There are wonderful things on these records, beginning with the orchestral playing and choral singing. Tietjen, the Festival’s Artistic Director in that decade, was more highly regarded as director (together with his usual designer, Emil Preetorius) than as conductor, and inasmuch as he had alternated as Lohengrin conductor with Furtwängler for this revival, I suspect that in the deeply grounded sonorities and stately tempos we are hearing much of the latter’s influence, if not all the inspiration. In any event, I like the gravity of the reading.^(I) Good as this season’s choral work was at the Met, there is an almost unearthly beauty in this Zug zum Münster, and, acoustics and choral leadership aside, some of it is vocal: the deep positioning of the tenors’ voix mixte in the upper-middle range, building seamlessly in to the entrance of the womens’ voices (pure, but also shaded), underpinned by bassier basses, the choirs blending in a richer texture.

Völker’s singing is much changed since those 1927-28 studio excerpts. Interpretively, it is far more nuanced and specific, oriented more toward a softness of texture and away from the heroic. Much of this is welcome, at least if we want a more relatable Swan Knight, and he’s still sustaining and moving the line along. But the default volume setting, almost always in the mf to mp range, is bringing with it an inclination to tonal mealiness, a looseness of handling, and when he needs to reinstate the heroic, it doesn’t have quite its former solidity and brilliance. ^(II) His partner, Müller, was an important soprano in the interwar years. Like Lehmann, she had debuted as Elsa (Linz, 1919), and had quickly established herself in the German houses. In 1936, she had completed a decade at the Met, where she’d sung some of her “young Wagner” and other similar parts (Agathe, Marie in Verkaufte Braut), but amidst the fierce competition for spots in the Met’s pecking order,^(III) had also become a frequent Aïda and was (lest we forget) the first Amelia in the famous 1932 production of Simon Boccanegra in the company of Tibbett, Martinelli, and Pinza—a role we associate with Rethberg through two surviving broadcasts. The most prominent memento of her singing is her Elizabeth in the 1930 “complete” Bayreuth Tannhäuser, wherein her strong lyric voice, consistently poised on the music’s line, has an appealing freshness and shine. Much of that is still present in these Lohengrin extracts, and she shows enough interpretive alertness to make us want to hear the rest of the scene.