Next up is Senta’s Ballad, from a 1936 performance at the Teatro Colón under Fritz Busch. It’s a little unsettled, with a tendency to flatness on some of the piano phrases, but very alive, and commanding when it opens out. There follows the Elsa/Ortrud exchange described above, and then a generous stretch of Parsifal Act Two, beginning with “Nein, Parsifal, du thör’ger Reiner” and extending through to the end of “Ich sah’ das Kind” (also Colón ’36 under Busch), with René Maison exemplary in Parsifal’s few lines. And this is marvelous from Lawrence, amply nuanced, full of tender, floating tone with expertly drawn back subito piano effects and, again, easy, suggestive dips down into chest (“erst-en Kuss“). Also here is Lawrence’s splendid voicing of the Götterdämmerung Immolation Scene (Met, Jan. 1936, under Bodanzky)—though this is better heard on Naxos’ historical Ring, with Ward Marston’s sound restoration. This first disc concludes with two extracts from a 1939 New York concert: a rather clueless “Vieni, t’affretta” from Macbeth (the vocal equipment is there, but neither Lawrence nor her conductor, Leon Barzin, seems to have any notion of how these phrases should go) and with some settings of Walt Whitman poems by Eugene MacDonald Bonner. These last, subdued, sustained, and evocative, pleasingly orchestrated save for a ghastly conclusion, and at moments suggestive of Delius, could easily make a soupy impression, but Lawrence sings them quite beautifully, with good line and feel for messa di voce, and an enlistment of darker shadings not often heard in the operatic material.

It was in June, 1941, that Lawrence was stricken with poliomyelitis (during a dress rehearsal for Die Walküre in Mexico City), and completely incapacitated. Her arduous rehabilitation, eventual return to the operatic stage in a few wheelchair performances as Venus, Amneris, and Isolde, and resumption of her concert career is, weepy movie aside, a genuinely inspirational saga. With CD Two of the present set, we begin to move—a little disconcertingly for those of us tracking the voice’s progress—back and forth between pre- and post-onset recordings. The disc opens with a Nov., 1945 aircheck of a London performance of the final scene of Salome, a role for which Lawrence had been highly regarded in both Paris and New York. The voice’s vibrato is on the hectic side for the first two or three minutes, but settles in thereafter, and there is little to no attrition audible in the puissance and reach of her instrument, whose combination of power and youthful timbre is ideal for the part. Strongly sung and knowingly inflected as Lawrence’s singing is, the scene is made truly memorable by the galvanizing playing of the BBC orchestra under Sir Adrian Boult. The rather congested sound doesn’t disguise one of the great readings of this music.

We then travel back five years to extracts (the Gypsy Dance, the Quintette, and from “Je vais danser en votre honneur” to the end of the act) from a 1940 San Francisco Carmen, with a fresh Raoul Jobin as José and a squad of longtime Met/San Fran comprimarios (Votipka, Alvary, Chehanovsky, De Paolis) in springier form than I heard them in the ’50s. (The complete act, with Ezio Pinza as Escamillo, has previously circulated on Vol. 1 of San Francisco Opera Gems, on the Guild/Immortal Performances label, and again with cleaner sound.) Lawrence’s Carmen is healthy and high-spirited but, as London Green points out in his annotations for the Guild set (also my source for the Swarthout quotation above), not very seductive, smoldering, or nuanced, and hardly helped by Gaetano Merola’s hack-routine conducting.