Forging Song addendum: I haven’t given this much attention in the above, because it more or less leaps over the trouble area, and all these tenors sing it effectively according to their powers. But for fans of the hit tune: search out the late ’30s recording of the whole scene by Nikandr Khanayev, known to us mostly for his Soviet recordings of character roles after WW2, when he was into his late 50s and 60s. This is impressive heroic tenor singing (in Russian, of course), and seconded by the hairy-sounding Mime of Alexander Peregudov.

Brünnhilde: There is less to be said about our soprano referents. While singers with all the qualifications for the role have never been exactly in profusion, in the first half of the last century there were always at least several on the international scene with the size and quality of voice, the technical control, and the stylistic command to give satisfying performances in the two roles that establish the “high dramatic” Fach, Brünnhilde and Isolde. Certainly there was no parallel to the heavy Heldentenor situation, where all but one or, at best, two, seemed lacking in some fundamental aspect relative to the demands of the music. And the writing for the heavy Wagnerian female roles does not truly parallel that of the male. It is more “normal”—i. e., wider—in range. This may appear to make these parts more difficult than their tenor equivalents, but it does not. The soprano is not forced to cram all her most dramatic utterances and wordy articulations into a few pitches in her upper-middle range, where weight can easily accumulate, and even if she were, she would not be singing at the upper edge of the passaggio—the registral distribution is entirely different. Instead of being penned in, she gets to roam the range in freer and more supple fashion. The problem, of course, is to do this with an instrument of sufficient calibre—or, failing that, cutting edge—to take its proper position in the musical fabric and convey the emotional life of the character in that sonorous context.

Besides, we have in these performances three supremely gifted singers: Kirsten Flagstad (twice, for Furtwängler/La Scala and Bodanzky/Met), Helen Traubel (Stiedry/Met), and Astrid Varnay (Keilberth/Bayreuth. As with the Siegfried of Suthaus, and for similar reasons, I am not submitting his partner, Martha Mödl, for consideration here.) Flagstad’s two performances come close to bracketing her war-interrupted international career. She was less than two years past her Met debut with the 1937 broadcast, and sang for only a few seasons beyond the 1950 one. (She is in fact the Walküre Brünnhilde of the Stiedry cycle.) She’s the only one of these sopranos I did not hear in person, as was Lorenz among the tenors. As a young devotee in the late 1940s and ’50s, I was surrounded by many who did hear her, and these included not only fellow devotees, but veteran conductors, critics, and ex-singers, some of whom had also heard Leider, Lawrence, Kappel, and even Gadski, not to mention others on interwar European stages. To a person, they assured me that they had heard no voice to compare with Flagstad’s in terms of size, tonal purity, and ease of emission combined. The latter two qualities can be confirmed from her records, and if we trust, as I do, these reports (echoed in contemporaneous reviews) on the first one, we can imagine ourselves utterly transported by a phenomenon as unique in its way as that of Melchior.