Wagner's Last Golden Age at the Met: II, The Heroic Tenor

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In our last post (http://operapost.blogspot.com/2019/03/wagners-last-golden-age-at-met-i.html), we undertook a fleeting review of the dramatic soprano during the fourth and last Wagnerian Golden Age at the Metropolitan Opera. During the first of these, 1884-1891, all opera at the Met was sung in German and Lilli Lehmann was the company’s prima donna assoluta; the second, 1895-1901, was dominated by the leading tenor of his time, Jean de Reszke and sopranos Lehmann and Lillian Nordica. New Yorkers owed the third, 1903-1917, to conductors Gustav Mahler and Arturo Toscanini, and sopranos Olive Fremstad and Johanna Gadski. Our focus here, as it was in our previous post and will be in our next, is on the fourth, the 1930s and 1940s. We devote the present installment to the Heldentenor. We should add that since the middle of the 20^th century, there have, of course, been extraordinary Wagnerian singers (Birgit Nilsson and Jon Vickers to name only two), but there has not been a cohort strong enough to stand side by side with the earlier eras of Wagnerian excellence, the last of which closed circa 1950.

In 1926, just as electrical recording technology began to do justice to the power and refinement of great Wagnerian voices, Lauritz Melchior made his Met debut as Tannhäuser. At first, the young Dane created only a modest impression. The Herald Tribune wrote, “An improved variety of that disheartening species, the Wagner tenor.” In his first two seasons with the company, Melchior appeared a scant seven times, then took a year’s sabbatical. It was not until the 1932-1933 season and the advent of a fabulous partner, soprano Frida Leider, that reviewers recognized his unique instrument and surpassing gifts. Melchior became the leading Wagner tenor of the 1930s and 1940s, and in retrospect, indisputably the greatest Heldentenor of the 20^th century. Kirsten Flagstad, to be sure, was the foremost Hoch Dramatischer, but Leider, Marjorie Lawrence, Helen Traubel, and Astrid Varnay attest to the deep well of ranking sopranos in this period. Melchior had the field to himself: more than 500 performances between that 1926 Tannhäuser and his final Lohengrin in 1950. By a wide margin, he holds the house record for every one of Wagner’s Heldentenor roles.

As we hear in countless commercial recordings and transcriptions of live performances, Melchior’s voice rides above the wave of the composer’s massive orchestration all the while taking the measure of passages of lyric tenderness. With a rock-solid lower octave, a legacy of the first five years of his career when he sang as a baritone, Melchior negotiates the top of the range with unparalleled stamina, brilliant timbre, and clarity of diction. Here, in a live 1941 broadcast conducted by Toscanini, are the final minutes of Act I of Die Walküre. Having at last revealed his identity to Sieglinde, his sister and soon-to-be lover, Siegmund draws the sword his father, the god Wotan, had embedded deep into an ash tree. The titanic feat finds expression in Melchior's unstinting delivery of the high-lying phrases. Traubel is the Sieglinde.



When Melchior and Flagstad starred together in the late 1930s, the Met’s box-office receipts soared. Their most popular draw was Tristan und Isolde. Little wonder that the exacting maestro Toscanini dubbed Melchior “Tristanissimo.” This 1939 recording of the end of the “love duet”lustrates how stunningly matched were Melchior and Flagstad, the quality of their huge, beautiful voices, a breath span that enables both to easily encompass the longest phrases.

We see and hear Melchior live on television in 1951 in Lohengrin's Act III narration. The "Swan Knight" explains the mystery of his name and provenance. At the age of sixty-one, the tenor sustains the long phrases with the bright metal of his voice intact.

p.s. In the mid-1940s, Melchior curtailed his Met performances and began to enjoy success in Hollywood movies as an amiable, avuncular character actor. In Two Sisters from Boston (1946), one of four films he made for M-G-M, he sings Walter’s melodious “Prize Song” from Die Meistersinger, a Wagner opera not in his New York repertoire. The sequence frames a comic reconstruction of an early 1900s acoustical recording session. The two characters who appear at the beginning are played by June Allyson and Jimmy Durante.