And to complete my thoughts about Anja Silja: she’s a poster girl for the extremely talented, extremely young singer (b. 1940, if the sanctioned date is accurate) who gets out ahead of herself. The voice heard on the Sawallisch/Bayreuth recording (live, 1961) is certainly promising, the enthusiasm engaging, the musical instincts sharp. But even considered as a pure lyric soprano, which is what it sounds like, the instrument has insufficient middle- and low-range strength; it’s out of balance. For her, the high key in the Ballad (and it is great to hear those freely released attacks on all the top As) is the only one that would work for her, and even with that, the low notes are inaudible or weak. It’s said that, under Wieland Wagner’s direction, she sang the Ballad as if in a trance. That has to have been mostly a visual impression. There is no trace of it, or of anything much we’d call “acting with the voice,” in her singing, because there is no “holding back” or “holding in” tension available to her to create such sounds—no wonder that with a few miles of Jugendlich roles on it, the voice was already wearing through by the time of the Klemperer recording. True, with her musical intelligence and dramatic presence, she made a conversion and extended her career in primarily 20th-Century roles. It’s a modern pattern.

Of all the Dalands I have heard, live or recorded, Ludwig Weber has to be the choice. A large  voice, true bass but with a brightening glimmer in roles like this, and a large vocal personality that took in everything from Hagen to Ochs—nothing lacking for the part. He is here, on the ’36 Stuttgart radio performance and, even better, in stage surroundings on the Covent Garden one, and was still singing this and many other parts (Ochs, Gurnemanz, the Commmendatore—there is much recorded evidence) effectively after the war. The veteran Ludwig Hoffmann, one of the outstanding Wagnerian basses of the preceding two decades, still manages the writing securely on Bayreuth ’42, but the freshness date has expired. A plausible rival for Weber in this role was Alexander Kipnis, but I have not heard his ’30s performance of it from the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, under Fritz Busch (the one from which Lawrence’s singing of the Ballad was taken for her recently released collection—see the post of 2/21/20).

Erik? On these ’30s and ’40s recordings we have, I think, all the most likely candidates of the time, save for René Maison, who’s on the Colón performance: Torsten Ralf (Stuttgart ’36), Franz Völker (Bayreuth ’42), Set Svanholm Vienna Live, ’42) , and Max Lorenz (Covent Garden ’37). The part is a unique cross-breed between Young Heroic, like Max (Freischütz), Lohengrin, or Stolzing, and the Italian Tenor of the time. His interruption of Senta, his Traumerzählung, and his part in the final trio are of the first variety, low-to-upper-middle in tessitura, and forceful, often declamatory. His two cavatina-like addresses to Senta, legato and lyrical, almost courtly with their graceful turns and scatterings of grace notes, are of the latter. It’s sometimes said that this writing is reminiscent of that of Bellini, of whom Wagner conducted many performances in his younger years, but it reminds me more of an early Verdi cavatina, e. g., Ernani’s “Come rugiada al cespite.” Wagner says of Erik that he mustn’t be a sentimental whiner, and that “Whoever should give a sugary rendering to his Cavatina in the Third Act [“Willst jenes Tages”] would do me a disservice.” And interestingly, he adds: “Everything that might justify a false conception of this piece, such as its falsetto passage [my italics] and its final cadenza . . . may be either altered or struck out.” By “falsetto passage” R.W. has to be referring to the phrase that carries up over the high B-flat, with a rallentando, at “gestandest du mir Liebe nicht,” with the topmost note rather awkwardly assigned to the second syllable of “Liebe.” We know from elsewhere in his writings that Wagner despised falsetto usages. But he wanted to give Erik this grand, arcing phrase, and was composing at a time when the older tenor techniques, which did not carry the full voice past A-flat or, at most, A-natural, were still predominant. It would seem that he was hoping for either a tenor who could actually sing a high B-flat a piena voce, or perhaps one who had a sufficiently ringing voce finta to keep things manly. Unless I’m forgetting something, I can think of only one other such phrase in Wagner’s tenor writing, before or after, and that would be the similar one he wrote—but at a more restrained dynamic—for Walther in the Meistersinger  Quintet. In a hallowed recording of that ensemble (with Elizabeth Schumann as Eva and Schorr as Sachs), Lauritz Melchior models to perfection how the modern Heldentenor can blend that note into the line, in a way that Wagner, by that time, would probably have been hoping for.