The Argentine seasons sung by Janssen and other distinguished Wagnerians yielded the next sequence, whose prize sides are remakes of the Tannhäuser Act 3 scenes, twenty years down the road from those first acoustical takes. The voice has darkened and marginally thickened along the way, but has in the process acquired some tonal enrichment, too, that arguably puts it more in the frame of a big-house Wolfram with colleagues like Flagstad or Traubel, Melchior, and Kipnis. Given this evolution, the solos are sung as impeccably and soulfully as ever, and the voice is given much greater prominence than it has on the 1941 Met Tannhäuser broadcast. That has a flip side, though: all these Argentine records, with the Colon orchestra under Roberto Kinsky, suffer from dim orchestral presence and, at times, scrappy playing. That is nearly fatal to the two laments (almost the entire role) of Amfortas, a role in which Janssen always won high praise. And indeed, he renders both scenes with ample, beautiful tone, expert elocution, and refined musicality. But it is as if these, and not the terror, guilt, and pain of the Grail King were the sum of the writing, and the orchestra’s participation strictly as a background element (though a male chorus is on hand, and more in the picture, in the Act 3 scene) ensures that these sides are valuable solely as documents of highly skilled vocalism. There’s such a thing as an excess of restraint. The last item from these 1943 sessions is the Otello Oath Duet, in Italian, with Melchior. In the 1920s, Melchior recorded the Monologue and the Death Scene, in German. They are among the indispensable Otello excerpts. It is easy, too, to imagine Janssen as an oily Iago, full of performative warmth, and with sufficient largeness of sound where needed. (He sang this role, and Scarpia, in the early years.) Both singers are in good late vocal condition for this session (8/31/43), and their singing would certainly have had an impact in live performance. But since the Rigoletto duet with Schöne, Janssen’s pronuncia has turned mushier, and this, taken with Melchior’s closed-in adjustment in and around the passaggio (raccolto, but not in the right way), makes an idiomatic rendition out of the question.^(I)

The last four of the 111 tracks on the Marston set are devoted to Herbert Janssen’s Sachs and Walküre Wotan. The two Meistersinger monologues, recorded in 1945, are both essentially lyrical, and thus reflect more of the strengths and fewer of the weaknesses of his way of dealing with the heavy Wagner parts than does his Wotan. He truly sings them from start to finish, lacking only a touch of tensility to keep the lighter phrases completely in character (the operetta baritenor of yore peeks through at, e. g., “Johannisnacht!“). There is also a 1947 disc I hadn’t heard before that embraces the end of Act 3, Scene 1, from “Mein Kind, von Tristan und Isolde” on through the Quintet. Janssen sings the “ein Kind ward hier geboren” well, but despite a good lineup (Torsten Ralf, John Garris, Herta Glaz) the Quintet does not fare very well. The Eva, Polyna Stoska, has trouble locating the needed poise at the outset, and the rest never quite comes together.