Melchior and Svanholm both began as baritones. I know of no recorded trace of Svanholm in that capacity, and have never detected much of those origins in his singing. Melchior, however, recorded a number of sides as a baritone between 1914 and 19l6. They’re all in Danish, and the only test of his treatment of sustained tone in the upper range comes on the F-sharps at the climax of each verse of the Traviata aria. In these recordings we can easily hear the grounding of the heroic tenor soon to come. The body, warmth, and utter steadiness of the lower octave are already infused with the higher overtones, and the passaggio is already “gathered.” As the prominent Danish tenor Vilhelm Herold, with whom Melchior began his transition to tenor, remarked, “I helped him a little . . . but I could not do much about the voice. It was almost rather inborn.” Melchior’s principal teacher after Herold was Victor Beigel, a fashionable London teacher to whom Melchior was introduced by his patron, Hugh Walpole. Again we are reminded of Chaliapin’s early training, for like the great basso’s with Usatov, Melchior’s with Beigel was concentrated and brief (some eight or nine months) before being deemed sufficient for a professional launch, and what little we learn of what was taught has to do with breath management. (Even that is vague. But what we can hear—just as with Chaliapin—bespeaks great breath efficiency and a relatively high level of subglottal compression in a massive respiratory structure, underlying that “gathered” or “narrow” vocal position.) The remainder of Melchior’s vocal tuition (though Beigel remained an intermittent influence) fell into the area of intensive role preparation, largely with Anna von Bahr-Mildenburg, the great dramatic soprano of Mahler’s Wiener Staatsoper^(I) and Karl Kittel, the head of role preparation at Bayreuth for many years. Since the Heldentenor‘s upper range extends only from F#/G-flat to A (S of S has a couple of passing B-flats and even one tossed-off, and usually highly theoretical, C; but this is quibbling), and so much of his writing, including dramatic and even climactic effects, falls directly on the passaggio notes, keeping the voice at once contained and firmly supported is crucial.

The other key aspect of Melchior’s technical superiority is the integration of the head register (he referred to it as “head resonance,” in keeping with a common explanation of the time) into this powerfully grounded structure. An Italian-American bel canto teacher, Ida Franca, described this kind of integration as “shut in the head, anchored in the chest.” Though she certainly wasn’t referring to Melchior, it’s an apt description of how this integration and positioning both feels and sounds, and the bel canto derivation reminds us that apart from Melchior’s unique register/resonance meld, great heroic singing is, like all other great operatic singing, based on control of legato and of breath through the mastery of the messa di voce. That way of sustaining tone underlies even the crispest of articulations, the most declamatory of utterances, and is what makes Melchior’s S of S  incomparable not only in the ringing exuberance of the Forging Song or the mounting jubilance of the final duet, but in such purely lyrical moments as “Im Schlafe liegt eine Frau” (last word sustained, mezza-voce, E-sharp, “au” diphthong) or the similar ascending phrases that immediately follow, “Süss erbebt mir ihr blühender Mund” and “Wie mild er erzitternd mich Zagen erreizt” (“Mund” and “-reizt” on F, piano—incomparable, and perfect demonstrations of the structure and guidance I’ve been discussing.