As I promised at the end of my last post (see Siegfried at the Met, 5/24/19), I am entering here some observations on the singing of the roles of Siegfried and Brünnhilde, as exemplified by the artists on the live historical recordings I selected to give us perspective on the current standard.

Siegfried: In terms of the basic qualifications for the part—strength, brilliance, and steadiness of tone; alacrity of vocal movement; guidance of the musical line and control of dynamics and coloristic shading; physical presence and temperamental ebullience; and, let’s not forget, sheer stamina—Lauritz Melchior is by a wide margin the best Siegfried of Siegfried of whom we have direct evidence. In certain aspects of style, musicianship (especially with regard to rhythm and tempo), and interpretive choice, it is possible to advocate for another tenor on a note-by-note, phrase-by-phrase basis. But those aspects, while worthy of consideration, are of far less importance than the pre-requisites cited, especially with a role in which the latter are met by so few.

Readers of my three-part report on Marston’s release of the complete Chaliapin recordings may have found it a stretch to find me drawing some specific technical parallels between these two exemplars, one a Russian bass, the other a Danish tenor, navigating quite different bodies of work. I’ll come to that in a moment. There are other similarities between the two. Both were large, powerfully built men, high-energy extroverts, given to physical pursuits not of the gym-and-personal-trainer variety (Melchior was a devoted huntsman). Both spent the later years of their lives and careers separated by political circumstance from their roots, and found their active operatic repertoires, initially varied and inclusive, narrowed to a few roles in which they were rightly deemed supreme. While Melchior had the early advantage of an upbringing in an educated, musical household in the highly civilized surroundings of Copenhagen, both ended formal education early and found their artistic footing under mentors and patrons. Both became popular, with their personalities and artistic standing points of ready recognition in the broader culture. We don’t think of Melchior as the paradigm of modern singingacting, as we do Chaliapin, but he was a major stage presence and an interpreter of great intensity, even  subtlety.

The technical similarity has to do with the treatment of two or three half-steps—let’s even bring it down to the pitches of E-natural and F above middle C, Chaliapin’s high notes and Melchior’s passing notes into the upper range. I observed that on these pitches at full voice, Chaliapin sang with a “gathered” adjustment, with all his energy concentrated into a precise position, “closed” but not “covered,” resulting in a tone possessed of a brilliance and ring unique among basses, which he could on occasion “open out,” but never to the point of becoming “spread” or shouty. And we find Melchior treating these same pitches in the same manner, adopting what he called a “narrow” point of attack, from which he could expand when needed.^(I)  This “narrow” positioning enabled him to find a pocket of resonantal ring that informed the entire range of the voice, and to avoid the distention of the open “a” that we hear in Set Svanholm (the Siegfried of both the Furtwängler/La Scala and Stiedry/Met performances) and Wolfgang Windgassen (of Keilberth/Bayreuth), from which it is difficult to re-focus for the high notes.