So there are our principals, save only for Matthew Rose as Claudio (“convincingly bluff,” according to Woolfe). And it’s reasonably clear that however pleasurable much of the singing may have been, and how fine Bicket’s conducting, and how clever the production’s cultural-analogy inventions, the one element that, in prospect, would have drawn me to Agrippina—the likelihood of really superb singing, knockout singing, in at least a couple of roles—was not on offer, just as I’d supposed. And while that might seem to contradict the notion that the Met isn’t too big for Handel, it doesn’t, really, because Woolfe’s reservations would apply no matter the venue.

Now I contemplate the forthcoming Giulio Cesare, a landmark of Handel’s operatic maturity. And I contemplate it in relation to all the other claims on my attention, since, as I try to point out in Opera as Opera, everything is in place of something else. And I further think, “If the cast of the New York City Opera’s 1966 production and subsequent recording on RCA Victor—that very cast, no substitutions including those of voice type (no falsettists!), though perhaps in a more musicologically reconciled edition—were resurrected and moved into the Met, or, for that matter, if the Cleopatra (Joan Sutherland) and Cesare (Marilyn Horne) of Decca/London’s ’60s excerpts recording, were with us and available, I would be there.” But our resurrections are limited to recordings. Announced for next season in the land of the living, in another updating by McVicar and conducted by Bicket, are: Cleopatra: Kristina Mkhitaryan, a singer I don’t know and will try to get a line on; Cesare: the “lighter and blander” falsettist, Davies. And others, of course. So my decision will depend on what the “somethings else” turn out to be, and on the whims of the gods of schedule.

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Lotte Lehmann is one of those artists of whom we want as complete a representation as possible. Marston’s new six-CD package brings us right to the edge of her classic mid-’30s recordings of two complete roles (Sieglinde and the Marschallin), which have never been out of circulation, and of the surviving live recordings from the Met and the Vienna State Opera, which comprise one additional complete role (Elsa), a later Met Marschallin, extracts from other performances of Lohengrin, Die Walküre, and Der Rosenkavalier, and from at least one additional role, Elisabeth in Tannhäuser. While the early electricals of the Marston set include a goodly amount of highly desirable operatic material, they also take us much further into Lehmann’s persona as singer of Lieder, folk and salon music, and of sacred selections. In doing so, they preserve the feel of Austro-German cultural layers that lay, somewhat queasily, between those of serious art and pop entertainment in the interwar decades. As is customary with the Marston label, every side Lehmann committed to disc over the six years represented is here, including the rarities, unreleased items, and alternate takes, in chronological sequence of recording, session-by-session and duly detailed in the fine accompanying booklet.