The Classical Review CDs/DVDs

The half-century-long saga of Decca Records’ attempts to cut through a tangle of bureaucratic obstacles in order to issue the cycles of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen recorded at the 1951 and 1955 Bayreuth Festivals has been much recounted. Those legendary early-stereo recordings, of course, were rescued from the Decca vaults by the enterprising Testament label a few years back, and the critical plaudits for the 1951 Hans Knappertsbusch-conducted Götterdämmerung and the complete 1955 cycle led by Joseph Keilberth have been long and loud.

What hasn’t received much press in all the hoopla is the fact that Decca recorded a second cycle of the operas at Bayreuth in 1955, featuring some crucial cast changes – Martha Mödl assuming the role of Brünnhilde from Astrid Varnay, Varnay switching to the role of Sieglinde in place of Gré Brouwenstijn (and even turning up in Götterdämmerung as Third Norn!), and Walküre’s Wotan, Hans Hotter, adding on the role of Gunther in Götterdämmerung, sung in the first cycle by Hermann Uhde. Testament has just issued both productions from this second cycle, giving ardent Wagnerians a chance to hear the differences those key changes of singer make.

Much is similar. Keilberth remains the chief revelation here. Once dismissed by many in the critical community as a reliable but unexceptional time-beater, he shows himself a consummate man of the theatre on these discs. Finding a flexible middle-ground between the fleetness of Clemens Krauss and the expansiveness of Knappertsbusch (two conducting colleagues from those post-war years whose own Bayreuth Ring recordings have appeared on a variety of private labels over the years), he’s able to ratchet up the tension to white heat when the scores require it, give the notes breathing space in the cycle’s more contemplative pages, and never lose sight of the big picture.

Singers common to the two cycles acquit themselves handsomely in both, not least Hotter’s Wotan, of which so much has been written – indeed unmatched in magisterial tone and Shakespearean depth in his word-pointing. He is caught in 1955 at the height of his interpretive powers, his idiosyncratically wooly tone already a fixture, but before a pronounced wobble brought unfortunate shades of Bert Lahr to his later performances. Hotter’s rendering of Gunther in the second-cycle Götterdämmerung is an indelible piece of vocal acting, the weak-willed king emerging less as a small man puffing himself up to great things that will never be (as in Uhde’s elegant and finely detailed reading in the first cycle), than as a great and noble leader tragically in the thrall of an expert manipulator. With Uhde, we saw Gunther the ineffectual wannabe who succumbs to his own naiveté and self-regard. Hotter gives us King Lear.

There’s no doubt in Varnay’s clarion performance that Sieglinde has the blood of the gods coursing through her veins and is champing at the bit to break free of her abusive marriage. Brouwenstijn’s first-cycle Sieglinde – a more lovable creation than Varnay’s – was a victim from the word ‘go’, spurred to change her life only when dazzled by her love for Siegmund. Brouwenstijn’s flickering vibrato lent a luminous shimmer to the climactic moments of the Act I love duet, while suggesting a fearful trembling in the voice elsewhere, as in her Act II flight with Siegmund just before his fateful battle. But it’s in just that scene where Varnay shows her genius as a singing-actor. Vividly using the text during Sieglinde’s terrified, half-mad hallucinations, and coloring it with ample doses of sprechstimme and heart-on-sleeve verismo, she creates a harrowing (and deeply moving) portrait of this woman-on-the-verge – arguably the best performance of Sieglinde’s Act II material on record.

As Brünnhilde in the first cycle, Varnay similarly led through strength, while finding effective moments where the warrior-maiden’s confidence has to crumble. Very much in touch with her inner Valkyrie, she was scarily potent in the plotting of Siegfried’s death, but pulled down to a quiet, inward-focused intensity in Walküre’s Third Act father-daughter encounter, and similarly in the final scene of Götterdämmerung. Elements of her voice were always an acquired taste – the imperious mezzo-ish color, the vinegar in the upper register, the inelegant scooping up to notes (which became an increasingly pronounced mannerism as her career progressed) – but her fullness of tone and the sheer confidence of her delivery, married to her perceptive approach to character psychology, rendered such vocal quirks of far less import.

With Mödl, vocal considerations are unavoidable. Her instrument certainly possessed the weight and lung power for Brünnhilde, but it was an unwieldy instrument she clearly had to wrangle with. As with the late Hildegard Behrens a generation later, Mödl was a singer whose effectiveness very much varied from performance to performance, offering incandescent greatness one evening, and a stitched-together quilt of mismatched registers, hollow patches and lunged-for high notes the next. (Her recordings, live and studio-made, bear this out all too well.)

But she’s in relatively secure voice here in the second cycle – indeed, her softer singing has a radiant beauty that sometimes eludes Varnay, and most of her high notes soar thrillingly – and her psychological insights are no less telling than her colleague’s. Where Varnay’s Brünnhilde was never far from her godly origins, Mödl’s is vulnerably human. Tenderness, ardor, confusion, impotent rage, wounded pride – the mercurial range of Brünnhilde’s emotions comes through with riveting clarity, her occasional vocal struggles only contributing to the in-the-moment vividness of her portrayal. Perhaps her Walküre Brünnhilde comes across a shade too weathered and neurotic for her own good (though the Act III duet with Wotan is terrific). But her Götterdämmerung Brünnhilde (after a somewhat husky-voiced opening duet with Siegfried) is a supreme performance that shouldn’t be missed.

Two sets, then, that really should be heard by serious Wagnerians – but be ready to take out that second mortgage: Testament hasn’t cut back on their premium price tags. And on this second cycle, you get more modest packaging, far fewer production photos and no librettos. (A PDF file of the full libretto and translations can be downloaded from Testament’s website.) At the very least, this splendid Götterdämmerung belongs on the shelf right beside its first-cycle companion.

2 Responses to “WAGNER Die Walküre; Götterdämmerung”

1. Posted Aug 05, 2010 at 5:45 pm by David Favrot

   Anyone interested in hearing modl’s brunnhilde without paying testament’s premium prices may do so by getting the 1953 furtwangler “ring,” issued as a budget set by emi. it’s a mono radio broadcast and it sounds its age (unlike testament’s stereo), but it’s still a keeper.

2. Posted Nov 12, 2010 at 10:53 am by Thomas

   I have just listened for the first time to the version with Varnay as Brünnhilde. Gunther is here sung by Hermann Uhde. But in the forth act, after Siegfried’s “Trink, Gunther, trink!”, the voice is unmistakebly Hans Hotter’s. In the scene three meeting with Gutrune (“Siegfreid – Siegfried erschlagen”) Uhde is back again.
   Has anyone else noticed this splicing of versions? Does anyone know the reason – stage noises or tape defects perhaps?

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