Unlike Flagstad, Melchior was a true actor with the voice—he belongs among the colorists, the artists who infuse their singing with overt emotional inflection of an instinctively dramatic kind, like his close friend and frequent stage partner Lotte Lehmann. I was too young on the two occasions I saw him (as the Götterdämmerung Siegfried and Tristan), and my recollections too intermixed with my many subsequent encounters with his recorded voice and with his personality as conveyed by radio, TV, and movie appearances, to report in any detail on either his vocal or physical interpretations of those two roles. But I retain distinct impressions, even from this late-career stage, of an imposing physical presence and an outgoing emotional energy, and of the consistently lean, ringing tone that easily countered Helen Traubel’s richly colored, voluminous one. We might suppose Parsifal to be a part less well adapted to his strengths than several others, and it’s true that it doesn’t present all the heroic demands, including those of sheer stamina, of the young Siegfried or Tristan. But that would be to overlook the subtlety of quiet inward shadings (as with his replies to Gurnemanz in Act 1, or his murmurings of “Die Mutter, die Mutter . . . konnt’ ich vergessen” in Act 2) or his mastery of lyrical expression, as shown repeatedly in other roles (Siegmund’s “Winterstürme,” Siegfried’s Waldweben, Tristan’s “Wie sie selig,” et al.) and here in the beautiful line and tipped-in mezza voce of the Good Friday Scene. And of course Act 2’s writing does rise to requirements of heroic tone and emotional extremity. Among my very favorite records are three sides Melchior recorded not with McArthur and the “RCA Victor Symphony Orchestra” in their cramped studio, but with the Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy conducting, in the Academy of Music. They take in “Amfortas! Die Wunde!“—two sides, through to “Ewig, ewig von mir!“—and “Nur eine Waffe taugt.” Great singing, embracing the role’s full dynamic and expressive compass, and thrilling orchestral work, all conveyed in excellent mono sound. And to round out our picture of the performance workload carried by our Met Wagnerians of the late Depression years, we note that these excerpts, plus three more sides from Die Walküre, Siegfried, and Lohengrin, were laid down on April 17, 1938, the day after the Tristan that concluded the postseason trio of performances up in New York.

The wide inflectional range, power, and tirelessness that Melchior maintained throughout a long singing life in the most challenging of tenor roles was owed in part to purely physical attributes—a strong, big-boned body and an exceptional supply of virile energy—but to the unique structure of his technique as well, built out from his beginnings to the most successful of all baritone/tenor conversions. I have written often about the functional aspects of his singing, which might be summed up as a combination of a tightly knit gathering-in of the tone on the passaggio notes along with an unusual infusion (in so heavy-calibre an instrument) of Upper Family (“head voice”) function throughout the range and a poised engagement with the breath that enabled him to handle repeated high-compression passages, especially around the “break,” without either over-opening or “covering” the tone or weighing-down the voice. It’s the closest-to- perfect Heldentenor adjustment we have record of. He is in representative form on the ’38 Parsifal broadcast, and while the voice’s presence is not often that of those Philadelphia sides, by way of compensation we have, as with Flagstad, the full role, which embraces a great deal more in Acts 1 and 3 than Kundry’s few lines.