Eloquent Elders: Arnold Whittall muses on the history of Wagner recordings with Knappertsbusch’s ‘Meistersinger’ and Elder’s ‘Lohengrin’

Reviews of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, conducted Knappertsbusch, Vienna, 1950–51 (Decca Eloquence, 4 CDs); Lohengrin, conducted Elder, Amsterdam, 2015 (RCO, 3 CDs).

November 2017, Volume 11, Number 3, 72–5.

Record collectors brought up on the supremely self-confident assertions of John Culshaw’s Ring Resounding won’t easily forget his affectionate description of Hans Knappertsbusch as a ‘nineteenth-century professional’ who ‘needed the smell of greasepaint’ to give of his best (p. 79), and who ‘never took well to recording studio conditions’ (p. 38). Knappertsbusch’s pioneering 1950–51 LP recording of Die Meistersinger (reissued on Decca Eloquence in 2017) is dismissed in passing by Culshaw as ‘disappointing’, with the balance favouring the voices ‘to the virtual elimination of the orchestra’ (p. 38). Culshaw creates the impression that it was unwisely undertaken before the new technology was fully understood and results justifying the cost of the enterprise could be guaranteed.

Far be it from me to declare that Culshaw was simply wrong.