It was irresistible catnip and I showed all the retail resistance of a frenzied bargain-hunter at a Walmart Black Friday sale. The minute I knew it was coming I had my credit card out and my pre-order in the queue. Not one microsecond of buyer’s remorse. Not one frisson of wondering “Now, come on there, do you really need that?”
I refer, of course, to the recent re-re-mastering and mega-release of the Solti Ring Cycle, done up proud by Decca in a giant boxed set stuffed with goodies: the Ring itself on 14 CDs, Deryck Cooke’s two-disc and book-length analysis of the epic and its musical construction, John Culshaw’s insider making-of book Ring Resounding, the libretti, pictures and press releases, a subsidiary disc of orchestra-only Wagner stuff released at the same time as the Ring albums, and as icing to an already drool-worthy cake, the Ring complete in slightly higher definition (48 kHz, 24 bit) audio on a Blu-Ray disc.
The Solti Ring gives us a rare instance of risky artistic vision resulting in commercial glory. Decca made a mint out of the thing, and even 54 years later the shekels continue to rain in. The first step (1958) was relatively modest but nervy nonetheless—the first opera of the tetralogy, Das Rheingold, in stereo, with no thought as of yet to a complete cycle. That doesn’t seem so daring nowadays, but it was. For one thing, stereo LPs were brand new. Stereo recording had become de rigueur as of about 1956 or so, but until 1958 the only medium for getting a stereo recording to consumers was via open-reel tape, which restricted distribution to a few audiophiles hither and yon. It took some years to develop a reliable technology for representing two channels of audio with a wiggly groove on a disc. Stereo LPs became commercially viable only in 1958, but it isn’t as though the entire market jumped to stereo all at once. You couldn’t play stereo records on a monophonic record player, after all—well, you could, but they sounded horrible and disc wear was catastrophic as a stylus designed to move only one way resisted being obliged to move in two. You could outfit a monophonic record player with a stereo cartridge, but most people opted to wait for stereo until it was time to buy a new record player. Separate bins in the record stores for mono and stereo were the norm when I was growing up.
It’s also worth considering that, in 1958, even LPs themselves were newish. Columbia introduced the format in 1948, but it required time and market persistence for LPs to become the norm. That didn’t happen without some squabbling as RCA Victor pushed hard for its competing format, the 7” 45 rpm disc. For a while there the market was in a dreadful state of affairs, witnessed by the situation with Pierre Monteux and the San Francisco Symphony’s 1950 recording Beethoven’s 8th symphony. RCA, anxious to cover every base possible, brought out the album in four formats—78s (DM-1450), 45s (WDM-1450), 10” LP (LM-43), and eventually a 12” LP (LM-1799). It took a while for the dust to settle, but by about 1952 it was clear that the 12” LP had won the classical market, while the 7” 45rpm disc found its ideal niche as the perfect medium for pop singles.
Thus there was absolutely nothing humdrum or ordinary about the notion of recording Das Rheingold in stereo. Most record companies wouldn’t have risked it. But Decca was blessed with some leaders who combined business acumen with vision, and despite considerable corporate qualms, the green light was given for the project, to be produced by the immensely gifted John Culshaw, with the equally invaluable Gordon Parry handling the technical end of things. Decca had perfected a technique of microphone placement that was producing startlingly realistic and full-bodied sound, and in 1958 all of the necessary accoutrements such as tape recorders, microphones, and amplification were highly developed. All involved knew precisely what they were doing, and they were willing to experiment as necessary to create a vivid Rheingold that not only captured the music, but also created an aural theater of the mind for the listener. That was a tall order, but they proved to be more than equal to the task.
Wagner’s vision for the Ring transcends the resources of even the most lavish stage production. The four Ring operas take place in a mythic space inhabited by gods, humans, and various otherwordly creatures; Rheingold has no humans at all. Wagner, that consummate master of musical theater, knew full well just how inadequate a stage production would be, no matter how much money he wheedled from King Leopold or how much skill he threw into the designing of the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth. The problem that he faced plagues every producer of a Ring to this day: the thing doesn’t want to settle down into a merely human presentation. Sooner or later any Ring production comes down to people standing on a stage and singing. That’s musical theater’s greatest strength—people standing on stage and singing—and its greatest weakness.
Wagner solved it by elevating the orchestra to the leading role in the drama. There is no doubt to my mind that the one indispensable element in any Ring production is the orchestra. Lose that, and no amount of stagecraft or world-class Wagnerian singing will save the thing. I will even go so far as to state that, for me at any rate, the Ring works best as a theater of the mind rather than a real, physical onstage experience. That’s true of all theatrical works to some extent, but it’s especially severe with the Ring, given its overwhelming scope. The four operas of the Ring best work their magic purely as music, unhindered by the inevitable disappointment that arises when idealized mental vision collides with quotidian reality.
Thus Culshaw’s single most momentous decision regarding the Rheingold recording: he engaged the Vienna Philharmonic. And not just any old Vienna Philharmonic, either: this was the Vienna Phil at one of the highest artistic crests of its history, fully recovered from the ravages of WWII and as of 1958 an Olympian crew of master instrumentalists who carefully protected their century-long tradition. The large-bore brass instruments and the slightly acidic woodwinds served as perfect complements to a string section to end all string sections. Old-timers in that orchestra had received their traditions from players who had played under the original Wagnerian crew of conductors—Richter, Levi, von Bulow, even Wagner himself. The younger members were just as keen to carry on the great tradition of Vienna playing. It was—and is—an orchestra that defines not only a city but an entire way of life. Even if Vienna’s musical glory days are long gone—no Mozarts or Beethovens or Brahmses or Schuberts stroll the streets these days—the Vienna Philharmonic has lost none of its luster. To this day it is still primarily the orchestra for the Vienna State Opera, with membership in the oh-so exclusive Philharmonic proper restricted to those deemed worthy by the players themselves. And there it was: Europe’s reigning opera orchestra that was also ranked at the summit of symphonic ensembles. And that dream orchestra was about to be preserved for eternity in radiant stereo sound by a team of recording engineers second to none. If there ever were a sonic pearl beyond price, this was it.
Das Rheingold required a triumvirate: producer, orchestra, and conductor. Georg Solti was the ideal choice, especially viewed with the crystal clarity of hindsight. John Culshaw has described some of his thoughts about the “other” prime candidate—Hans Knappertsbusch, a veteran and beloved Wagner conductor steeped in the Bayreuth tradition. But Culshaw understood only too well that the relatively easy-going Knappertsbusch wouldn’t have the necessary fire and brimstone that the project all but demanded. It was one thing to conduct a relatively loose-limbered Rheingold in a theater, where the audience would be distracted by all that papier-maché and guys in frog suits and big beefy Wotans stomping around the six-foot-high mountaintops. It was another thing to create a Rheingold that would leap out of a record groove and into a listener’s mind. So Solti took command, and what a command it was: the Vienna Philharmonic can be downright truculent when it loses respect for its conductor, but the orchestra snapped into golden, glorious attention for Solti.
The casting was no less careful and well-considered, and in some cases agonizing. But they got it the way they wanted. Maybe that wasn’t the way everybody wants it—how could it be—but signature performances abound throughout. Culshaw got his singers moving around, not aimlessly, but in accord with the action as specified in the score. He never hesitated to use sound effects as necessary, but never for cheap thrills. Thus Alberich’s laugh as he recedes into the depths of the Rhine with his plundered gold, or his ghostly voice emerging from empty space as he dons the Tarnhelm. Culshaw gave us the 18 anvils that Wagner specified for the Nibelungs, and Solti saw to it that those anvils hammered out precisely the rhythms notated in the score rather than just banging. The mighty thwock of Donner’s hammer as he dissipates the mist that obscures Valhalla probably made more needles jump out of more grooves than any moment in LP history, but it is precisely the kind of world-shattering sound that is necessary at such a moment. A plain old bang just won’t do.
Thus a sonically vivid Rheingold that floods the listener with waves of sound and conjures up images that float free of any stage constraints. Solti and Culshaw never lost sight that this was a recorded version of Rheingold and as such it would succeed or fail on the acoustic landscape it presented. Solti’s conducting is urgent and taut, but he also allows the Vienna Phil, and his cast, luxuriant space for their lyrical passages. But through it all, the show really belongs to the Vienna Philharmonic. That’s made abundantly clear from the get-go, with the most awe-inspiring rendition of the fiendishly difficult Prelude ever put to disc. Talk about a minefield for horn players—and while a crack here or there might not be a big deal in the theater, cracks and bloops and blats have no place on a recording that will be heard time and again. The story has it that the orchestra agreed to return after a long night playing at the Staatsoper to have another go at the Prelude, since nobody was quite satisfied. Even exhausted as they were—and according to Culshaw, possibly a bit tipsy from the lavish refreshments provided by Decca as an inducement—that’s when they nailed down the rendition that has come down to us. Every other Rheingold Prelude seems a bit wan in comparison.
And that’s only the beginning. Throughout Das Rheingold the Vienna Phil treats us to an orchestral joyride, one moment displaying the turn-on-a-dime flexibility of a seasoned accompanist for those long Wagnerian recitatives, another melting the vinyl with lyrical effusion, and then come those incredible passages when the great orchestra flexes its awesome muscles—the descent into Nibelheim, Donner’s parting of the mists, the jaw-dropping brass splendor of the finale. There’s never a moment when the Vienna Phil’s playing—and Solti’s passionate stewardship—isn’t worth hearing again and again. And yes, there are usually people singing all the while, really really good people singing, and they do an absolutely fabulous job of it. But I’m an orchestra wonk, and the Vienna Philharmonic on the Solti Rheingold is, to me, the overriding reason for this great recording’s enduring fascination.
So Rheingold went gold. It became an international best-seller. Who would have thought it? An opera record? And a vast Nordic myth, devoid of familiar arias, at that? Thus Rheingold begat the rest of the Ring cycle, first with a Siegfried that fared commercially almost as well, then the mightiest Götterdämmerung of them all, then in 1965 a Walküre that some afficionados consider the weakest recording of the four—but for me, with my attention riveted on the glorious orchestra, stands up fully with the rest and then some.
Is the re-re-master worth it? Oh, yes. Apparently time has taken its toll on the original master analog tapes and so the 1997 digitizing, from which this latest remastering was made, may well be the last for the originals. (You can hear some of the tape decay if you listen with high-quality headphones, but the remastering has done wonders on eliminating most of the problems from aging magnetic media.) I am the happy owner of two first-edition LP sets of Rheingold, one the British release, and the other the American from Decca’s US subsidiary, London, with its different and—frankly rather tacky—album art. The advantage to those LPs is that they were mastered off the tapes when they were new, so they offer their own acoustic picture of the witchcraft being wrought in Vienna’s Sofiensaal. As the recording industry’s greatest achievement (routinely chosen as #1 on any responsible greatest-classical-recordings list), the Solti Ring has come out on release after release. It was one of Decca’s first remastered CDs back in the 1980s and suffered some diminishment from the growing pains of the medium. The big 1997 re-digitizing and remastering was a vast improvement. But these latest CDs give us the best Ring yet, radiant and glowing and powerful. And it’s slightly over $200 on Amazon—not exactly chump change, but reasonable nonetheless.
The mere existence of the Solti Ring is something of a miracle, all things considered. How ordinary hardworking human beings managed to undertake such a mammoth undertaking is an inspiring story in and of itself—just think of the schedules involved, as over a seven-year period the world’s most celebrated singers arrived from all over the globe at precisely the right time, as one of the world’s busiest orchestras carved out huge segments of time for long, exhausting sessions, how Solti himself carried the musical weight of the entire project while Culshaw oversaw the whole with consummate skill. But for it to be such a compelling whole: that’s even more miraculous. True, the casts are not consistent across the tetralogy: Kirsten Flagstad’s Fricka in Rheingold gives way to Christa Ludwig in the rest of the cycle, as does George London’s studly Rheingold Wotan become an elderly but magisterial Hans Hotter. But the Ring holds together as an artistic unity nonetheless, and besides the engineers and managers and small army of technicians and workers who made it all happen, that’s due to a threefold bond of steel: John Culshaw, Georg Solti, and above all, the Vienna Philharmonic.