It’s night and day. The gremlin is forever banished. True, this wasn’t an Isolde voice or an Elektra voice, but a Senta or Chrysothemis voice (we can hear the latter on the 1947 Beecham performance) and, as I’m sure Strauss himself recognized, the ideal Salome voice and temperament. Up to the time Welitsch worked intensively with the composer for a 1944 Vienna performance,^(I)she had sung predominantly lyric parts, including his Ariadne Komponist. But after all, he’d granted Salome permission to Mary Garden thirty years earlier, so he certainly would not have quibbled over Welitsch taking her on. As Welitsch’s international career opened out with the war’s end, she triumphed with it in London, first in German and then in the much-debated English-language production staged by Peter Brook in designs by Salvador Dalì. She arrived in New York as a heralded singer, but one virtually unknown to her audience, save by critical report of her European and UK successes. She’d made no recordings, at least of international circulation. ^(II) Only the cognoscenti who had seen her abroad had much notion of her voice and theatrical presence. On the ’49 broadcast we get plenty of the voice, with its unique melding of a vibrant strength that could slash and soar with an intense femininity that was somehow sensual and pure at once (no trace of “vulnerability”), and more than a suggestion of the temperament, with its passionate eagerness to launch into each new episode, each new phrase; its reveling in the bating of Herod; its exultation in the power she holds over all men except one and in the vengeance she visits on that one’s mysterious power of resistance. Here, she can let fly with the rare kind of seeming heedlessness, a “controlled abandon” that great singers sometimes achieve in roles that are perfect fits, and with a sort of dramatic specificity that eludes most of them. She can project the low passages described above (though not in a defined chest voice), including her eerie intonation of her woman-under-a-spell “little death” with the head, where in the 1952 performance she is forced to resort to spoken recitation. Written report and pictorial evidence leaves us in little doubt as to the analogues of these in her physical performance.