The ‘Ring’ that Might Have Been: Roger Allen revisits a benchmark ‘Walküre’ conducted by Furtwängler

It is an ironic quirk of history that what proved to be Wilhelm Furtwängler’s last recording was intended (at least according to the booklet notes and general received wisdom) as the first instalment of a projected studio recording of the entire Ring cycle. As David Breckbill observes in his illuminating review of the recently released recording of the Ring from Bayreuth in 1955 conducted by Keilberth, ‘this release [Keilberth] prompts reflection on the way in which the history of Wagner performance and Wagner on record developed in the absence of this recording, and on how these fields might now be different if it had appeared in a timely manner’. The same is true of this reissued 1954 recording of Die Walküre – or at least its projected continuation.