On the Bodanzky/Met recording, however, we get little sense of this sound that would, without anything unusual in the way of interpretation, engulf us in the “logic of emotion.” That is better suggested by a few of Flagstad’s postwar recordings. What we do hear is a free, virginal tone of snowy coloration that sails through the challenging writing without constraint or complication. That’s a great aesthetic pleasure, but if we are looking for the female counterpart to Melchior’s eagerness, intensity, and expressive variety, we won’t quite find it. I prefer her participation in the Furtwängler/La Scala performance—the voice has deepened; she’s found some points to offer, and I think Furtwängler is more attuned to her temperament and body rhythm.

In many respects, I prefer Traubel (Met/Stiedry). She has warmer tone and a more open, personal, and responsive communicative manner, not to mention a capacious lower range that counts for a lot in several passages. Trouble at the top, however, not so much with the Cs—the first one is easily transposed and the opera-ending one an option that neither she nor Flagstad (even in ’37) elect—as with the two B-naturals, which are not so easily dodged and which Traubel by this time can only wave at. Otherwise, the upper range is solid and imposing, though rather unrelievedly so; there is not much give-and-take. Never do we doubt we’re in the presence of a great voice. “You mean Flagstad’s voice was bigger?“, I’d ask. My older friends would nod solemnly in the affirmative.

The Met had a hard time figuring out what to do with Astrid Varnay. Possessor of a large, darkly interesting voice at a very young age (as you can hear on the broadcast of her Met debut as Sieglinde, substituting for Lotte Lehmann in 1941, and again in that role in the ’51 cycle), she also owned a less than consistent technique—the timbres could emerge scrambled or gnarly; the support could loosen at odd moments; and the top, though always there, could thin and detach from the body of the voice. The Met tried her in Italian roles (Santuzza, Aïda, even Amelia Grimaldi) with promising but uneven results, and the Jugendlich parts never seemed an easy fit. An impressive and brooding stage presence, her best Wagnerian roles at the Met were Ortrud and Kundry, and she scored a triumph as Elektra under Reiner in 1952. But as Traubel faded, Margaret Harshaw, just turned soprano from several seasons as a contralto, succeeded to her roles at a time (the early Bing years) when the Met wasn’t doing much Wagner. When the Nibelung cycle returned in the 1956-57 season, Harshaw and Mödl divided the Brūnnhildes. Then came Nilsson, and by that time Varnay just wasn’t in the mix.

Through these same years, however, Varnay established herself as very much the leading soprano of the Bayreuth Festival, and she was the Brünnhilde of choice there over a number of seasons under several quite different conductors. I’ve never heard her better than in this 1955 Siegfried conducted by Keilberth, a conductor with whom she seems to have always felt comfortable. Here her is voice a more compact, steady whole and is under a tauter rein than was often the case. One might not think her tonal format, which could be on the sombre side and at moments harsh or edgy, would recommend itself to this music as easily as to the Walküre and Götterdämmerung Brünnhildes, but in fact she makes the adaptation very well and is in command throughout the scene. And of these three sopranos, she is the most intriguing in searching out the moment-to-moment inflections of phrase and shadings of word that keep us following the journey of the character.