Karl Burrian, the Herod of both the Dresden and New York premieres, was a Heldentenor, well respected as Siegfried and Tristan. On his records (like Fremstad’s and Van Rooy’s, early acousticals) he shows a firm, clear tenor capable of sustaining line and poise in a German-language Forza duet with the baritone Plaschke and in Tristan’s “Wohin muss Tristan scheidet,” and an interestingly heady mezza voce in “In fernem Land.” He sounds like a singer of high competence, not of timbral magic or extraordinary interpretive imagination, and that accords with the burden of the critical response to him that I’ve seen. But he was enthusiastically praised for his Herod, which would suggest a gift for vocal characterization. He had the advantage, of course, of advice from the horse’s mouth, but we can hear suggestions of it on his “Mime hiess ein mürrischer Zwerg” (Götterdämmerung). In ’34, Max Lorenz and Frederick Jagel both sang Herod. The former was the leading Siegfried and Tristan of the ’30s and ’40s in Germany and Austria while Melchior held forth here, and while Jagel was an all-purpose tenor for the Met whom we usually identify with Italian roles (a sturdy, unglamorous voice in that context), he’d also taken on Wagner assignments, and recorded Siegfried extracts with Stokowski in the ’30s. Between 1934 and the Welitsch broadcasts, the Met had offered the splendid Belgian dramatic tenor René Maison, a world-class Lohengrin and Stolzing in those years, and an American tenor with a substantial sound, Arthur Carron, as Herod. In ’49, Jagel is back, a year from retirement, and on returning to the broadcasts I’d assumed I’d have a fairly strong preference for Set Svanholm, of the ’52 performance. And he is good, rather in the vein of his Loge in the Solti Ring, his voice suggesting a more youthful Herod than Jagel’s. But I found myself admiring the way Jagel tucked his quite insightful and animated readings into his bulkier sound, which by no means seems enfeebled. Ramon Vinay, en route back from Otello, Radames, and Samson through Tristan, the elder Siegfried, and Parsifal to his home base in baritone roles, was also an effective Herod in these years, the first I saw at the Met in performances with Inge Borkh under Mitropoulos. The takeaway here, I think, is that Herod is a Heldentenor part. We hope that said Heldentenor has a grasp on this unheroic character and some inventiveness and limberness with the atypical writing that Strauss has done for this voice type. But the role should not be cast with a character tenor, his music given over to the substitutions for singing that even the most theatrically clever of that species is obliged to live on. He is too important a figure in too important a drama, set to music of too great a scale and too demanding an aesthetic, for that. We can grant a provisional amnesty to that ingenious artist Julius Patzak, nailing every inflection on the nose with a lyric tenor voice of quality without turning Herod into a caricature, at least on records. Would it have worked in the house, I wonder?