The operatic Janssen next crops up at Covent Garden in 1936-37, first again as Gunther, in one of the performances I mentioned in connection with Leider. This is conducted by Beecham (not Furtwängler, who also led some of these), and begins with a side first released on 78 as part of a two-disc set focused on the Hagen of Ludwig Weber—Brünnhilde’s presentation as Gunther’s bride, with the greeting of the vassals and Gunther’s brief but important solo. Then follows a second version of the act-ending scene, “Welches Unholds List,” now with Weber and, happily, Leider as Brünnhilde. It is thrilling to hear her vibrato, her impetus, and her shaping of the music. Weber’s sound is exactly right, and he sings superbly in most of this role; in this scene, I wish he’d decided to sing more and parlando less. Janssen v. Janssen is a wash, which is nothing to complain of.

We next meet Janssen as the Holländer, singing the great monologue and the “Wie aus der Ferne,” with Flagstad his Senta in the latter (a doleful excursion for her), still at Covent Garden and still with the LPO, now under Fritz Reiner. This performance had Max Lorenz as its Erik and Weber as its Daland, and extended excerpts have circulated in various formats since the 1950s. The first thing to be said is that these selections have never sounded as good as they do here (they are correctly pitched, for starters). The second is that for the first time, we encounter Janssen moving into the heavier repertory he essayed over the second half of his career. The Marston set’s well-informed biographical annotator, Iain O. Miller, enters a strong protest against the notion that Janssen was coerced into taking on these parts, clearly problematic for a voice of his range and format, or that the singing of them negatively affected his voice and/or shortened his career. I can surely agree on the last point: Janssen was still singing well in the higher Wagner roles in his late fifties, and retirement at sixty, still essentially intact, is by no means premature for an operatic baritone. It is hard to imagine, though, that circumstances did not bring pressure to bear that a man of such vocal intelligence might otherwise have resisted. Friedrich Schorr was winding down, and Heldenbariton rivals (Hotter, Schöffler, Frantz, Uhde) would not emerge from the AustroGerman cosmos till after the war. In the Americas, the Rigolettos, Germonts, and Tonios were not open to Janssen. But Wotan and Sachs were—in fact, there wasn’t anyone else, at least of established international stature. So I suspect that this was mostly a case not of coercion in some direct sense, but of the force of circumstance and the old bank robber’s explanation (was it Willie Sutton?), “I seed my opportunities, and I took ’em.” The only important question is, how did that turn out?

As the Holländer, Janssen still has his virtues. There is eloquence and lovely tone in all the quiet passages, a masterly guiding of the line throughout. And the difficulty is never one of volume per se (as I said, his voice was “capacious”), but of a center of gravity insufficiently deep to keep the voice equalized and in rein up and down the compass. The weak low range doesn’t merely mean no audible low G for “letztes Nass versiegt.” It also means nothing much to work from on many a phrase coming up from B (“Nur eine Hoffnung soll mir bleiben“) or settling down to the C (“im nichts vergehn“). And it means overblowing those open top Fs and Es, so that in the bigger, weightier passages of the lower Heldenbariton roles, the whole range assumes a top-heavy shape, and the voice does not seem well in hand. Well, he survived. The first example of his Wotan we have is the Wanderer/Mime scene from Siegfried (with the mime of Erich Witte), and it is very promising. This is extracted from the same performance heard at greater length in Medici Arts’ video/CD package “Wagner’s Mastersinger/Hitler’s Siegfried,” devoted to Max Lorenz (Marston has cleaned up the clicks and crackles and brought the sound up nicely). It’s from the Colon in 1938, with Erich Kleiber leading a powerful delineation of the score. It’s as viciously cut as anything from Bodanzky’s Met, first a passage from the early part of the scene (from “Gastlich ruht’ ich bei Guten” to “Hier sitz’ ich am Herd“—wonderful music ideally suited to Janssen’s gifts), and then the entire sequence of The Wanderer’s questions to Mime (!), jumping to The Wanderer’s exit advice. But the remainder (Mime’s queries of the Wanderer) is right in Janssen’s wheelhouse—long, sustained horizontal phrases riding on the swell-and-diminish, capped by the thunderous assertion of Wotan’s dominance at “des Speeres starkem Herrn!“—and he and Kleiber leave nothing unrealized.