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 tip of an epic journey to make the primary full studio recording of Wagner’s Ring cycle, a cycle of 4 operas lasting 15 hours in whole.
Who was Georg Solti?
Georg Solti was a Hungarian-British conductor of each orchestral and operatic music, finest identified each for his opera conducting with orchestras in Munich, Frankfurt and London, and for his lengthy and extremely profitable spell as music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. The whole Wagner Ring cycle nonetheless stands as certainly one of his best achievements, alongside full Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner and Mahler symphony cycles in Chicago.
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 wonderful 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 bought, they puzzled, to cowl the big monetary funding required to finish the venture?
When Das Rheingold was ultimately launched as a three-LP boxed set in March 1959 (worth £6), Decca executives acquired their reply. The critics raved concerning the new recording and, crucially, it started promoting in substantial numbers globally, even changing 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.’
Who was John Culshaw?
Culshaw himself was a serious motive why Das Rheingold was so stunningly triumphant. Seeing thrilling potentialities within the new expertise of twin-channel, stereophonic recording, he completely rethought how opera must 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 a vital 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 critically: 18 anvils had been duly discovered, and 18 gamers employed to hit them. The thunderclap heralding Rheingold’s remaining scene additionally acquired the Culshaw therapy, and was certainly one of a number of ‘sound results’ rendered with unprecedented constancy on the completed recording.
What’s the finest ‘Ring’ cycle?
The recordings from Solti and the VPO are good candidates for a ‘Ring’ cycle finest recording. Das Rheingold’s industrial success induced Decca to sanction a continuation of the Ring venture, and recordings of Siegfried (1962), Götterdämmerung (1964) and Die Walküre (1965) adopted. Popularity of every instalment was once more nearly common, many commentators acknowledging that fully 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 got had up to now’. 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 most important 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 Occasions referred to as them), led by Gordon Parry, additionally performed a vital 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 attainable 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 best achievement’. Over half a century later, there are various who proceed to share his verdict.
