Before taking leave of these earliest years of Lohengrin sound documents, I mustn’t fail to note the series of excerpts recorded by Fernando De Lucia between 1902 and 1907, presented in chronological sequence on another Marston release devoted to the tenor’s G&T recordings. There are six sides in all, including a repetition of “Nun sei bedankt;” they are of course in Italian (“Mercè, mercè, cigno gentil“, etc.); and on two of them he is paired with his frequent recording partner, the Spanish soprano Josefina Huguet. Most of what I wrote about De Lucia in my Fedora report (1/27/23) would be applicable here, though in Wagner his “poetic dalliance” is somewhat restrained by a recognition of the necessity of a fairly close adherence to the score’s recommendations. Still, the De Lucia/Huguet version of “Das süsse Lied verhallt” (“Cessarono i canti alfin“) takes slightly longer than the Slezak/Förster-Lauterer (4:07, without announcement), and carries with it much of the same suspended, lingering-in-the-moment quality. We are also reminded at several points that much as we identify De Lucia with exquisite and sometimes self-indulgent head-voice-dominant treatments of earlier Italian music, much of his standing was based on his singing of verismo parts—the voice had metal when metal was needed. And Huguet brings an interesting tang to her Elsa, with more defined touches of chest co-operation at the lower end of the part’s range than most of her Northern European colleagues.

Coming forward a decade or so, we come across two of the most significant exemplars of these roles, Lotte Lehmann and Jacques Urlus. I wrote at some length about Lehmann earlier in this series (see “Lotte Lehmann and the Bonding of the Registers,” Parts 1 and 2, 9/29/17 and 10/13/17), so I’ll note here only that Elsa was her breakthrough part (Hamburg, 1912, two years after her debut); that the Dream Narrative and the “Euch Lüften” constituted her first disc (1914); that she recorded those same excerpts twice more each (1924-25 and 1930), along with the Act 2 “Du Ärmste kannst wohl nie ermessen” in 1917; that she is also heard on the 1935 Met broadcast, which I’ll touch on below; and that her voice is of ideal quality and calibre for the role, as is the immediately recognizable sense of intimate contact she brought to everything she sang. The Dutch tenor Urlus is my (and many connoisseurs’) nominee for the “greatest Heldentenor we can hear before Melchior” title, edging out Slezak by virtue of his many repetitions of both Siegfrieds and Tristan, in addition to all the other Wagner parts. He also sang the same range of Italian and French roles (and Mozart’s Belmonte and Tamino) as did Slezak, and was celebrated throughout his long career as the Evangelist in Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion, notably under Willem Mengelberg. His large, rock-steady voice can be characterized as basically dark, if by “dark” we understand that clear vowel formation and a healthy ring in the tone are not foreclosed (or, as Jürgen Kesting puts it Die Grossen Sänger, it was”einer dunkel-fundierten, aber strahlenden und exemplarisch gemischten Stimme.” And there is a clue in that “gemischten,” for Urlus often approached full-voiced tone at B-flat and above, and softer phrases a bit lower down, in an open-throated head-voice manner, technically related to Slezak’s practice but aesthetically quite different, and unheard for a century or so now except in poor falsetto imitations. His Lohengrin excerpts (the usual ones) and other Heldentenor recordings (don’t miss the Götterdämmerung selections) are not affected directly by this, but the presence of the usage affects the entire range of the voice, and helps account for its pliability and mellowness of timbre. Jon Vickers would be the sole postwar dramatic tenor to suggest this vocal structure. He also suggested a perfect combination of voice and presence for Lohengrin, but apparently the part did not interest him.