Of our two Kurwenals, Schutzendorf has more of the timbre and weight I like in the part, and in Act 1 lines out his song and announcements in good form. In his portion of Act 3, however, he far outdoes Melchior in the matter of clips and snips, and most of his material goes for little. Huehn, with his clear timbre and higher-lying baritone, is in his best vocal condition. (He is also the Kurwenal of the 1941 broadcast issued by the Met in its own series of historical releases.)  Ludwig Hofmann, the Marke, with about half his role to work with, brings to it a major bass voice, though one that apparently cannot help sounding like Hagen; he’s strong and in charge, but not very sympathetic.

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Although he had a relatively late professional start, due in part to military service in WW1,  Herbert Janssen started at the top, at the Berlin State Opera, in 1922, a year before Leider arrived there. At first he sang a mix of small and “important secondary” roles, but soon established himself as one of that distinguished company’s leading artists. Like Leider, he had a broad repertoire of non-Wagnerian roles in the first decade or so of his career—principally Verdi, but also including such parts as Valentin, Tonio, and even Papageno and Dr. Falke. He guested at nearly all the European houses of stature, became a regular at Covent Garden beginning in 1926, and first sang at Bayreuth in 1930, in what we can probably term his Lieblingsrolle, Wolfram. He was not Jewish, but had been a marked man since the Nazi takeover in 1933 because of his outspoken opposition to the regime. In 1937, barely escaping arrest by the Gestapo, he fled to England, and thence, in 1939, to America, his career from that time forward being centered in New York in the Northern Hemisphere winters, Buenos Aires in the Southern Hemisphere ones. After his retirement from opera, he lived and taught here in the Hotel Ansonia, New York’s old singers’ pile from Caruso’s time on.

Janssens’ voice was a capacious, mellifluous one of great warmth. (N. B.: he is the only one of the artists spoken of here, apart from Melchior, whom I heard in person.) If Schorr’s was of maroon coloration shot through with brass, Janssen’s was a deep tan, with a mellower instrumental reinforcement. In his early years it was firm, centered, and comfortable in the high baritone range; later, it loosened, fattened out, and darkened—for those familiar with my left-of-center/right-of-center categories from Opera as Opera, we could fairly say that between the mid-1920s and the late 1940s, his voice moved from perhaps five degrees left of center to ten or fifteen degrees to the right, thus joining, right in step, the broad left-to-right migration of classical vocalities over that time. When he softened and lightened the tone, a quick vibrato often emerged, quite in agreement with the format and timbre of the younger voice, but sounding slightly out of place later on, like an escapee from a different style and personality. From first to last, he sang a model legato, every syllable blended without incident into the next, and always informed by the messa di voce, whether that was on display or held in latency. In those respects, he is similar to Leider in an ongoing singiness that is easily heard as Italian: even in declamatory mode, he never resorted to straightening the tone or to barking the attacks. A peculiarity of his way of singing, more noticeable as time passed, was a back-of-tongue formation of the “r” consonant, which when combined with the habit, then common among German singers, of darkening the “e” vowel almost beyond recognition in syllables like “ver” (“fawrh“) made an oddly Slavonic impression. He was a strong physical presence, and my recollection of his acting corresponds to  descriptions by those of more complete memory, i. e., fully invested, incisive, and economical.