There are performances that exist primarily as documents, and there are documents that barely survive their own documentation. This Metropolitan Opera Siegfried from January 1962, preserved on Archipel with all the sonic fidelity of a telephone call placed through wet cardboard, falls closer to the latter — which is a genuine shame, because scattered within this murk are moments worth excavating.
Start with the coughing. It is relentless, industrial, almost competitive. The Act II orchestral prelude — one of Wagner’s most extraordinary feats of atmospheric writing, those shimmering string tremolandi conjuring the forest’s watchful stillness before a note of drama has been struck — is simply destroyed by what sounds like a respiratory ward in full session. January in New York, granted. But the Archipel engineers, rather than doing anything useful about it, have apparently decided that proximity to the audience was itself a virtue. It wasn’t.
The sound picture throughout is muddy and recessed, with a pre-echo problem that gives certain passages an unnerving ghost-of-itself quality. You can hear what the interpretation might be; actually hearing it is another matter.
Hans Hopf. Where to begin. He was, by 1962, a fixture at the Met and at Bayreuth, a German tenor of the old belting school for whom power was its own argument. There is a tradition of heroic tenors — Melchior, of course, but also Set Svanholm, who brought genuine intelligence to the role — against which Hopf measures poorly. His tone is raw and blunt, his phrasing about as supple as sheet metal, and a wobble intrudes with the regularity of a metronome set to Allegro agitato. Siegfried is Wagner’s most physically demanding tenor role, yes, and one forgives roughness in the third act when a singer has been laboring since nine in the morning. But Hopf sounds effortful well before then.
What saves the performance — partially, conditionally, but unmistakably — is Birgit Nilsson.
She doesn’t arrive until the final scene, of course. That’s the structural cruelty Wagner built into Siegfried: the soprano the audience came to hear spends three acts offstage, asleep on a rock, while the tenors and baritones do the heavy lifting. When Nilsson finally stirs, the effect even through this foggy recording is galvanic. She may take a few minutes to find her full voice — the recording doesn’t help one assess this fairly — but once she’s fully awake, the sound is unmistakable: that gleaming, steely, perfectly centered soprano, riding over the orchestra with what always sounded less like effort than like natural law. The final duet is thrilling, even with Hopf bellowing alongside her like a man trying to be heard above traffic.
George London is the other reason to investigate this set, though the recording frustrates him at every turn. London’s Wotan was one of the great Wagnerian achievements of the postwar era — that dark, velvety bass-baritone with its suggestion of barely contained authority, its hint of wounds not fully healed. He recorded the role unforgettably under Solti in Das Rheingold and under Leinsdorf himself in Die Walküre, and those remain the places to hear what he could really do. Here, in the guise of the Wanderer, he has his moments — the scene summoning Erda shows flashes of the old grandeur — but too often the voice disappears into the sonic fog, and one is left inferring a performance rather than hearing one.
Paul Kuen’s Mime is a genuine pleasure, and I mean that without condescension. Mime is a role that can curdle into caricature at terrifying speed; the temptation to wheedle and sneer until the audience’s teeth are on edge is one that many tenors have catastrophically yielded to. Kuen navigates this with real theatrical intelligence — the characterization is sharp and specific without tipping into self-parody. Ralph Herbert’s Alberich, by contrast, is vocally thin and offers little that distinguishes it. Jean Madeira’s Erda has size, but not always the kind of dark, chthonic weight the earth-goddess requires.
Leinsdorf is an interesting case. He was among the most technically precise conductors of his generation, and his Met Walküre with London remains a formidably well-shaped reading. Here he drives the earlier acts with characteristic energy — the Forging Scene has real momentum — but the final scene, where everything should gather and surge toward that tremendous awakening, seems to lose its forward pull at precisely the wrong moment. Perhaps the release lies; perhaps he was pacing his forces. Either way, the propulsion that is his trademark goes missing when it matters most.
In the end, this is a set for the committed completist — someone who wants to track Nilsson’s Met appearances, or who has a specific interest in London’s Wanderer, or who simply cannot resist a live Siegfried from any source. As a listening experience, it offers frustration more reliably than reward. Solti’s studio Ring on Decca remains the reference, and for a live Siegfried with genuine sonic presence, Böhm’s 1966 Bayreuth performance is everything this one isn’t. Archipel’s transfer does nobody any favors — least of all Wagner, who wrote music that deserves better than to be heard, as it largely is here, through a wall.
