Among recorded voices, that of Friedrich Schorr set the model for the role of the Dutchman. Its timbre, range, and sonority measure precisely to the description above, and hearing him will clarify my earlier reservations about Theo Adam. Adam was an alert interpreter, whose voice had quite sufficient amplitude and quality, but sounded as if it belonged a step higher—the open vowels and distinctly baritonal quality of his upper-middle range seemed “right” for a Verdi baritone, but lacked the gravity we’d like to hear from the Dutchman. (As I recall, the singing of a real Verdi baritone, Cornell MacNeil, in this assignment had more darkness, size, and reach to the bottom than Adams’—though, as was his wont from mid-career onward, he sang a few of the sustained top Es and Fs “too open.”) Schorr recorded nearly the entire role, minus only the final scene, between 1923 and 1925, when his voice, with its combination of brassy thrust and nut-brown, velvety nap were at its freshest. And all the virtues of his classic rendering of Hans Sachs are here, too—the perfectly bonded legato line (very sparing with the portamento, whose latency is always present on even the cleanest intervals); the inherently mellow, firm mezza-voce he used so eloquently, always riding on a swell-and-diminish capacity that could turn on a dime (try the instant change, sudden but controlled, from “So ist sie mein-” to “wird sie mein Engel sein?” Incomparable.^(I)

Incomparable, but the closest comparison would be the Swedish baritone Joel Berglund, who came to the Met for several seasons in the late 1940s, and later became director of the Royal Opera in Stockholm. Berglund made what is perhaps the most vocally satisfying of all studio electrical versions of “Die Frist ist um,” for Victor during his Met sojourn, and is heard on both a complete Bayreuth Festival broadcast of July, 1942 (I have it on Preiser CDs), and in excerpts from a Vienna performance two months later (on Vol. 19 of the Koch/Schwann series of Staatsoper live extracts). His strengths are similar to Schorr’s—a beautiful bass-baritone voice of both warmth and core, with a little more “run” in its vibrato, a lyrical guidance to phrasing, and no lack of proclamatory force when needed. His monologue in the Bayreuth performance is not quite as settled as in the studio version, but everything from there on is as well sung as one is likely to hear it.