As has happened on several occasions, an unusual convergence of work demands has resulted in a slightly off-kilter publishing schedule. I have divided my consideration of the Decca/London/La Scala Madama Butterfly and the Bru Zane/Talens Lyriques Faust into two installments, the Butterfly herewith and the Faust in one week’s time. A few preliminary updates from my last full post: 1) Richard Dyer has corrected my reference to Jean Madeira as Suzuki. She sings that role on the Columbia recording under Max Rudolf (with Steber, Tucker, and Valdengo), and not on the Met Record Club release under Dmitri Mitropoulos with Dorothy Kirsten, Daniele Barioni, and Clifford Harvuot. Mildred Miller is the Suzuki there. 2) The onstage surprise celebration of Lawrence Tibbett’s 25th anniversary with the Met took place on the evening of the first performance of Peter Grimes in the 1949-50 season, not after the broadcast matinee a few days later, about which I wrote. 3) With respect to my speculations about Armed Forces Radio Network transcription discs (my suspected source for that same Grimes), Arianna Zukerman writes that the Library of Congress owns an extensive collection of those, which it is in the process of digitizing. There must be fascinating material there, some of it not preserved—or at least not well preserved—in any other form, including some of interest to lovers of opera and singing.

Finally: We had a rare old time in our June 10 “Porgy and Bess Roundtable,” produced by Joseph Horowitz’s Post Classical Ensemble. Horowitz has posted a brief blog entry on the event, accompanied by some video excerpts, here. I don’t yet know if the recording of the entire discussion (it lasted nearly two hours) will be made accessible in the future, but will keep you informed. And to our subject of the day—  

Aspects of the Butterfly production and performance were so off-putting to me that, after viewing Act 1, I very nearly decided to not write about it at all, or to simply report on the doings of the first act and allow us all to imagine the rest. If, I thought, this is what we’re to get at the opera world’s highest professional level, it does not matter if it’s the first, second, or fifth edition (see below) or the Bowery Follies edition—the emotional emptiness will be the same. And this wasn’t because the performance wasn’t succeeding on its own terms, but because of the terms themselves, which no longer seem open to question. Yet (I continued thinking) the restorations, of which the most extensive (in terms of elapsed time) were already past, are worth some notice and preliminary evaluation, and I was aware that the post-interlude parts of Act 2 (in other words, Act 3 in the common act division) held some changes of potential musical and dramatic import. So, after a fitful night’s sleep, I forged ahead.

All opera fans past entry level know that despite a cast headed by Rosina Storchio, Giovanni Zenatello, and Giuseppe de Luca, Madama Butterfly was a fiasco at its premiere (La Scala, Milan, 1904), and that the opera underwent extensive redaction and retouching before settling into the “standard edition” we almost always hear today. Minor revisions were made immediately, between the first and second performances of the original production; more extensive ones by May of that year, when Butterfly was performed with great success at Brescia; more again for its London premiere in 1905; and yet more for its first presentation in Paris (1906, at the Opéra Comique), on the basis of which the “definitive” vocal score, in Italian, was printed. There were even further changes, for Puccini re-inserted a few of the cut passages for a 1921 production at the Teatro Carcano, Milan. Although that edition could arguably be deemed the composer’s “final wishes,” it wasn’t taken up by the majority of the many companies undertaking the work—by any that I know of, in fact. ^(I)

The purpose of today’s minipost is to announce a forthcoming video discussion I think many readers will find stimulating. Some of you will remember my extended essay on last season’s  Metropolitan Opera production of Porgy and Bess (see 11/3/19) and the follow-up responses to readers’ comments (see 11/22/19). You may also recall my reference (with links) to the reviews of that production by Joseph Horowitz, whose several books on American music (and music in America) include “On My Way”/The Untold Story of Rouben Mamoulian, George Gershwin, and “Porgy and Bess.”

Now, Horowitz has gathered a highly qualified panel to exchange thoughts about Porgy, its place in our culture, and the questions of race that inevitably surface around its performance, including whether or not white singers should be allowed to perform in it, and if so under what circumstances. It’s the second in a two-installment discussion on Gershwin, parts of a series of video chats and podcasts produced by the Post-Classical Ensemble, of which Horowitz is the Artistic Director, and will include musical examples. Besides Horowitz, the participants will include Angel Gil-Ordoñez, PCE’s Musical Director; George Shirley, performer of major tenor roles in many of the world’s leading opera houses and frequent spokesperson on the status of African-American singers on the operatic scene; bass-baritone Kevin Deas, distinguished concert and recital artist who has sung Porgy on numerous occasions; Mark Clague, head of the Gershwin Initiative at the University of Michigan; and myself. Bill McGlaughlin, host of many of the PCE podcasts and chats, will moderate.

This event, in the form of a Zoom chat, will air this Wednesday, June 10, at 6:00 pm. You do have to register, but that’s simply done. Here’s the link, which includes all needed instruction:

I hope many of you will tune in.

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NEXT TIME: As previously announced, I’ll be writing about video and audio recordings that feature the restoration of much material originally included , but subsequently cut, from the scores of two standard repertory operas: Madama Butterfly, in the 2016 La Scala production (on Decca/London DVDs) and Faust (on CDs from Bru Zane). Due to the pile-up of work, I’m giving myself a day’s grace on my usual Friday publication date. So look for it on Saturday, June 13.

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Today’s post is, as promised, the completion of the non-thematic, no-concept article I began two weeks ago with commentary on the 1956 Met broadcast of Manon Lescaut. As I was preparing for that, my colleague Joseph Horowitz sent me a message or two enthusing about the conducting of Paul Paray with the Detroit Symphony in a concert performance of Carmen from 1959. Horowitz is much more up on conductors and orchestras than I am, and his posts on artsjournal.com fruitfully explore several under-critiqued areas of our musical heritage. So when he enthuses about something, I pay attention. As it turned out, the Carmen and José of Paray’s Carmen were Jean Madeira and Brian Sullivan. Hearing them again started me thinking about not only their own careers, but those of others, some of whom participated in the Manon Lescaut performances of those years, and others who struck little bells because they connected to topics that were already active in my mind—Benjamin Britten, because I was assigning myself some homework in anticipation of the Billy Budd the Met had announced for next season, and Lawrence Tibbett, because of my involvement in Marston’s upcoming restoration and release of that great baritone’s recordings. These pieces jigsaw together for me in ways that are no doubt idiosyncratic, but which may throw some light on aspects of the American opera scene, 1948-59.

Paray was a French conductor and composer who spent a eleven or so years (1952-1963) as conductor of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. He recorded extensively for Mercury, which label was turning out some of the best-sounding orchestral recordings of that time (or this), and while to my ears the Detroit remained a recognizably American orchestra (as did the BSO under Munch or the CSO under Martinon), Paray’s French ear clearly had an influence on its style and sound.^(I) In this Carmen, I certainly hear a lot of what Horowitz found stimulating, especially when the orchestra is properly to the fore. The overture has great fizz and discipline—Paray finds the virtues of clarity and crispness without their often concomitant loss of weight. And those qualities prevail through most of the performance, along with some fine execution of instrumental interjections (the trumpets at several junctures) or solos (the violin picking up on Carmen’s “Tra-la-la-las” as José leads her to prison). At points, as with José’s outburst at “Non, je ne peux plus d’écouter!” and succeeding bars, the orchestra’s interjections make an impact one doesn’t often hear. There is also a strong momentum to the reading, usually to its advantage but sometimes not, as with a recklessly fast tempo for the smugglers’ quintet, which turns to shambles, and more crucially the opera’s final scene, which is brutally pushed in best sauve qui peut fashion. Perhaps broadcast constraints were pressing.

It would be frivolous to call the performing arts “essential industries” in the shelter-health-and-sustenance sense that has to take priority now. And the prospects for resumption of anything resembling “normal” activity in pursuits that require the herding of one or two hundred to several thousand souls in auditoriums, on stages, and in orchestra pits are, to say the least, uncertain. So we—all of us to whom opera and the other arts of the act afford shelter, health, and sustenance for heart, soul, and mind, and for confirmation of an important piece of our identity—are bereft. Fortunately for us, we have the awareness that even under circumstances more trying and tragic than our present ones, the passion and dedication of artists and devotees have always found ways to bring the striving for beauty and meaning back to full life. That will happen again, I am sure.

Meanwhile, there are secondary resources in plenty to help carry us through. Given the necessary adaptations to my own current situation—a fairly strict observance of a self-semiquarantine regimen, without access to the bulk of my reference materials (and no, not everything is online), in addition to late-life retraining to keep my teaching practice active via Zoom—I’ve taken the liberty to follow casual leads and paw about among these secondary resources, without much regard to whether or not an over-arching theme unites the findings. I’ve always found, though, that it’s in the nature of pawing about to turn up items that connect, at a micro- if not macro-level. In fact, that’s the tautological essence of subjective exploration, and the discovery that many such micro-connections are held in common plays a big role in the life of the devotee community. My original intent with this post was to lead off with a consideration of a recently released starry performance of Puccini’s Manon Lescaut, then follow with thoughts about two nearly (but not quite!) identical performances of Britten’s Peter Grimes, and finish with a glance at an old concert performance of Bizet’s Carmen from an unlikely source—all these from the 1948-59 time period, and full of these micro-connections. As sometimes happens, though, I have found myself with a lot to say about the Puccini performance, particularly in regard to its leading tenor, Jussi Björling. So the remainder of my proposed material will follow at more modest length in two weeks’ time, and a full post on a date TBA after that. The micro-connections will still be there.  

The Manon Lescaut is a recent release from the St. Laurent Studio of the Metropolitan Opera performance of March 31, 1956. The romantic protagonists are sung by Licia Albanese and Jussi Björling, and the conductor is Dmitri Mitropoulos. This was a broadcast that acquired a legendary status among devotees, partly on its merits as one of those electric afternoons, partly for its presumed superiority to the RCA Victor studio recording starring the same protagonist pair, and partly as one of the relatively few complete opera broadcasts by Björling, who had dismayed us with frequent cancelations. It happens that I was there. If you should acquire this two-CD set, take a look at the photo on the verso of the track listing card (a view I don’t recall seeing previously reproduced), and let your eye follow along the aisle by the wall on the right to where it curves in at the back, you will see the precise location along the rail of my Family Circle standing room spot on that day at the old house. It was a favored location, won by charging up five flights of stairs faster than the competition when the 40th Street door was thrown open, and knowing exactly where you wanted to be for the fullest view. Kept us regulars in shape.

I have had an unusually full reader response to my two-part essay on Der Fliegende Holländer, which began with a consideration of some of the ideas incorporated into the François Girard production that had just begun its Metropolitan Opera run when the pandemic descended upon us; continued with a discussion of this opera’s plunge into modernity at Otto Klemperer’s Kroll Oper, and of that conductor’s later recorded interpretation of it; and concluded with attentions paid to a sampling of the pre- and post-WW2 interpreters of its major roles. Some of the respondents were answering my invitation to corrections, since I’d released the second of these posts without the usual proofreading and cross-checking. And indeed there were several corrections needed—mostly misattributions or inconsistent references to dates and venues, but including one genuine gaffe, the designation of the highest note in Erik’s Act 3 Cavatina as a B-natural, when it’s actually a B-flat. That’s embarrassing, especially inasmuch as I had the score before me as I wrote. Late-night drear or not, one wonders how such things can happen.

All these factual face-plants have now been set straight, with my thanks to the readers who alerted me to them. But since I had in any case intended to add a footnote clarifying my reference to the tenor aria in Verdi’s Ernani and expanding the discussion of Wagner’s concern over the very phrase that contains that same high note, and since three of the responses have dealt with substantive matters of interpretation, I’ve decided to post a brief addendum on them here, rather than trying to squeeze them into a future post on unrelated subjects.

F. P. Walter has written to point to what he sees as a “sharp disconnect” between my partial description of the Dutchman’s character (as heard in the music) and my evaluation of the suitability of certain singers for the role. He finds my observations about the “monstrous” aspects of the Dutchman’s psyche “insightful” and “original” (thank you, F. P.—I rather liked this passage, too, and haven’t seen that connection made elsewhere), but then finds it odd that I should cite Friedrich Schorr, with his “smooth, round, benevolent sound” that suggests “a kindly man with a streak of melancholy,” more suited to Wolfram or Sachs than to a figure of  demonic configuration. He has some of the same reservations concerning my admiration for Joel Berglund and Herbert Janssen in this music, and wonders if I may not be under the lingering influence (as we all can be) of my first loves among Wagner baritones.

As to this last, I have to concede that one can never eliminate that possibility, and that to pretend to do so would be to assert a power of objective judgment on a question that is inherently subjective. I’d say that I can only trust my ears, evaluative skills, and listening experience, and hope they’re enough to add up to plausible preferences. I’d also concede that all of us who are voice professionals (singers, teachers) are apt to be more concerned with what we might call purely vocal attributes than are many other listeners. If a voice seems truly “right” for the music, and the singing meets the standards we’re accustomed to applying (the combination is rare), we’re mighty satisfied, and if not, not so much, even if we recognize other virtues at work. One can call this a bias, but of course I think it’s a salutary bias, the setting of a base point of reference before we go on to other attributes of artistry. And a final concession: F. P.’s point about Schorr’s timbre is well taken. There is little we would call demonic in it, and from that standpoint the Dutchman was not quite hand-in-glove for him, as were several other Wagner roles. Also (though I did not dwell on this in the article), with even primetime Schorr,  we are always aware that while the top Es and Fs at forte are secure and imposing, there is not the sense of much room above them. Until his last few years, he could sing F-sharps and even Gs (in Wagner’s writing for baritone, these are almost never sustained), but other singers, including Hotter and London at their best, released these pitches more freely. Here, though, it’s well to keep two things in mind. One, which I cite in the post and which is applicable to these Holländer extracts, is the constant admonition heard in the course of acoustical recording to step back from the horn for full-voice top notes, with the result that we never hear the whole impact of these in relation to the rest of the voice. The second is the testimony of many qualified listeners as to the sheer power of Schorr’s voice—in my book I refer to Hugh Thompson’s recollection of it pealing through the house “like a trombone.” Some of that comes through on Schorr’s best recordings, e. g., from the Walküre Wotan, but again we have to infer some of the live-performance effect.

In last Monday’s post, I mentioned thinking about Der Fliegende Holländer in the light of its small share of opera’s journey through what we loosely designate as “The Modern” and on into our present “Postmodern” condition, in the course of which the artform seems to have gotten lost. And some of my thinking was occasioned by a look back through Patrick Carnegy’s Wagner and the Art of the Theatre. This impressively researched, well-written book traces the production histories of Wagner’s operas, from the practices of the theatre world into which they were born down to those of our own, with thoughtful efforts to contextualize them artistically, politically, and socially. Any such history will tend to organize itself around emblematic statements or movements of “reform,” and for Wagnerian stagecraft one such is the short but eventful life (1927-1931) of Berlin’s Kroll Opera, where Otto Klemperer was the music director. Carnegy devotes an entire chapter to the Kroll, and within that chapter pays significant attention to the company’s production of Holländer. For any in-depth understanding of the Kroll’s place in its cultural milieu and of Klemperer’s stature over the long span of his life and career, I would refer you to Carnegy’s work and to Peter Heyworth’s splendid two-volume biography of O.K. Here, I’ll only note that the company was rebelliously modernistic and anti-Romantic, very much influenced by the revolutionary trends in the Weimar culture, with all their cross-pollinations among artforms, and that Klemperer, though steeped from childhood in the older musical and theatrical assumptions, was by this time a strong advocate of that newer spirit. He had experienced a “revulsion against anything that smacked of exaggeration or emotional indulgence” (Heyworth), and had turned away from Wagner (thenceforward, he preferred R.W.’s early operas to the later ones). He leaned now toward Bach and Mozart among the classics, and Stravinsky, Hindemith, and Krenek among his contemporaries.

At the same time that I was dipping into Carnegy and Heyworth, I re-acquainted myself with O.K.’s recording of Der Fliegende Holländer. It dates from some forty years after the Kroll production, so we cannot assume that it represents what he did with the score then. Still,  I was curious to find if I could hear in his conducting and work with the singers some musical correspondence to the modernist elements of that long-ago event, and—apart from the question of liking or disliking that aesthetic—get some sense of whether or not there was the kind of eye/ear unity that is notably lacking in so many contemporary productions. Klemperer’s standing in the postwar decades was lofty—especially in the UK, where much of his effort was concentrated—but among record-buyers and connoisseurs worldwide, as well. The revolutionary of the ’20s was now, along with Furtwängler, Walter, and Erich Kleiber (all of whom he outlasted), a grey-eminence connection back to the Wilhelmine days and all that had happened in the interim—and a complex, strong-minded personality, to boot. As a young critic assigned in the early 1960s to review the operatic portion of his growing discography, I approached the task with deep respect and, perhaps, some hesitancy to buck the unchallengeable credentials and established wisdom.

As we all deal with the grip of global mortal illness, with silence and absence, I’m going to try to sustain a small something of the nourishing presence of our art, and of the stimulation of critique. Today’s post was to be devoted to the Metropolitan Opera’s co-production time-share of Wagner’s Der Fliegende Holländer. And its first few performances did in fact take place, but since I held tickets for the canceled one of March 18, I can’t write about that. I can, though, write about the nature of the work itself, and the views of it set forth by the production’s creators, principally its director, François Girard. And I can relate those to some of the important ones advanced by others, and those in turn to how they have been, or might yet be, realized in performance. While we anxiously await the return of living art, a combination of writings, recordings, and recollections may yield some useful thoughts.

Girard was responsible for one of the most widely lauded Met offerings of recent years, the Parsifal that had its premiere in 2013. I wrote extensively on that production in Parsifal Lite and the Afterlife (3/9/18, q.v.), wherein I argued that although the production was impressive for its skill, invention, and technical command, it had to be rejected for its auteuristic contradictions of the work’s given circumstances. On the basis of its success, Girard has been brought back for Holländer and, we are told, a near-future Lohengrin. That last would replace the Robert Wilson production, which was my “enough, already” kickoff point for Opera as Opera—so in prospect, Girard has plenty of upside to play with there.

In Zachary Woolfe’s preview article in The New York Times, the auteurial trope that emerges as central to Girard’s concept is a removal from reality. He observes that whereas Parsifal is set in a “world of unreality and we tried to pull it back to reality,” Holländer is the opposite, and must therefore take the reverse journey. This kind of thinking has become so common that its peculiarity is no longer recognized: whatever a work’s creator has stipulated as fundamental to its stage world (and after all, this is only Richard Wagner) must be contradicted—it’s the director’s solemn mission. But of course, Girard has his reasons, and as in most such cases, these have to do with bringing the work’s cultural assumptions, its Weltanschauung, more into agreement with our own. This is first so that audience members will not be troubled by sneakily enjoying, or even finding themselves endorsing, once-presumptive attitudes we claim to have transcended, and second so that the director and his collaborators cannot be held guilty by association with them. Betrayal of the work’s integrity does not figure on the ethical balance sheet.

If pulling Parsifal back to reality was Girard’s aim with that work, his shot group landed well wide of the target—that is to say, the realm he depicted was far weirder, more “unreal” than the one Wagner describes. Stage worlds don’t work that way. Once the mythical medieval Kingdom of the Grail is established, as is stipulated in the work, things seem “real” according to how closely character actions and events follow its laws, not ours. Now, for Holländer, which is set in a world of everyday reality, Girard finds it advisable to take it somewhere else. “When you play it too realistically,” he tells us, “you expose its simplicity or naïveté” (my italics). Further, according to Woolfe, there’s the “challengingly misogynistic” matter of “antiquated gender dynamics” (Daland promises Senta to the Dutchman for “some gold [he] is carrying”). So if we can whisk the whole piece off to another level of reality (“Senta’s fevered imagination,” for instance), we can designate the shady deal for assignment there. “It’s like in a dream,” says Anja Kampe, the production’s Senta, thus placing it in the now-hoary succession of re-writes (to which Holländer has been especially susceptible) that dispose of perceived embarrassments that way. Virtuality—film and projections—will help transport us there, and since Girard began as a film director, he knows how to handle them, as he demonstrated with his Parsifal. (I much enjoyed the only one of his films I’ve seen—which, come to think of it, was about an artist, Glenn Gould, who chose to distance himself from the reality of live performance and dwell in the secondary orality of the recording studio.) Near the end of his article, Woolfe states that “About Mr. Girard’s sensible symbolism and visual flair . . . no one takes serious issue.” On “visual flair:” right. On “sensible symbolism:” wrong. Read on.

Displacements and re-arrangements necessitated by the health crisis, including setting myself up to do some online teaching, have forced me to postpone publication of today’s post till Monday (April 6). Then, I’ll be discussing Wagner’s Der Fliegende Holländer—the work itself; some of the ideas about it set forth in François Girard’s production of it; a smattering of the production history that brought us to such ideas (hint: Otto Klemperer and the Kroll); and some of the singers who have essayed the opera’s juicy roles. 

Thanks for your patience, and stay safe and well, all.

C.L.O. 

Today’s post is devoted primarily to Marston’s release of Lotte Lehmann’s electrical recordings from 1927-33 (further to the label’s restoration of her earlier acousticals), with what I hope will be instructive comparisons to other versions of some selections. Those will afford us further assessment of Lise Davidsen, about whom I wrote anent her Met debut in The Queen of Spades (see the post of 1/3/20), and will include a glance at Pentatone’s “complete” Der Freischütz, on which she sings the role of Agathe. But first, I’ll take a few lines to respond to a smattering of inquiries about the Met’s offering of Handel’s Agrippina, still running as I write this. After all, I devoted considerable space to an “Agrippina Forecast” (see 6/28/19 for some thoughts on this entertaining early work, and on Handel and Me.) Why wouldn’t I follow up that up? It’s right in the neighborhood.

Well, I did think about it, just as I’m thinking now about the Giulio Cesare announced for next season, and for that matter, about everything operatic that isn’t part of what I see as my principal subject, which is the performability of the “standard repertory” canon, and about the best use of my available time, energy, and money. Having read quite a bit about David McVicar’s take on the opera, and having looked over its casting here, I thought, “This is going to be a production of the forced-relevance type, replete with sometimes amusing parallels of a sort that can always be found. It’ll be musically lively (Harry Bicket, cond.) and pretty consistently undersung by talented people who will knock themselves out to keep my eye titillated and my ear on background.” 

I was still contemplating springing for a ticket, though, right up until seeing the review by Zachary Woolfe (NYT, 2/8/20), whose lines I think I’ve learned to read between. It’s not that his review was unfavorable—on the contrary, it was enthusiastic for almost exactly 70% of its generous (by NYT allotment) length, the 30% remainder being the singing-and-knocking-themselves-out segment. It’s also not that this order and allotment was necessarily disproportionate. That’s how opera presents itself these days, exceptions being the exception. So Woolfe’s piece opens with a rejoinder to the notion that the Met is too big a house for Handel or other Baroque repertory. (“This Is Now Handel’s House,” runs the title, with a subhead reference, picked up from the text, to the Met’s “looming proscenium.”) The rest of the 70% is devoted to characterizing the work and the visual tone of the production, in terms that, with allowance for the kind of “selling review” language that always hints at someone hoping to sell himself on what he’s seeing and hearing, isn’t at all out of line with my predictions. Then comes the 30%. Even here, more attention is given to bodily energies than to singing. But we are told that Joyce di Donato’s voice (a slender, though agile, one for the title part) can grow “pinched and strident toward the top;” that Kate Lindsey’s (Nerone) is “sometimes overwhelmed in fast passages;” that Iestyn Davies’ (Ottone) is “perhaps lighter and blander than the female contralto Handel envisioned” (we can safely cut the “perhaps”); and that though Brenda Rae’s “highest notes pop into the theater . . . her voice [as Poppea] is otherwise narrow and sometimes nearly inaudible.” Further, that though the “general sense of vocal unease” seemed to settle in after intermission, “even then the cast didn’t fully meet the virtuosic and sensual demands of this music.”

That’s what the distinguished Algerian baritone Dinh Gilly said to his wife, Cécile, who was teaching a talented but raw young Australian soprano, Marjorie Lawrence, in her Paris studio, c. 1929. And indeed, the excellent American mezzo Gladys Swarthout, recalling her most admired colleagues, later observed that “There was a wild quality in her voice that electrified me.” A major compilation (the first I know of) of this important soprano’s work has recently been released, as has a six-CD set extending Marston’s survey of the recordings of Lotte Lehmann. We’ll get a running start on these recordings today, PLUS: a follow-up on Wozzeck and the problems of Sprechgesang, together with the bibliographical references promised last time, AND a professional Conductor’s Lament over the current state of musical interpretation.

On the Dec. 21, 1935 Metropolitan Opera broadcast of Wagner’s Lohengrin, there’s a riveting five minutes late in Act 2. The moment always has some shock effect, as Ortrud interrupts the wedding procession into the cathedral with her contemptuous dismissal of Elsa and denunciation of her Swan Knight groom, and Elsa rises to the defense. Given choral and orchestral forces of professional grade and soloists of some vocal presence, Wagner has seen to that. But even heard out of context, there’s a special excitement here, a flaming, vaulting thrust to Ortrud’s attack, a firm nobility and purity to Elsa’s response, and a propulsive urgency in the conducting. The Ortrud is Marjorie Lawrence, singing just three days after her Met debut as the Walkūre Brünnhilde; the Elsa is Lotte Lehmann; the conductor is Artur Bodanzky.

Lawrence and Lehman shared the Met stage only briefly. This Elsa/Ortrud pairing and one other, Brūnnhilde and Sieglinde in Die Walküre, account for their scattering of joint appearances. But I am led to consider them together through a coincidence of recording discoveries—a recent four-disc compilation of Lawrence’s work—nearly all live—in Desiree Records’ Great Australian Voices series (GAV 010, very kindly passed along to me by Richard Dyer) and the new  Lehmann package mentioned above, this one comprising her 1927-’33 Odeon electricals. (An earlier Marston release covered her acousticals from 1912 to 1926—see my posts Lotte Lehmann and the Bonding of the Registers, Parts 1 and 2, 9/29/17 and 10/13/17.) Lehmann’s career was long and her studio recordings many; she is known to, and appropriately revered by, all opera lovers of historical inclination. Lawrence’s career was severely curtailed by polio, and she made relatively few commercial recordings. Any subliminal public awareness of her is probably due primarily to the movie based on her autobiographical memoir, Interrupted Melody.^(I) For the short span allotted her, however, there can be no doubt that she was a dramatic soprano of the first rank. She was also a rather different kind of “dramatic soprano” than we grew accustomed to from her time forward, or than we have any example of today.