Beczała aside, the most solid of the men was Günther Groissböck, the King Heinrich. His timbre is narrow in span, the tone frequently stuck in a one-vowel-fits-all glue (the Italian language and line of Don Carlo‘s Filippo earlier this season brought more variety of color and dynamic to the voice), and his low notes don’t have the easy Tiefer Bass “sit” one would like to hear. But the tone is sturdy, steady, and penetrating, the vocal manner authoritative, and for that much one is grateful. The Telramund was Evgeny Nikitin, who sounded as if he had revised his technique in a poorly chosen direction—he sang in a lightened, mouthily spread manner I don’t recall from earlier hearings—and he did not have much of a grasp on the rhetoric of either the Act 1 accusation or the Act 2 rant, both of which rattled on with little sense of point or destination. And finally there is the Caller of Hosts (Heerrufer), the King’s Herald, in whose person many a leading baritone (from Heinrich Schlusnus to Lawrence Tibbett to Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau to Leonard Warren to Sherrill Milnes, et al.) has made an early impression. There’s a case to be made that his should be the loudest voice onstage, with his open-air summons to trial and combat and announcements of banishment from high on castle walls; at the least, it must have a solid, officious weight. It was sung by Brian Mulligan in a clean, pleasant voice much too light and bland for the music.

All in all, I regret to say that in terms of honest evaluation, we must go with ChatGPT’s first paragraph, and not the merrier second one. But if the Wagner-singing area of the music industry is indeed in decline, what is it in decline from? If we could get snapshots of that, we could show them to young people or others approaching Lohengrin (or Wagner, or opera) for the first time—or for that matter more experienced operagoers not well acquainted with what we can hear of our past—to help them understand that whatever they may have taken from this experience, it doesn’t represent anything like what’s there, and that they shouldn’t shrug the whole thing off. We might even persuade a talented student or two that the lures of musicals and contemporary operas notwithstanding, taking on this desired challenge in the music industry and becoming qualified to sing these renowned works might be something worth pursuing.

And if we turn to the past, we actually need look no further than the first season of the Wilson production, which with the debatable exception of Beczała (and do we have a clear preference for him over Ben Heppner?) was stronger at every point than this year’s grouping. Delving a little deeper, we’ll find that many major-label studio recordings and broadcasts (from Bayreuth, European radio, the Met, etc.) made in the three decades following WW2 give us if not a surfeit, at least a sufficiency of singers and conductors of stature in this music—though sprinkled hither and yon, seldom gathered into a critical mass. But I think it’s especially useful to search out fragments that suggest aspects of a work’s fulfillment to which no clues are to be found in recent performance. So I’ll try here to provide a chronological sketch of this opera’s vocal legacy from the years before WW2. That means going about as far back as possible, to the first seven years of the past century, where it happens that a few of my favorite Lohengrin recordings are to be found.