None of our Eriks alters or strikes out this phrase, which they all sing in their various versions of full voice. All are better than the run of today’s possibles I know of, with the exception of Jonas Kaufmann in healthy condition. Ralf renders all the lyrical sections of the role appealingly, and sounds rather mealy in some of the more dramatic ones. Völker would have been a splendid Erik some five to ten years before this. We still appreciate his strongly profiled enunciation and his sense for the dramatic accent. The voice, though still functional in the music, does not sound youthful. Lorenz, by this time tackling many a Siegfried and Tristan and a bit thick-voiced as a result, is nonetheless vocally strong and dramatically committed. For Svanholm, see below.

I have made a point of discussing these interwar performances, however haphazardly, to direct readers to artists—not always the greatest ones, and the great ones not always at their best—from a legendary era of Wagner singing that is gradually slipping from view. The real monuments of that era are undoubtedly found in recordings of the later masterpieces, wherein the likes of Leider, Melchior, et al. join with the best of these to remind us of what these roles can sound like when actually consummated . But I do want to touch on the two complete postwar Holländer recordings I mentioned earlier, with regrets that we’re not coming close to discographic completeness. It happens that I have in-house experience with both these casts.

The first Holländer I saw was in the series of Met performances from which the Dec.,1950 broadcast was taken. I saw a different protagonist pair, however (Margaret Harshaw, in one of her earliest soprano outings, and Paul Schöffler), and recall that my adolescent ears preferred them to the broadcast singers, Varnay and Hotter. The latter both sound mighty good at this removal in time. Except in roles of a predominantly dark and malevolent coloration (Elektra, Ortrud, Kundry), Varnay usually made me uneasy, and Senta would not be a role I would pick for her. She does have a little trouble in the Ballad (in G minor, not A minor), especially with controlling the sustained piano at the upper F and G on “Doch kann dem bleichen Manne/Erlosung einstens noch we-er-den” and the equivalents in the second and third verses—but then, I’m not sure I’ve ever felt completely comfortable with anyone’s rendering of these phrases; they’re just hard. But once Varnay cuts loose with the final allegro con fuoco of the Ballad, she never looks back. The big, darkling instrument is rock solid and closely knit, the topmost notes cemented in place as they sometimes weren’t, and the characterization unleashed, driven-sounding. It’s an atypical Senta voice, but it harbors that hint of a troubled something held in concealment that I mentioned in touching on the monstrous.

Her monster, Hotter, is truly sui generis. No voice maven will ever be entirely happy with his singing. It is too often spread, lacking in core or center, sometimes nasal, with words mushily chewed over. The vibrato could loosen out of his control. These functional faults encroached increasingly, as they will, with the passage of time; here we find him somewhere around the midpoint of their influence on his singing, but in good voice for the juncture, and in a highly compatible role. The flaws were layered onto a capacious, rangey, and ample dramatic baritone voice with a notable spontaneity of utterance, deployed by an artist with an unusual sense of the melancholic and spiritual. We get a picture of an imposing but vulnerable and mysterious man of quiet pain—the Dutchman personified. There are moments, usually of pronouncement, when we wish for the gathered, well-supported tone of Schorr or Berglund, but they are quickly submerged in the expressivity of the performance.