Bodanzky’s reading comes more into its own with his return for Act 3. In the pages following a gripping Prelude (again quite slow, leaned-into) the music moves along a bit more, picking up a pulse in response to the more sustained melodic nature of the writing, and the voice/orchestra balance is on the whole somewhat better. List contrives some tender inflections, and he and the orchestra rise fully to the climactic pages at “So ward es uns verhiessen.” The transition into the second Grail Scene has a great, tragic gravity, and the chorus sings well, though with a timbral spectrum that seems a counterpart to the Flower Maidens’. They can’t help it, I suppose, just our inbuilt American can-do spirit—but as they bear in the coffin of the revered Titurel, they sound happy.

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The 1936 Buenos Aires performance (Marston 53003-2, long out of print but available, sans booklet, as a download), offers a fascinating complement to the Met in ’38. It has its own audio difficulties and linguistic oddities. Chief among the former, as Ward Marston explains in the booklet, is the fact that three microphones were in use, controlled from the basement by a fellow who had no comprehension of which should be on when, with the result that the voices move from foreground to background and return without any relation to balances, in addition to the broadcast problems normally presented by staging positions. And among the latter is the peculiarity of a chorus singing in a language other than German (it’s not easy to determine, given the theatre’s acoustic and the broadcast sonics). I at first assumed this to be Spanish, and when I queried Ward Marston about it, he reported that César A. Dillon, the booklet’s author of a short but interesting history of the Buenos Aires German-season broadcasts (they started with a 1920 Parsifal from the Coliseo led by Weingartner) confirmed that it was Spanish. However, my critical colleague and correspondent David McKee, who has posted his own review of both these recordings, tells me he has followed the performance with an Italian-language score and that the match is perfect; in fact, that the solo Blumenmädchen, singing in German, are backed by Italian-language choral lovelies. And that’s not implausible, given the Colón’s history as an Italian-language house. In any event, it’s not German, and on many of the long-sustained vowels, the effect is strange. There are also cuts, extensive and unwelcome ones in Gurnemanz’s Act 1 narratives, and in the Klingsor scene, which is chopped approximately in half.

So, between the sometimes frustrating miking, the cuts, and the choral oddity, the performance has to be of unusual interest to keep us involved. Fortunately, it possesses such interest. Its principals include three of French linguistic and stylistic cultivation (the Australian soprano Marjorie Lawrence, the Belgian tenor René Maison, and the French baritone Martial Singher), and one of Russian, the Ukrainian bass Alexander Kipnis. The only culturally German participants of importance are Fritz Krenn, the Klingsor, Fred Destal, the Titurel, and Fritz Busch, the conductor. Krenn and Destal both do well with their assignments, Krenn managing to sing his role honestly without sacrificing characterization. Busch, who in those years was conducting Mozart at the early Glyndebourne Festivals in the Northern summers and Wagner at the Colón in the winters, leads a highly charged reading, abetted by our basement engineer’s apparent preference for leaving the orchestra’s mic permanently on. Because of the redactions, it’s not easy to compare Busch’s track timings with Bodanzky’s, but where beginning-to-end passages survive intact, Busch’s are faster in all that I sampled. He elicits electricity and tension without seeming overdriven or losing the sense of tragic weight. With one exception, his cast is younger and of at least somewhat lighter calibration than their Met counterparts. But this is by no means a Parsifal Lite. Lawrence, the youngest of them all, has a soprano of less breadth but keener focus than Flagstad’s, and a much greater alertness to dramatic/verbal events. She also has a chest register, deployed in a well-curated manner, which gives her something to land on in the lower range, and the timbral contrasts Wagner heard when he wrote those notes. At the other end of the compass, she has fresh, bell-ringing, “on the voice” top notes. She starts a little tremulously, but quickly finds her footing. Maison, always interpretively committed and vocally happiest in the Jugendlich Wagnerian roles (there are fine Met broadcasts of Stolzing, Lohengrin, and Loge) is her match in all respects—together, he, Lawrence, and Busch create the most exciting end to Act 2 I can recall hearing. The Amfortas, Singher, is the one artist from these performances I saw multiple times in a variety of roles, including this one, both at the Met and in concert performances. I always admired the musical and stylistic incisiveness of his singing, and while his voice was not a true Heldenbariton of the Schorr type, it was ample and of a format suitable to Amfortas. When he sang parts set in a higher, more lyrical tessitura (above all his superb Pelléas on the 1944 Met broadcast), he accessed notes up to the high A with ease and effect, but when he attempted that tessitura while in his baryton grave guise (and he sang parts of that vocality, such as the Dutchman and Telramund, with some frequency in the ’30s), they would not take the full pressure even in those prime years, so after much fine, classically restrained singing, his assault on  those last desperate pages is only marginally more satisfying than Schorr’s.

The exception to the younger/lighter/Frenchier tone of this lineup is, obviously, Kipnis, and he is magnificent. Has the voice lost a trace of its freshness and core since his 1927 recording of Act 3 extracts with Siegfried Wagner, Fritz Wolff (Parsifal) and the Bayreuth Festival orchestra? Possibly just a trace, but rehearing this performance after many years, I was struck by how little change there had been. In the Act 1 narratives, he provides all the firmness and sostenuto missing from List’s account, and in Act 3 the voice pours forth with tonal authority, sustained line, and a bewitching mezza voce where called for. This is far better singing than Kipnis managed on any of the Met broadcasts that begin only a couple of years later, and while the cuts in his music are deplorable, what we have is itself enough to make the recording, for all its other virtues and faults, essential.

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NEXT TIME: As I previously announced, my next Met encounter will be with the revival of Richard Strauss’s Arabella, in late November. That will mean a publication date in the second or third week of December. If something presents itself for attention before that, I’ll let you all know.

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