A while back (sorry I don’t have a citation for you), the estimable Nina Stemme remarked that Birgit Nilsson and Wolfgang Windgassen had pretty much ruined things for all subsequent Wagnerian sopranos and tenors. True enough, I thought, and appealingly modest—but what about the two or three generations before that fine couple? Guess she hadn’t heard them. In any event, into the heroic tenor void of the early 1950s left by the three foregoing singers stepped Windgassen (b. 1914), who became the standard of quality in this repertory for the next twenty years, and has had no proper successor. And that is remarkable, for his instrument was of altogether lighter calibre than the three I’ve discussed, or than those of Suthaus or Vinay or Hopf. I recall John Culshaw, Decca/London’s star producer of the 1950s and ’60s, who led the production team for the first complete commercially  recorded Ring, telling me (and he may recount this in Ring Resounding—I don’t have the book at hand) of the search he and his team vainly undertook for a tenor to assume the role of Siegfried, recognizing that while Windgassen was a superb and utterly reliable artist, his was not really a voice for that music. They thought they had found their man in Ernst Kozub, who did indeed have an important dramatic tenor voice, but after some work with him found that—at least in their opinion—he couldn’t meet the necessary musical and interpretive standard. So Windgassen it remained.

And Windgassen it is on the Keilberth/Bayreuth ’55 performance. Few will complain. Certainly I didn’t, when he arrived in New York to sing Siegmund and the Siegfried of Siegfried a year later, and we realized that his singing could be enjoyed and counted on. We also heard, though, that  Windgassen represented a slimming down. He fired clean shots with a weapon of smaller bore. There was going to be consistency and multiple virtues of style and commitment, but not many goosebumps. As it developed, that was the last we heard of him in New York—he was scheduled to return in the early ’60s to sing Tannhäuser opposite Nilsson, but canceled the entire run. I have no doubt that his tone impinged more in the Bayreuth auditorium than it did at the (old) Met. But even there, it cannot have sounded as fine in the house as it sounds on this recording. Neither could any other element, for no vantage point in the Festspielhaus or any other opera house could have yielded the presence and beauty of tone, the stage/pit balance, of the microphone placement and production control of the Decca/London recordists.^(I) His lean-and-mean tone, his keen intonation and rhythmic precision, are caught in all their youthful freshness, and are a pleasure to hear.

But to grind it down a bit: like Svanholm, Windgassen habitually sings notes on the upper edge of the passaggio “too open.” He does this from a within a structure that was not erected on a baritonal base, and whose early use, though not as operetta-oriented as Schager’s, was in predominantly lighter tenor repertoire, where that approach to the register transition is more common and less costly (though still not recommended). So he doesn’t press on this open adjustment or drive it higher, as Svanholm did, and he thereby endured longer in roles that, judging by the weight and limited wing span of his voice, we would normally say he had no business singing. Even in this recording’s best of all possible worlds, there are moments that betray his un-Helden status. Some of them occur in the full-voice scramble-for-the-peak moments of Acts 1 and 3, but in a way the most revealing are mezza-voce moments like the ones I cited for Melchior, where Windgassen manages a soft dyanmic, but with a bland and slightly precarious tone that teeters, rather than settling on a still point. Stemme was right. But so was Culshaw.