Walther von Stolzing (Klaus Florian Vogt): If the point was to escape the kinds of aesthetic offenses committed by Heroic Tenors of second or third rank or with too many miles on the odometer, mission accomplished. If it was, additionally, to avoid any resemblance to their betters, that was also achieved. Because the writing is so lyrical and youthful in desired overall color, its difficulties, centered around the requirement that this lyricism and youthfulness retain its suppleness and freedom of emission for long stretches of high tessitura and repeated, sustained climaxes on and around the high A, but still at least suggest the heroic format, are not widely appreciated. It’s a hard role, and when we get to Act 3, a fairly relentless one. Of the tenors who have sung the part in the theatre since World War 2, I can think of only Torsten Ralf (still capable, though no longer the fresh, firm singer of the 1939 Dresden Act 3 under Böhm), Wolfgang Windgassen, Sándor Kónya, Jess Thomas, and Ben Heppner as really conquering the part.^(I)

When I saw Vogt as Parsifal at the Met (see Parsifal Lite, 3/9/18), the voice, though of radically unconventional quality for the role, had more presence than I had anticipated, and I appreciated his musical diligence. But Stolzing is another matter, for the reasons cited above, and presence is one of the things hard to get a handle on from this recording (see below.) Searching my mental file for tenor voices of a heady, free-floating, cirrus-cloud sort (Rudolf Crist? Helmut Krebs? Karl Erb? Peter Pears?), I could recall none that sounded this disengaged from any visceral source, let alone one who would venture into Wagnerian leading roles—it’s rather like hearing a puffed-up Noel Coward or Reynaldo Hahn who happens to have the notes. Vogt hangs in there right to the end, but the timbral restriction is too severe to allow for more than that.

Eva (Jacquelyn Wagner): Her voice comes across as an attractive lyric soprano that’s weak in the segment from E to B (above middle C). An American, she has thoroughly incorporated the musical and verbal idiom of the part. She will play the Act 2 scene with Sachs winningly and maintain a foothold on the big moments, so the final impression is of a nice, but small-scaled, performance. Much of this part lies in lower-middle conversational territory, thus calling for a strong registral bond that can then bloom on  later excursions into the upper range; Wagner (Jacquelyn) hasn’t quite sealed that deal. Over the past eighty years, we have completely lost touch with the larger-format, earthier kind of voice (Lotte Lehmann, Rethberg, Müller) that could fill out the picture of the role, to say nothing of the calibre suggested by Easton, Gadski, et al.—that’s an entirely different woman, with an entirely different range of interpretive potential, possibly foregoing some of Eva’s girlishness, and along with that the simpering quality that can invade if the singer isn’t careful.