The two best Eriks I have seen are Svanholm and Sándor Kónya. The latter, with his full, juicy Jugendlich tenor and predilection for melodramatic emotionalism that could be irritating in Italian roles but was compelling in the Traumerzählung, I have the better recollection of, because more recent. But the 1950 aircheck gives me confirmation of Svanholm’s clean, strong sound—still together here, with good ring to the upper range—well-guided phrasing (his habit of nudging attacks from below isn’t absent, but relatively unobtrusive), and fiery dramatic commitment. He sings the part better here than he had at Bayreuth in 1942—the voice sounds better knit, and there is more of a sostenuto feel under heavily accented passages. The Daland is Sven Nilsson, his voice a bit dried since heard in bits and pieces from the 1930s, but otherwise altogether on top of the part’s requirements. As on many Met broadcasts of these years, this one reminds us of the depth of the company’s casting for important secondary roles: Thomas Hayward is a hale Steersman, fully qualified for important lyric tenor roles, and Hertha Glaz a strong contralto presence for Mary.

Fritz Reiner has never been a favorite conductor of mine in Wagner (too much of the brisk, let’s-push-it-along and don’t-let-it-get-weighty cohort), but of all the Wagner operas this one is, I suppose, the most amenable to the approach. The singers seem to respond well to it, and the orchestra and chorus perform at an above-average level for those years.

The RCA Victor studio recording under Dorati I feel even more connected to, as it recalls the next Met revival of Holländer, which for several seasons in the early 1960s was regularly in repertory, and most often with this Senta, Dutchman, and Daland. (Erik was more freely handed out: in addition to Liebl, several other tenors chimed in, and even Jon Vickers took it for two or three performances.) Rysanek and London made this production go. Since I did not see Varnay, I have to account Rysanek the best Senta of my operagoing experience. She could be uneven, not only from night to night, but within a given performance. But on even a representative occasion, the propulsive tingle of her upper range, the rapt quality of her suspended pianissimi, and the weird, sometimes over-the-top neurotic passion of her embodiment made for some riveting moments. The recording captures a measure of that, but between the studio atmosphere and Dorati’s gradualism (Rysanek teamed better with Böhm), only a measure. Speaking of studio atmosphere, and before commenting on London, a word about the recording itself. After many hours of listening to old monophonic recordings, few of them state-of-the-art of their sort, and relieved only by the relatively sober engineering of the Klemperer version, I found myself loathing the artificial contrivances of this high-quality modern stereo artifact. Gussied-up sonorities fired at me from far to my left and far to my right, as if I were on the podium of a very wide pit. A disorienting aura of reverb encased the presumed stage, and in London’s case seemed to distance him in a special bubble all his own. I found myself fighting to figure out what was actually going on with singers I was on quite familiar terms with. The old recordings were limited by technical capacity; this one, made  gratuitously unrecognizable by technical tomfoolery.