off). Clarinets are principal victims of the Bayreuth balance wherein quite a bit of lovely and important woodwind detail is occluded, even inaudible; so (less) with oboes and even (sometimes) horns. But trumpets are searing: fantastic at the climax of Siegfried’s Funeral Music; elsewhere simply too harsh, cutting, merely loud. The steerhorns in the Summoning of the Vassals, however, are rightly earsplitting. The homogenous mass of the brass choirs is grandly euphonious, well blended, and secure (not a single crack in the eight-part web of canonic forms at the start of Rhinegold); and the overall sonority is grounded in firm rich string tone. Everything is caught in stereo sound so good that the received accounts of gramophone technology will need adjustment.
The rest of the cast can be mentioned more briefly. Fricka, Erda, Sieglinde, Waltraute are fine, and some of the cameo parts for minor gods are particularly treasurable. Rhinemaidens and Valkyries are respectively delectable and doughty — very well disciplined, too, in particular the choric balance when all eight horsemen sing in chorus. Norns, too, in their marvellous scene which some fools would like to see cut. Loge is a touch too hard in the Ring’s most Schubertian role (though he nowhere approaches the nasty abrasion deemed appropriate in many more recent portrayals). The other lyric tenor, Ramón Vinay’s Siegmund, is exceptionally affecting — as, too, Fasolt, the tender-hearted giant, well differentiated from his unfeeling brother, Fafner/Josef Greindl, whose return as Hagen is fabulous — tireless black bale, a match for his steerhorns in decibels; but he has to keep going for far longer! His Watch on the Rhine is one of the highlights of a Götterdämmerung that, on balance, is the best performance of the four, wonderfully responsive to every dark twisty place equally with the mighty pano- ramas and epic set-pieces of the tetralogy’s most consistently inspired music. A must!
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