Ring Cycle - ROH 2018

Congratulations. So pleased to say I have mine for the second cycle. Which is appropriate as it will be my second complete cycle.

Saw the Barenboim semi concert, 2013 Prom performances. It was during a rare July heat wave and the RAH was boiling.

One of the musical highlights of my life.

Just showing off a bit, I heard Kempe's last cycle at Covent Garden in 1960 which was wonderful – very musical as can be heard from the recording of the 1957 cycle on Testament.

Then I endured Solti's construction of his cycle as he built it up during the early 1960s and finally gave it complete in 1964 with all his hard-driven energy and very little overall shaping, by which time some of the regulars had decided that Solti's Wagner was actually not very good Wagner and the nights when Wagner returned to the house were the occasional one-off performances that Edward Downes conducted. The glory of Solti's complete Ring was the participation of Birgit Nilsson as Brünnhilde and Hotter as the Walküre Wotan.

I then experienced the whole of Goodall's Ring, partly because EMI was recording it for Peter Moores so I had priviliged access to tickets in the front stalls! All the singers were wonderful and at the time it inhabited an amazing musical sound world of its own in which the audience became transfixed and time stood still, but I regret to say that it doesn't stand up well when listened to on record these days as being far too slow.

My last Ring was Pappano which was well conducted but a bit underwhelming vocally with the major disappointment being Lisa Gasteen's Brünnhilde.

I am certain I will never attend another Ring cycle live, but so long as high quality performances are available on TV, like the recent semi-staged Opera North cycle then I will continue to get pleasure from this incredible work. Those of you going to the performances next year should make the most of your opportunity to enjoy this unique experience.

And remembering Goodall's Wagner, I think I may already have mentioned the amazing experience of two thousand or so people all sitting with tears rolling down their cheeks during the third act of Reggie's Mastersingers at the Coliseum. Who knew what a weepie Mastersingers was?

Managed to get two tickets in my chosen price band but not many available!

My first Ring so intend to do some reading/watching/listening to prepare for it. Any recommendations?

Mr Snow, thanks for the link to that Introduction CD. I'll start with that and Pappano's BBC documentary which I recorded years ago, and then consider which to listen to beforehand. Given I'm doing the last cycle, I've got a whole year to study...

That's all excellent advice, Mr Snow, but you didn't actually mention any of the books. The famous, classic text is called Wagner Nights by the distinguished critic Ernest Newman (1868–1959), originally published in 1949. If you don't already have it then you should certainly acquire a copy, not just for the Ring but for Newman's excellent analysis of the rest of Wagner's main operatic oeuvre. Apart from that I cannot particularly recommend any other books but there are plenty.

Also, might I recommend the Ring recordings in which I personally had a hand one way or another (anonymously) being those conducted by Kempe and Keilberth on Testament and Goodall now on Chandos. There is a particularly fascinating history attached to how the Keilberth recording, the first stereo Ring, came to be made and then how it came to be locked away unissued for so many years until Testament managed to clear all the rights and put it out. When I first heard excerpts from the recording I was gobsmacked at its vividness and vitality and it still seems to me to capture a great deal of the character of Bayreuth itself in a way that cannot be described. Maybe I am imagining all this but the original producer, Peter Andry, was my boss for many years at EMI and in recent years I have been part of the team responsible for all Testament releases so it was a very special moment when we won a Gramophone Award for the release. So, n1david, you can't go wrong if you are going to buy just one Ring recording than to get the Keilberth, even though it is quite expensive, but some of the others are relatively cheap so you should get more than one and you might even become obsessed and buy them all!

OK now gents. What do we recommend from a practical point of view that n1david actually does to start making a serious study of the Ring?

I am not familiar with Pappano's documentary but I am sure it will be worthwhile. I would then agree that the introduction to the Ring using extracts from Solti's complete recording would be a very useful reference to the motifs:

www.amazon.co.uk/Wagner-Introduction-Ring-Nibelungen-CDs/dp/B001N9UZ8O

and then that leads fairly directly to buying the complete Solti set. Despite my serious reservations about Solti's live performances at the ROH in the 1960s, I have to admit that the Decca studio recording is of outstanding quality as a complete representation of the work both vocally and technically and IMHO is very much preferable to the other main studio recordings by Karajan and Haitink for a variety of reasons. Having said that, all the live recordings have technical limitations of one kind or another and will best repay listening once one is more familiar with the work as a whole from the best studio recording, which is Solti.

Of course I have a special admiration for the Testament live Keilberth and Kempe cycles, not to mention Goodall on Chandos, but you can't listen to them all at once and if n1david's principal intention at this stage is to get to know the work in preparation for seeing it live for the first time next year then I think he will hear it at its best with Solti. As to books, then tmesis has offered some good suggestions.

So them's my thoughts on a first line of attack for getting to know the Ring. Anybody got any comments on that?

Well tonyloco reluctantly I would also have to say Solti, yes it's a magnificent recording that, sonically, still sounds amazing and his roster of soloists, amongst studio recordings is second to none, but like most of his interpretations I find it too hard driven.* I agree Karajan and Haitink aren't as good. One live performance I like is Barenboim's at Bayreuth. It's very good hifi-wise and stage noise ain't too distracting. John Tomlinson is a very moving Wotan and Anne Evans a musical Brunnhilde.

* I see that Culshaw's 'Ring Resounding' is re-available in paperback. I found it a great read about 40 years ago!

I suppose that had something to do with it. Recording Wagner operas in general and the Ring in particular is something of the holy grail for record companies. I can't resist the temptation to tell a version of the story here and now – we might perhaps call it 'Tony's Narration' in good Wagnerian style.

After the arrival of electric recording in 1925 it became possible to record complete operas in acceptable sound on 78s but Wagner remained something of a challenge. Before Columbia and The Gramophone Company (HMV) merged in 1931 to form EMI, the two companies were fierce rivals and both embarked on an extensive catalogue of recording complete operas under studio conditions, usually in major opera houses, but Wagner (and Mozart) lagged behind popular Italian and French operas. Columbia went to Bayreuth and recorded an abridged 'Tristan' in 1928 and an abridged 'Tannhauser' in 1930 both in studio conditions while HMV recorded chunks of the Ring piecemeal in Berlin, Vienna and elsewhere. There is a fabulous Act I of 'Walküre' with Lauritz Melchior and Lotte Lehmann under Bruno Walter in Vienna from 1935 (still available on Warner Classics) and Melchior recorded a large part of the role of Siegfried. Some critics say that to hear the role of Siegfried properly sung, it is essential to listen to the Melchior recordings which are available on various historical retransfers. But nobody recorded any of the Ring operas complete up to 1939 when World War 2 effectively put an end to recording all German operas.

Cut now to the early 1950s when tape recording and the LP record had both arrived and it became possible to record Wagner operas from a technical point of view, although the commercial return on a studio recording of a Wagner opera still remained a problem. However, when Bayreuth reopened in 1951 after the war, both EMI and Decca saw the possibility of making live recordings of long Wagner operas relatively cheaply. This was still the era of mono recordings and in 1951 Decca under John Culshaw went to Bayreuth to record the Knappertsbusch 'Parsifal' and EMI under Walter Legge went to record the Karajan 'Meistersinger'. Both companies had ambitions to record the Ring as well in subsequent years under these conductors and in fact they both unofficially recorded complete cycles in 1951. As you can read in Culshaw's book 'Putting the Record Straight', the Knappertsbusch 'Parsifal' was a triumph and was released by Decca to great acclaim, but Knappertsbusch was not on good form in the Ring and it was only 'Götterdämmerung' that Culshaw edited ready for release but EMI stopped the release because they had several of the singers under exclusive contract and it was not until 1999 that Testament was able to clear the contractual rights with both Decca and EMI that this splendid recording saw the light of day.

Back in 1951 at Bayreuth, Legge unofficially recorded a complete cycle with Karajan but it was not satisfactory and Legge released only the third act of Walküre in order to make a contractual claim with the Bayreuth Festival to complete the cycle later with Karajan, which never happened.

The next thing that occurs in this saga is that John Culshaw leaves Decca in London and goes to work for Capitol in Los Angeles in about 1952 in order to set up a classical recording operation for Capitol based on European orchestras and artists, but he has barely settled into his new job when EMI buys Capitol and Culshaw decided he did not want to work for Capitol after it became part of the EMI group so he returned to Decca in the autumn of 1955. This was right at the start of the era during which stereo was being developed and, in fact, in Culshaw's absence Decca had sent a stereo team to Bayreuth in the summer of 1955 to record the entire Ring conducted by Keilberth under the junior producer Peter Andry. When Culshaw on his return to Decca learned about this live stereo Ring, he forbade any further mastering being done on it because it was his ambition to record the first stereo Ring under studio conditions in Vienna under Georg Solti, who had impressed Culshaw when they first met some years before in Germany. Shortly after that Peter Andry and his mentor at Decca, Victor Olof, moved to EMI in 1956 to take over the HMV classical recording programme in competition with Walter Legge who was running the Columbia programme so Culshaw became the senior classical producer at Decca and effectively decided the company's recording policy.

Now back to EMI in the early 1950s. Furtwängler and Karajan were both Legge artists and were great rivals so Legge retained Karajan on Columbia but put Furtwängler on HMV. Legge had made the fabulous complete 'Tristan und Isolde' in 1952 with Furtwängler in London with the Philharmonia and then set up a complete 'Walküre' in Vienna which was meant to be the start of a complete Ring cycle, but alas Furtwängler died shortly after the 'Walküre' was completed. Meanwhile, Karajan had fallen out with the Wagner family at Bayreuth so Legge's plans for a Karajan Ring at Bayreuth were thereby thwarted. By now the stereo era was dawning and in preparation for a complete studio Ring in stereo, Legge had under exclusive contract Hans Hotter and Birgit Nilsson and their stereo duets album and Nilsson's solo recital from that period can be heard on Testament but alas no complete Ring was ever set up and the best EMI ever did was to release the complete Ring that Furtwängler had recorded in 1953 with the Italian radio station RAI in Rome but this suffers from various technical problems and is considered less successful than the Furtwängler recording originating from La Scala . In fact, EMI's first and only complete studio Ring is the Haitink from 1988-91 which is ruined by the unsatisfactory Brünnhilde of Eva Marton. To complete the story, Karajan recorded his complete studio Ring for DGG in Berlin between 1965 and 1969 or thereabouts, which puts it immediately following the Solti recording, but the general critical opinion is that Solti's soloists are very much 'echt' Wagner while Karajan's are more individual and less experienced, particularly in what some critics refer to as Karajan's 'chamber music' style for some parts of the cycle.

For further source references I recommend 'Ring Resounding' and 'Putting the Record Straight' both by John Culshaw and the CD booklet notes in the complete Testament Ring cycles by Keilberth and Kempe and also the 1951 'Götterdämmerung' under Knappertsbusch and the 'Götterdämmerung Act III' under Solti from the Proms 1963. These excellent CD booklet notes are by Mike Ashman and yours truly. There is also some interesting information in Richard Osborne's biography of Herbert von Karajan.

Well, you did ask, Mr Snow!

Tony's Narration is absolutely fascinating.

You mentioned tonyloco Culshaw's 'Putting the Record Straight.' Having enjoyed 'Ring Resounding' years ago I always wanted to read this. Would you recommend? (Amazon S/H price £29.96!)

Thanks tmesis and Mr Snow for liking my Narration. Like Wagner, I do tend to go on rather a long time once I start but I hope what I have to say is of some interest. Over the years I collected rather a lot of books about music, musicians and the record business but in my recent downsizing I got rid of quite a lot of them. I can however recommend the following but I find it sad that some of them now have astronomical price tags, even second hand on Amazon.

'Ring Resounding' by John Culshaw – the making of the Solti Ring by the man who made it.

'Putting the Record Straight' by John Culshaw – Culshaw's autobiography, an essential historical record about the making of a large part of the Decca catalogue

'On and Off the Record' by Elisabeth Schwarzkopf – Walter Legge's life and times, a collection of writings by Legge in his own autocratic style

'Otto Klemperer: his life and times' by Peter Heyworth – two volumes of essential reading but volume two, which covers his later life in the recording studio, is now very expensive

'Herbert von Karajan' by Richard Osborne – an excellent biography of the man who sold more gramophone records than anybody else. Both this and the Klemperer book include a great deal of accurate information about the recording careers of both conductors.

'Inside the Recording Studio' by Peter Andry – a collection of cameos about the artists that Andry worked with at Decca, EMI and Warners. The publishers did not want an autobiography and insisted the author concentrated only on the biggest names like Beecham, Karajan, Rostropovich, Pavarotti, Callas, etc. This is an American publication which partly explains the high price.

'Music Makers on Record' by Suvi Raj Grubb – a rather biased account of the classical recordings produced by Grubb in his role of assistant to Walter Legge and then as a producer in his own right at EMI

'Since Records Began' by Peter Martland – a history of EMI celebrating the company's centenary in 1997, based very much on the company's operation in the UK. An excellent over-view of the company but covering all genres of music, not just classical.

I would sound a note of caution about the memoirs of Fred Gaisberg, the famous HMV producer, in any of its forms, being Gaisberg's original version called 'Music on Record' and the two expanded revised versions by Gerald Northrop Moore called 'A Voice in Time' and 'Sound Revolutions'. They are very interesting but Gaisberg's original book contains many errors and inaccuracies that Northrop Moore fails to correct.

I should also mention the wonderful books by the other Gerald Moore including 'Am I too Loud', 'The Unashamed Accompanist' and 'Farewell Recital', all of which are gems and include a lot of details about the artists he recorded with.

There are of course many autobiographies and biographies about almost every major classical artist that cover their work making records, starting with mountains on Callas but the ones I listed above are the ones I would recommend about the history of classical recording.

Yes, I intended to add 'Elisabeth Schwarzkopf A career on Records' to my list of books but somehow failed to do so. I should have also added 'Walter Legge: A Discography' by Alan Sanders to the list. This is a complete discography of every recording Walter ever made with some brief but valuable details of Walter's activities year-by-year as a heading to each section. I do love discographies, whether of individual artists, orchestras, record label series or producers. As well as all the published historical discographies in book form there are some splendid ones available online. But I digress – as usual!

In due course I will jot down a few thoughts about Legge and Schwarzkopf. They are mostly second-hand anecdotes but I do have a few minor first-hand things to say.

TL