As the scene heats up into confrontation, there is an unsatisfying aspect to the vocalism itself. She shirks nothing, going right after the high B for “Lach-te!” and taking the high options for the great cries of “Irre! Irre!” But there is an uncentered, disembodied quality to the tone, and a disembodied Kundry is a contradiction in terms. This relates to a matter of technique I’ve often referred to, i. e., that the range extremes of a voice are in a reciprocal relationship. At the lower end, Flagstad does not engage the chest function, and where that grounding is lacking we expect the highest notes to erode sooner rather than later, particularly under heavy and frequent performance demands. For her, that is exactly what happened. Her open-throated sound was so ample that the lowest notes were probably audible in the house, though many are not so on this broadcast, and we note that she has no alternate color to work with for so vital a place as “Fern, fern ist meine Heimat,” dipping from the middle E flat to the low A. Both vocally and interpretively (to the extent that we can separate the two), this is a disappointing, abstract-sounding performance that seems never to have progressed beyond the first-reading conditions under which Flagstad had quickly learned the part some three years earlier.

How much of the unsettled, unformed quality of Flagstad’s work might we attribute to the Leinsdorf discomfort? As every history of these doings recounts, following Bodanzky’s death there was high (and very public) tension over the succession to his position as principal conductor of the Met’s de facto “German wing.” Flagstad, with Melchior’s support, pressed the Met’s General Manager, Edward Johnson, on behalf of her friend and accompanist Edwin McArthur, and while Melchior was apparently quite lukewarm on McArthur as conductor, he was as adamant as Flagstad in opposition to Leinsdorf. ^(I) I hear no trace of vocal insecurity on Melchior’s part in this Act 2, and in any case his wont was to press ahead on tempi. (He does for some reason omit the G of “Die Klage, ach die KLA-ge,” one of his juiciest notes, late in “Amfortas! Die Wunde!“, as if not quite prepared for it. But that sort of thing happened with him from time to time, regardless of who stood at the podium.) While we have no way of comparing these artists’ singing here with their long-accustomed responses to Bodanzky, it happens that in November of 1940, Flagstad and Melchior made a studio recording of Act 2 of Parsifal from Parsifal’s “Dies alles—hab’ ich nun geträumt?” through to the end of the act (i. e., the entire Parsifal/Kundry scene), with McArthur conducting one of the assemblages of highly skilled studio musicians labelled “The RCA Victor Symphony Orchestra.” The two great voices are of course more consistently present than on the broadcast. Apart from that, the recording confirms three things so far as Flagstad is concerned: first, that yes, at a few spots, including a couple I’ve mentioned, she uses the little extra time given her by McArthur, plus the calmer atmosphere of the studio, to gather her slow-twitch self to better fulfill the moments; second, that despite this, the command of her upper range is no more convincing than on the broadcast—indeed, there a couple of desperate lunges; and third, that McArthur’s accompaniments are compatible with Irving Kolodin’s description of one of the three Tristans he was granted at the Met as unprecedentedly “circumspect, subservient.” ^(II) Finally, we have one more chance to check in on Flagstad’s Kundry, and that is with a complete Act 2 from a June,1951 Covent Garden performance under Karl Rankl, partnered with Franz Lechleitner (Parsifal) and Otakar Kraus (Klingsor).(I happen to have it on a bonus CD with Walhall’s release of a complete Vienna Staatsoper performance of Oct., 1948, but no doubt it is available in other forms—possibly as part of a complete performance? The Vienna Parsifal, conducted by Rudolf Moralt, has a cast headed by Anny Konetzni, Günther Treptow, Paul Schöffler, and Ludwig Weber.) The condition of her voice in this Act 2 is as we hear it on other postwar live broadcasts, its timbre only slightly changed by the deepening mentioned above (that “Fern, fern ist meine Heimat” sounds more available), the tone still untroubled by any hint of wobble or shortness of breath, and the top now full, now thinned in that detached-sounding way. But has her interpretation perhaps grown with the years? Not to speak of. Save for a modestly increased specificity of inflection here and there, it is remarkably unchanged. I have not the slightest doubt concerning the Flagstad Phenomenon, and love much of her singing we can hear, both pre- and postwar. But the part of Kundry seems to have been a temperamental misfit for her.