For sheer electricity, few discs can equal the opening pages of Act 2 of Die Walküre as recorded by Leider and Friedrich Schorr at the Berlin Singakademie in September of 1927, with Leo Blech conducting the Berlin State Opera Orchestra. Wotan has only a few lines here, but they are memorable ones, and to hear Schorr’s dark maroon timbre and authoritative declamation, capped by that trombone-like sonority vaulting out the F-sharp on “reite zur Wal,” is to experience the perfect set-up for Brünnhilde’s Battle Cry. For that, Leider follows exactly the same blueprint as do Wildbrunn and Gadski, the swooping portamenti up to the Bs and Cs accompanied by a mutation of the vowel from the “o” of “Ho-jo-to-ho!” to a snapped-off “a” as in “whack!”—a bit in the way of a gimmick, we might say, but one that secures its opening-out effect. But Leider’s vibrato lends the music even more of a bounding-forward effect (again, irrespective of the  actual tempo), and while both Wildbrunn and Gadski have excellent trills, Leider’s is better yet, tensile and narrowed even more finely onto the center of the pitch. ^(I)

That perfect trill, serving in the Battle Cry not to suspend time (as it so often does, famous examples  being Selma Kurz’s in the Lockruf of Goldmark’s The Queen of Sheba or Margarete Siems’ at the close of the cavatina of “O beau pays” in Les Huguenots) but to lash it onward (like Luisa Tetrazzini’s in “Io son Titania“), is just one mark of the precision and ductility, unusual in a voice of this calibration, that Leider shows in her singing from the start, and which she retained to the end in at least sufficient measure for it to inform her singing  of music that required less of it in terms of overt execution. Her early sequence of Trovatore excerpts (in German) shows it all in fresh estate—the dynamic control that enables her to accelerate and swell on the rising phrases of “Tacea la notte,” then pull back on both tempo and loudness as the phrases crest; the filled-out but elegant line of “D’amor sull’ali“—with, again, beautifully shaded-off diminuendi at the high B-flat destinations, and no hint of detachment or loss of vibrato; the ease and delicacy with which little turns and nuances of expression are tipped in; and, not least,the ability to negotiate the florid cabalettas of both arias and the allegro brillante of the Act 4 scene with Di Luna (Heinrich Schlusnus her equally adept baritone partner) at the ridiculous tempos necessitated by the timing limitations of 78-rpm sides. All these virtues did not make of her a bel canto ornamentalist (though Norma was among her youthful roles), but they lent a remarkable malleability to her hochdramatische identity, and underlay the lightness and intimacy of tone she brought, in her mid-50s, to those wartime Lieder recordings.
Though this kind of vocal finish, and some of her stylistic habits, would mark Leider as a rather old-fashioned singer today, she considered herself very much a modern artist. She was a part of her time’s shift, in both spoken and sung theatre, away from the older rhetorics of body and voice to a more true-to-life-seeming theatrical sensibility. When she arrived in Hamburg, she found herself instinctively resistant to the “overly dramatic, declamatory gestures” and the “greatly exaggerated diction and dynamic energy, practically devoid of any differentiating nuances” in the vocal stylings of the company’s established “high-dramatic” soprano, Thea Drill-Orridge—”effective, but not convincing.” She sought out a veteran baritone whom she regarded as a “highly intelligent actor, noble in every way and almost without gesture,” Alphons Schützendorf-Bellwidt, to work with her, especially on her Isolde. He emphasized the “harmony and aesthetics of movement,” and the necessity of listening closely to one’s partner and of allowing the music to suffuse every gesture and utterance. Similarly, when she alternated with Nanny-Larsén Todsen as Isolde at Bayreuth in 1928, although she found her “a great artist,” her Isolde extremely feminine and her makeup transformatively beautiful, she also objected to her “histrionic gestures” and classified her as “belonging to a bygone time.”^(II) Leider also tells us that whereas many singers of the day considered it incumbent on them to represent Wagnerian characters as superhuman figures, she approached each as a “human being, a singer” (“ein Mensch, ein Sänger”). In the spoken reminiscences she has left us, there is the tone of authority and experience, but no trace of pretension or diva-ish performance. In her singing we hear a constant awareness of the inflectional interrelationships of word to note to phrase, an awareness that never descends to a mere surface-level demonstration or illustration, or of “nuance” calling attention to itself. The proportions are those called forth by an inner attention, not the observance of stylistic convention or melodramatic effect for their own sakes. We gather that was also true of her physical acting.

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I have taken some pains to discuss Leider’s singing as heard on some of her many studio recordings (I’ve only scratched the surface) to encourage those who may not be familiar with her to do some listening of their own, and to carry that listening into the material heard on the Immortal Performances set. To an even greater extent than is true with most pre-WW2 broadcasts, such knowledge is crucial to making much sense of what one is hearing. Most of this Tristan material—amounting, I’d estimate, to sixty percent or so of the score, allowing for the extensive cuts within the surviving portions of the broadcasts involved, mandated by the Met’s performance practice of the time—have circulated on and off for seventy years or so, beginning with pirated LPs in the ’50s. By the 1970s, it was possible for David Hamilton to publish, in Vol. 6, No. 4 and Vol. 7, No. 2 (Fall, 1976 and Spring, 1977), of Musical Newsletter “Tristan in the Thirties,” a critical survey of the opera’s broadcasts from that decade (and, actually, a bit beyond, taking in Met transmissions of 1940, ’41, and ’43) that still has me in awe for its all-inclusiveness, dedication to detail, and keen artistic perception. An outgrowth of an MN series called “The Pirate Underground,” it is to this day the go-to resource for anyone in quest of the musical realities of Tristan performance (and by extension, Wagnerian performance in general) in that “Golden Decade,” at least for English-speaking devotees. (Nine of the broadcasts surveyed are from the Met, two from Covent Garden, and one, of Act 2 only, from an NYPO Carnegie Hall concert under Barbirolli.) David’s article is definitive on the vexatious matter of cuts, accurately cautionary with respect to sonics, and always responsible as artistic evaluation, including a meticulous examination of the musical inaccuracies of Melchior’s Tristan— which characterization is, unsurprisingly, present on all the performances save the Philharmonic broadcast. ^(III)