Yet Knappertsbusch’s Prelude still makes its songful, lingering, “slow” effect. We are reminded that timings are not everything when it comes to our impressions of pace, and that in this instance we must also consider the significant differences in acoustical ambience (Bayreuth), the orchestras themselves, and recording techniques. But I think that contrasting senses of phrasing and attack are what is most important here. The Prelude begins with three statements of the theme associated with the moment of the Christian sacrament (“Take from me my blood, take from me my body,” as the knights will sing to that theme in the first temple scene), each higher, louder, and more urgent than its predecessor, till the third, dominated by the higher woodwinds reinforced by trumpet, has a searing quality at once ecstatic and anguished, with biting sforzandos and string tremolandos. (We will hear this same emotional extremity, set to the same musical sequence, in Act 2, when Parsifal voices Christ’s cry “Erlöse, rette mich aus schuldbeflekten Händen!—”Deliver, rescue me from guilt-stained hands!”) These statements are separated by passages of peaceful settling, marked by undulating arpeggiations in the strings below (we miss much of their effect on these broadcasts) and calming, gradually dying repetitions of a chord, in phrased triplets, by the flutes and clarinet above. The second of these passages finishes with our first hearing of the Grail theme, ending with the Dresden Amen. After the first and second come extended silences, empty bars given fermatas and thus at the conductor’s will, though meant, we would assume, in some proportionate relation to the established tempo. And after the third, we hear the first pronouncement of the faith theme, strongly accented, in the brass. Bodanzky treats these progressions differently enough from other conductors to be called idiosyncratic. The repeated woodwind chords are given not only their indicated gradual reductions in volume, but a ritardando as well, with little fenced-off silences between the final phrased groupings. Other conductors mark these repetitions too, but Bodanzky’s are more keenly etched and insistent, with attacks resembling the coups de glotte of a technically adept singer. The effect is like the reading of a high rhetorician who wants to keep his listeners in suspense as to when he is actually finished with his emphatically reassuring utterances. The mute bars that follow are very long, as if this rhetorician is daring you to let your attention slip, so that the next resumption comes as something of a relief. When the faith theme enters and is developed, each accented note of horn and trumpet (they’re all marked marcato) is jaggedly separated from its neighbors, with no sense of a sostenuto carrying them along. It can be heard as a powerful declaration, or as a pounding on one’s skull that has a literal, plodding effect. These choices are not, of course, all that different from those of other conductors—Bodanzky, Busch, Furtwängler and Knappertsbusch can all defend theirs as marked on the page. But Bodanzky’s are a little startling, and clearly reflective of his sense for the drama in the music. I wish I could have heard them in the house, with the audience.