Wagner: Gotterdammerung: Dawn, Siegfried's Rhine Journey & Funeral March

This selection of some of Wagner’s finest orchestral excerpts opens with the ‘storm-swept ballad’ of Der fliegende Holländer, the opera which launched his epoch-defining later masterpieces. The entire span of Der Ring des Nibelungen is represented in this programme, from the luminous rainbow bridge which leads the gods to Valhalla in Das Rheingold, the urgent drama of Die Walküre, and the atmospheric repose of the Forest Murmurs in Siegfried, to the tragic depths of Siegfried’s Funeral March. This recording has been praised for its ‘radiant sensuousness’. (Gramophone) Volumes 2 and 3 in this series are available on 8572768 and 8572769.

‘It’s Wagner’s opera: let’s present him and not ourselves!’ This remark by Hans Knappertsbusch to Hans Hotter as the singer was about go on stage as Gurnemanz at Bayreuth in 1964 was characteristic of the conductor’s attitude. Singers’ egos, directors’ concepts and designers’ flights of fancy had no place in the Knappertsbusch vision of Wagner’s stage works. Indeed, after his second season at ‘New Bayreuth’, he told Wieland Wagner: ‘As soon as the spirit of Richard Wagner moves back into the Festspielhaus, I shall be the first to return’. And yet it would be hard to find a more flexible and spontaneous exponent of the conductor’s art than Hans Knappertsbusch, or ‘Kna’ as his friends and colleagues called him. No two of his performances were alike, which made him a difficult conductor to ‘capture’ in the clinical environment of the recording studio. He was notoriously averse to rehearsals, preferring to take inspiration from the moment when everything came together in the crucible of a live performance in the theatre or concert hall. Frequently the result was magnificent as this collection is testament to.

This collection brings together the bulk of his Wagner orchestral recordings for Decca (with the Wiener Philharmoniker), with scenes from Parsifal with members of the Wiener Staatsopernchor and the ‘Forest Murmurs’ from Siegfried with Franz Lechleitner in the title role – in all, more than two-and-a-half hours of music recorded for Decca between 1950 and 1959. Australian Wagner scholar Peter Bassett contributes the illuminating notes for this release.

Knappertsbusch died in October 1965 in Munich, following a fall at his home. In a long musical life, he explored the works of the great classical composers with intelligence and imagination; but, as he himself said, it was to Wagner’s music dramas that he devoted ‘his most and his deepest’.

Wagner is the giant among composers by reason of the fact that he created his own world. Whereas others interpreted ancient and familiar mythology, Wagner created his own myth. Whereas others composed to librettos by poets, Wagner wrote his own texts. He even built his own opera house, which had to be different and innovative. Wagner was the greatest creative genius in music history.

And yet this superhuman giant also had a sense of humour, clearly audible in the wonderfully constructed Meistersinger overture. And he created intimate, sensitive lyricism, which moves us deeply in his Siegfried-Idyll. This lyricism is the most important aspect of Wagner's music: Brünnhilde's beautiful, longing melody which shines through the huge flame that absorbs both her and the collapsing world.

Iván Fischer (from liner notes)

CD 1 rolls off with The Ride of the Valkyries, CD 2 with The Flying Dutchman Overture – there’s over 150 minutes of Wagner on this star compilation.

Of course, Wagner also wrote big ballads as well, so there’s the Siegfried Idyll, the Tristan Prelude and Liebestod and the ethereal Prelude to Lohengrin

The big names are there, above all Karajan, Böhm, Kubelik and Jochum. It’s a mainly orchestral set, with just the Lohengrin Bridal Chorus and two extracts from The Ring (conducted by Karajan) to remind you that Wagner was writing operas.

The perfect Wagner starter-set!

This double album constitutes one of the most important issues of Toscanini’s recorded legacy in that it combines in these two CDs the first ever broadcast concert the Maestro gave with the NBC Symphony Orchestra, an orchestra founded expressly for him in 1937 in New York, and the last - his final appearance with the Orchestra in April 1954. A great deal of interest therefore attaches to these two events, combined for the first time as a commercially issued package - a true ‘hail and farewell‘ (Ave Atque Vale) to the art of the conductor whom many reagard as the greatest of all.