In Fritz Reiner, an old Strauss hand from the Dresden days, and in the Met orchestra of the time, she had perfect accomplices. In the mid-to-late ’30s, when Salome was allowed to come in from the cold, the orchestra had played the score (and that of Elektra, too, which had entered the repertory) under Artur Bodanzky and—surprisingly but reportedly effectively—Bodanzky’s counterpart on the Italian side of the repertory, Ettore Panizza. Then, for a couple of seasons in the early ’40s, George Szell took charge of the piece. So (allowing for the normal turnover) the players knew their Strauss, and had learned it under high-intensity, disciplinarian conductors. Reiner, with his deep collaborative experience with Strauss, his tiny beat, his fanatical insistence on detail, and his turbocharged approach, was completely in sync with Welitsch’s inclinations, and the orchestra plunges through the score with the same sort of “controlled abandon” as her own, and of course with a much wider dynamic and coloristic range. We should note that we are hearing all this in mono, and in broadcast balances that are not unlike that of the early (1954) studio recording with Goltz and the VPO under another great Strauss conductor, Clemens Krauss, but quite unlike later studio efforts under a Solti or a Karajan. But I think we can discriminate between the perspective evoked by recording methods from that created by the live relationship of voices to orchestra to audience, at least if we have been so fortunate as to have had long experience doing so.

If Welitsch’s singing was so wonderful and her voice so suited to this Lieblingsrolle, why did her career end so precipitously in her mid-prime years? Good question, and we seek to learn from such unhappy events. She herself said that “I gave too much.” She was an emotional performer, and sometimes an undisciplined one. Others have cited too many performances of big roles with too little recovery time between. Both these observations (and especially the two together) are plausible as partial answers. But I think a technical factor, related to the register development and bonding desideratum mentioned above, should be considered. The basic set of Welitsch’s voice is bright, with persistently open vowel formation, leading to the “silvery” quality (and sometimes a sharpness of timbre toward the top) so often referred to by keen listeners. And a true chest voice never emerges in her lower octave. She is thus in the position of having neither the “enveloping the lower register in the higher one” option that well-developed darker (more “covered”) female voices have nor the “bonded from below” one deployed by more open ones of high accomplishment, usually Mediterranean—listen to the F-to-B-above-middle-C segment in such lyric-coloratura sopranos as Bori, Galli-Curci, or Tetrazzini (the most powerful of these; she could have sung Salome), or to the same area in the voice of Claudia Muzio, a great Italian spinto, or in that of Giannina Arangi-Lombardi, a dramatic soprano with a model Italian technique. As I’ve indicated, Welitsch was not entirely lacking in low-range strength. But that strength was derived from a mix that bridged the passaggio, with not enough chest down where it belongs to properly seat the voice, and too much (in a thinned-out form) a little higher up, where it tends to shallow out the tone, encourage exaggeratedly open vowels, and act as a tug on the voice as it ascends. ^(I)Welitsch took all possible inflectional advantage of her technical structure in her singing of Salome, gleefully punching through all that lower-middle wordplay, but sometimes also stretching her mix far higher than was prudent. Some of her most compelling moments are so exactly because she dares actorly inflections most singers would have the sense to avoid, and the feel of the singer breaking the rules is part of the thrill. The clearest instances are in the mounting demands for the head of Jochanaan, not only in the phrases that carry ever higher and with ever stronger accenting, but in those that require power and accent in chest territory, (“Ich fordre den Kopf des Jochanaans,” repeated low A’s) or with pounding accents back and forth through the break or on repeated F sharps—in sum, nearly everything she sings from the end of the dance till the emergence of her coveted dish, a head on a platter.