We can sum up our imagining of the ideal Salome voice as being that of a dramatic soprano of the Wagnerian type with total command of the line, the chiaroscuro, and the messa di voce over a pitch range from the low G-flat (which, incidentally, Isolde does not approach, her lowest note being an A, which she touches once, and otherwise B, which she accesses a few times) to the high B natural. But to this we must add the requirement, already noted, of a strength and alacrity of quick-firing declamation, the registering of many small verbal points, in the lower and lower-middle range, which no Wagnerian soprano faces. And that changes the voice’s functional set-up to a degree. Of course, as with all great roles, there have been singers who have succeeded as Salome without possessing all, or even most, of these virtues. Just two seasons after the Met’s introduction of the work to New York, Oscar Hammerstein’s Manhattan Opera Company mounted it for Mary Garden. She’d met with Strauss, worked a bit on the part with him, and had his blessing to undertake it. She not only took it for a nice run in New York, but sang it in Paris and then in Chicago (where she also revived it after assuming artistic control of the company), always to feverish acclaim despite sometimes severe criticisms of her voice. She sang it in French, the language of most of her triumphant roles (Louise, Carmen, Thaïs, and above all Mélisande), thus bringing it into closer compliance with Wilde’s text. ^(I) Garden’s recordings give us scant clues as to how she managed these roles. She obviously possessed an extraordinary erotic/mystical charisma, in addition to some vocal charm, that swept audiences along with her, and enough vocal stability to make her way through challenging parts without an actual breakdown. It was a combination of virtues that’s proved at least as rare as Isolde-ish mastery.

As to that , I think that while allowing for the possibility that during the interwar decades in Europe some dramatic soprano of whom we have little report and scant recorded tracings (there are suggestive fragments of Jeritza, for example, and after all every opera house had at least one representative of the Fach), and without for a moment dismissing the achievements of Lawrence, Rosa Pauly, Göta Ljungberg, Christel Goltz, Astrid Varnay, et al., the soprano who, after Fremstad, most completely filled the bill was Birgit Nilsson. She alone had the required security from top to bottom of the range, the cool beauty of tone, dynamic control, naturalness of musical response, and sheer ease of emission—this last most of all, for only with her could one settle in and receive an Isolde, Brünnhilde, or Elektra without a moment’s concern for loss of stability or freshness, and finish with the sense that she could do it again after a quick break for refreshment. That’s all there for the hearing on her recording with Georg Solti, though obviously we lose some of the tonal presence and impact, the marveling at the feat being done in the moment. And in the very success of John Culshaw’s stereo dramatization, with its ambition to uncover notes never heard and effects never made, some of the effect is dissipated.