Wagner: Euch Lüften, die mein Klagen (from Lohengrin)

2013 sees a series of Wagner reissues on Eloquence from complete operas and highlights to Wagner singer portraits and even an audiobook!

This is a 31-year retrospective (1956 – 1987) of great Wagner singing on Decca and Deutsche Grammophon featuring fourteen extracts from nine operas with seven great singers. Wagner’s heroines make for some of the most pivotal moments in his operas and this anthology highlights almost every aspect of his women – suspicious and inflexible (Fricka, here taken from a recital recording by Regina Resnik), redeeming (Elisabeth and Brünnhilde), passionate (Sieglinde), transfigured (Isolde). We hear the great voices of Joan Sutherland (who sang a number of Wagnerian roles before establishing her incomparable reputation in the bel canto repertoire), her idol, Kirsten Flagstad (here singing Kundry), Flagstad’s Scandinavian successor Birgit Nilsson (in two of the greatest opera scenes – Isolde’s Liebstod and Brünnhilde’s Immolation), and at the start of this recording, the splendidly Italianate singing of Susan Dunn as Elisabeth and Sieglinde. The illuminating notes on the music and the singers are by Wagner scholar Peter Bassett and the booklet includes a photo gallery of the singers.

These recordings were made when the great Norwegian soprano was in her vocal prime, between 1935 and 1940. Although her voice remained astonishingly well preserved till late in her career, later recordings of the same music are no less resplendent but perhaps lack the last degree of dramatic tension she could bring when regularly singing these roles on stage.

Included is the Act 2 duet from Parsifal, which became a calling-card not only for her but for her partner in this recording, and times without number on stage, Lauritz Melchior.

Desmond Shawe-Taylor remarked in the New Grove Dictionary of Opera that ‘No one within living memory surpassed her in sheer beauty and consistency of line and tone’. She quickly became a legend in Norway, where her portrait adorned both the 100 Kroner note and the tail of Norwegian Air Shuttle planes, but her fame spread throughout the musical world (she is one of the few opera singers to have her own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame). Rudolf Bing called her ‘the greatest soprano of the century’, and many would agree.

The German soprano Maud Cunitz was a legendary leading singer, who was completely dedicated to the ensemble of her opera house. She was self-critical and self-confident enough to never attempt a role to which she was unsuited.