Late within the afternoon of 19 November, 1965 – a Friday – the Hungarian conductor Georg Solti steered the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra via the placid concluding measures of Wagner’s Die Walküre, the ultimate downbeat touchdown at exactly 5.30pm. It was the top of an epic journey to make the primary full studio recording of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, a cycle of 4 operas lasting 15 hours in whole.
That journey had began seven years earlier on 24 September, 1958, when periods to report Das Rheingold – the curtain-raiser to Wagner’s tetralogy – started within the Sofiensaal, Vienna, a transformed Nineteenth-century steam tub identified for glorious acoustics. The street to that opening session had, nevertheless, itself been tough. Decca, the corporate making the recording, wanted appreciable persuasion {that a} full Ring cycle made sense commercially. Would sufficient copies ever be offered, they questioned, to cowl the large monetary funding required to finish the undertaking?
When Das Rheingold was ultimately launched as a three-LP boxed set in March 1959 (value £6), Decca executives obtained their reply. The critics raved in regards to the new recording and, crucially, it started promoting in substantial numbers globally, even turning into a well-liked hit within the US. ‘There it was within the Billboard charts of the best-selling LP albums,’ reported Rheingold’s producer John Culshaw, ‘surrounded by Elvis Presley and Pat Boone, and with out one other classical recording in sight.’
Why was the Solti / Vienna Phil ‘Ring’ such an enormous success?
Culshaw himself was a significant purpose why Das Rheingold was so stunningly triumphant. Seeing thrilling prospects within the new expertise of twin-channel, stereophonic recording, he completely rethought how opera ought to be offered to the armchair listener. Culshaw’s ‘theatre of the thoughts’ concerned cautious placement of singers throughout the stereo spectrum, mimicking stage positions and actions.
Wagner’s personal instructions had been an important level of departure in Culshaw’s calculations. The rating of Das Rheingold requires 18 tuned anvils for the Nibelheim episode, a stipulation often ignored within the theatre. Culshaw took it significantly: 18 anvils had been duly discovered, and 18 gamers employed to hit them. The thunderclap heralding Rheingold’s last scene additionally obtained the Culshaw therapy, and was one in every of a number of ‘sound results’ rendered with unprecedented constancy on the completed recording.
What did the critics say in regards to the Solti / Vienna Phil ‘Ring’ cycle?
Das Rheingold’s industrial success induced Decca to sanction a continuation of the Ring undertaking, and recordings of Siegfried (1962), Götterdämmerung (1964) and Die Walküre (1965) adopted. Popularity of every instalment was once more just about common, many commentators acknowledging that totally new requirements had been being set each artistically and sonically within the presentation of opera on report.
One critic hailed Siegfried as ‘the best recording, as such, of opera that we’ve had thus far’. In Götterdämmerung, Culshaw had particular steerhorns made for Act Two, including to what one reviewer referred to as ‘the alchemy of Decca’s magnificent, gorgeous, overwhelming new recording’.
Which singers carried out within the Solti / Vienna Phil ‘Ring’ cycle?
Maybe the largest issue of all within the Decca Ring’s success was the excellent high quality of the singers. Kirsten Flagstad, Hans Hotter, Gustav Neidlinger, Wolfgang Windgassen, Birgit Nilsson, Christa Ludwig, Régine Crespin, Gottlob Frick – all featured prominently, drawn from a traditional technology of post-war Wagner performers. Culshaw’s ‘incomparable engineers’ (as The Instances referred to as them), led by Gordon Parry, additionally performed an important function in capturing performances which, of their extremes of dynamic and expression, usually severely stretched the analogue tape expertise of the interval.
In the present day, the Decca Ring stands as a monument to an optimistic golden period of recording historical past, when grand operatic tasks had been doable and audiences hungry for excellence purchased the data. When the entire cycle was launched on 19 LPs in 1968, the eminent critic Andrew Porter referred to as it ‘the gramophone’s biggest achievement’. Over half a century later, there are lots of who proceed to share his verdict.
What else was occurring in November 1965?
sixth: The French composer Edgard Varèse dies on the age of 81 in New York. A scholar of the composers D’Indy, Roussel and Widor in Paris, Varèse went on to forge a lot of his profession within the US. Works reminiscent of his groundbreaking Ionisation for 13 percussionists (1931) demonstrated his emphasis on rhythm and timbre, whereas his pioneering later works earned him the sobriquet ‘The Father of Digital Music’.
eleventh: Inside hours of one another, Aeroflot Flight 99 and United Airways Flight 227 crash whereas trying to land at Murmansk Airport and Salt Lake Metropolis Worldwide Airport respectively. Thirty-two of the 64 passengers and crew of the Soviet Tupolev-Tu 124 are killed, as are 43 of the 91 folks on board the American Boeing 727.
twelfth: The well-known 330-year-old Manneken Pis statue in Brussels is stolen. Ripped away from its pedestal on the nook of Rue du Chêne and Rue de l’Étuve, solely the ft and ankles stay. An nameless cellphone name will later reveal that it’s mendacity within the metropolis’s Charleroi Canal, from the place it’s retrieved by divers and brought to Brussels Metropolis Museum.
twenty second: In Las Vegas, Muhammad Ali efficiently defends his world heavyweight boxing title in opposition to Floyd Patterson, himself a former champion. The superior Ali toys with Patterson for a lot of the battle, which the referee stops within the twelfth spherical. One reporter describes the spectacle as like watching somebody ‘pulling the wings off a butterfly’.
twenty fifth: The British pianist Dame Myra Hess dies aged 75. A famend performer of composers starting from Bach to Schumann, Hess grew to become significantly well-known throughout World Conflict II for defying The Blitz by organising greater than 1,500 lunchtime concert events on the Nationwide Gallery in London. Her final live performance was on the Royal Competition Corridor in September 1961.
