All these artists will, I am sure, be rated as superior to their Salzburg/Dresden counterparts by most listeners. This leaves us with two key dramatis personae to consider, Eva and Sachs. There are those who love Gundula Janowitz’s singing, even in Wagner, and I suppose her purity of tone can be heard as appropriately virginal and guileless. But Eva, while undoubtedly a virgin till shortly after the final curtain falls, is far from guileless, and I quickly grow frustrated with the voice’s abstract quality, the pecking at phrases, the conversion of all vowels in the upper range to a single, schwa-like one, and the constraint on emotional expression. She does some of the small inflections sensitively in Act 2. Thomas Stewart sings through the music of Sachs so reliably, and works away at the character so conscientiously, that I hate having to say that I’m not, finally, persuaded. I always respected Stewart’s success in adapting what sounded to me like an essentially higher, more lyrical voice to some of the heaviest roles in the repertory (his first Met assignments were as Ford and Wolfram, and that seemed about right to me), and since there were then nearly as few workable alternatives in these parts as there are at present, was grateful for the qualities he was able to bring to them. That can be said of his work here: his baritone clears the vocal hurdles in good form, yet its open, bright timbre, with its cutting component that can verge on a snarl, misses some of the dignity and mentoring calmness of the character, and his inflectional observances, intelligently aimed as they are, sound like just that. He was, I believe, undertaking the part for the first time, and there’s a great deal in it to incorporate.

To my ears, Kubelik’s interpretation is at once far from “terrible,” yet less than what I would have hoped for. His orchestra and chorus, while of very good quality and on good terms with this score, does not quite arrive at the level of total identification with and flawless execution of it  that the Dresden ensemble meets. The conductor looks for a sharper profiling of the music’s gestures, less coddling of atmosphere and nuance, than does Thielemann,  and this pays some good dividends in the first act, where his singers are also able to take charge of their episodes with greater authority. But as we move along, the no-nonsense, sometimes foursquare treatment, combined with a hectoring feel to some of Stewart’s work, can wear one down, and late in the show there are a couple of bafflingly rushed passages—the appearances of the Nightwatchman, cast with a lightweight baritone who lines out his little song as if he can’t wait to get offstage, and the successive entrances of the guilds in the last scene, each piling in almost before the preceding one has finished—that bespeak an uncharacteristic lack of care on the maestro’s part. These complaints should, of course, be understood in the context of a generally high level of execution and understanding. But they detract.

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NEXT TIME: I am pondering possibilities, and will keep you informed. If all goes well, the date will be four weeks hence: Friday, Feb. 12

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