# A Voice from Valhalla: Melchior and Flagstad in Parsifal
The discovery of these aluminum transcription discs in a basement—sixteen of them, cartons gathering dust for decades—has the quality of myth. But then everything about this 1938 Metropolitan Opera Parsifal feels touched by the numinous.
We’re listening to the second act complete, plus the final fifteen minutes of Act Three. The performance took place on Good Friday, April 15, 1938, when Lauritz Melchior and Kirsten Flagstad were at the absolute zenith of their powers. Richard Caniell and his Guild Historical team have worked miracles with the source material, though they make no apologies for the clicks, stage noise, and occasional clumsy joints where orchestral notes went missing at disc changes. Quite right, too. This isn’t about sonic perfection—it’s about bearing witness.
What strikes you first is the sheer presence of these voices. Flagstad’s Kundry has that peculiar combination of warmth and steel that made her legendary. Listen to her in the seduction scene: she modulates from maternal tenderness to erotic urgency without ever compromising the line or the legato. The voice soars over Leinsdorf’s orchestra (more on the conductor shortly) with absolute security of pitch and diction. She’s forty-three here, and the instrument retains all its bloom. The kaleidoscopic shifts the role demands—seductress, penitent, desperate woman facing spiritual annihilation—all register with a psychological acuity that belies the occasional charge that Flagstad was merely a glorious voice.
But it’s Melchior who stops the heart. His “Amfortas! Die Wunde!” has an electrifying radiance, the heldentenor cutting through the orchestral texture like a shaft of light through cathedral gloom. The transformation Wagner demands—from naïve youth to a man seared by compassion—happens in real time. You hear it in the darkening of the timbre, the way he shapes phrases after the kiss with a new gravity. This is singing on a scale we simply don’t encounter anymore. The top notes arrive without strain or distortion; the middle voice has that bronze resonance that recorded sound, even at its best, only approximates.
Arnold Gabor’s Klingsor won’t make anyone forget the great interpreters of the role, but he’s more than serviceable—firm of tone, clear in his malevolence. The Met’s comprimario roster was deep in those years, and Gabor (804 performances of sixty roles over eighteen seasons!) represents the kind of professional reliability that made the house function.
Now, about the conductor. Christopher Fifield raises the intriguing question: is it really Leinsdorf on the podium, or Artur Bodanzky? Leinsdorf’s autobiography states categorically that by Good Friday, Bodanzky had recovered sufficiently to conduct. But the booklet claims Leinsdorf replaced him for Act Two. Without access to Met archives or contemporary reviews, we’re left to speculate. The conducting itself—compelling, dramatically intense, with that driving forward momentum characteristic of Leinsdorf’s best work—could be either man. Bodanzky was no stranger to propulsive tempos; Leinsdorf, at twenty-six, had already reveald complete command of the Wagnerian style. Perhaps it doesn’t matter. What matters is that the maestro, whoever he was, supports the singers without smothering them and maintains structural coherence across Wagner’s vast spans.
The Act Three "finale" with Herbert Janssen’s Amfortas comes from a different source—one of those “Opera House of Our Dreams” recordings—and the sonic discontinuity is noticeable. But Janssen’s contribution is valuable: that noble baritone, the anguish conveyed without histrionics. These were singers who understood that Wagner’s characters, for all their mythic dimensions, must register as human beings in extremis.
The sound itself… well, it is what it is. Solid orchestral reproduction, voices well forward, the hiss and crackle of 1938 broadcast technology. Caniell’s policy of preserving overtones rather than filtering everything to death is absolutely correct. You lose the sense of being in a real space, with real instruments and real voices, when you scrub too aggressively. Better some surface noise than the embalmed quality of over-processed transfers.
This was the golden age of Wagner at the Met—more by accident of history than planning, as Robert Farr notes. The greatest singers fled Europe and converged on New York. Between 1942 and 1947, the house mounted twenty-one Parsifal performances. That none was broadcast beggars belief. This single preserved reading becomes doubly precious.
You won’t mistake this for a modern disc. The stage noises intrude, the sonic spectrum is limited, the balance sometimes favors the singers to an unrealistic degree. None of it matters when Flagstad and Melchior are singing. This is Parsifal as few have heard it, sung by voices of superhuman beauty and power, preserved against all odds. Wagnerians will want it. Need it, really. Some performances transcend their technical limitations to become essential documents. This is one of them.
