There’s no use pretending that recordings of any sort capture more than a suggestion of Kirsten Flagstad’s voice. A few of the postwar studio recordings (above all her Isolde under Furtwängler), perhaps supplemented by selected live performances from those same years, come the closest. But while there was still plenty of voice left, and its maturing had taken on a deepening of its set and timbre that was welcome in many passages, she was no longer in her prime, and the top was often thin and tentative when not evaded altogether. I missed the few chances I might have had to hear her live, and so like everyone else must needs construct an imagined experience compounded of what’s on the records, recollections of adolescent broadcast hearings, and the reports of informed listeners who could compare her with the greatvoiced sopranos I did hear live—Traubel, Farrell, Nilsson, and just a notch below those in calibre (not in artistry), Crespin and Rysanek or, in a musical/stylistic mode twice removed, Joan Sutherland.^(I) From all these, it seems clear that what the young-ish Flagstad proffered was a Wagnerian variation of something I attributed to Sutherland at a similar stage, a magic  “. . . that lay not in sounding on the voice, but in sounding released from it”—a goddess-like tone that seemed to have no bodily source, but gushed forth freely and filled the house like no other. Even for Met audiences and critics accustomed for decades to greatvoiced sopranos, this voice had something unearthly about it that was uniquely compelling, overarching. At the same time, there was a purity, almost a girlishness, in her timbre that served at least nearly as well for Elsa and Elisabeth as for Isolde and Brünnhilde.

And it is important to acknowledge this, to concede that from broadcasts like this we can only hear, in our minds’ ears, a projection of the very element that made Flagstad a phenomenon. Because there is a crucial distinction between a phenomenon and a Kundry, and for anyone who wants to hear this unique character dramatized in the voice, Flagstad’s verges on the emotionally empty. In the scene with Klingsor, there’s no sense of the awful compulsion to do his will—she of course observes the rests for phrases like “I . . . shall not! . . . Oh!” (“Ich . . . will nicht! . . . . O!“) or “You . . . cannot . . . compel me” “(Du . . . kannst mich . . . nicht . . . halten),^(II) but without a trace of resistance in the tone—nor is there any bitter mockery to “Ha-ha! Are you chaste?” (“Ha ha! Bist du keusch?“). I am not trying to force Flagstad into the veristic singing-actress mold. Many singers of her time and before who had the full inflectional spectrum at their disposal chose to not use it in more than a (seemingly) strictly musical fashion. Schorr, in fact, could be placed in that category—but then he made the points in that way, eloquently, whereas Flagstad sounds innocent of the intentions that would motivate such an interpretation, or of the instinctive treatment of the sounds of words that would enable it. As her “Ich sah das Kind” wends its stately, relaxed way, she doesn’t pick up on any way of enlivening, for instance, “Den Waffen fern, der Männer Kampf und Wüten” or “Hei! Was ihr das Lust und Lachen schuf,” or, as she preps Parsifal for The Kiss, even of registering the pulse under the held notes and little triplet runs of her ditty of the wisdom of experience, “Bekenntnis/wird Schuld in Reue enden,/Erkenntnis/in Sinn die Torheit wenden.” ^(III) These are all places where a “purely musical” realization could have relieved the unvaried timbre and underdone articulation of the narrative. But they go unobserved, as if neutral recitation could carry the day. It does not.