Götterdämmerung Live by Elder and the Hallé

There is no escaping the weight of what Götterdämmerung demands — of its performers, its listeners, and ultimately of any conductor bold enough to schedule the thing live. Sir Mark Elder and the Hallé brought it off in Manchester in May 2009, and the result, preserved across five CDs, is a performance that earns its place in the catalog — not without qualifications, but with real distinction.

Elder has always been a maestro who thinks in long paragraphs. His Wagner breathes. The Norns’ scene that opens the Prologue — those three ancient women unraveling the rope of fate in the dark, their music moving in slow, inexorable spirals — arrives here with a genuine sense of mystery, of something ancient and cold being unwound before your ears. The Hallé strings find a burnished, slightly rough-edged tone that suits this music better than the upholstered perfection of some grander ensembles. There is wool in the sound, not silk.

Then Siegfried rides off down the Rhine, and the opera truly begins.

Katarina Dalayman’s Brünnhilde is the rendition’s center of gravity, and she holds it. Her voice carries that particular Scandinavian brightness — a cool luminosity at the top — that cuts through the orchestra without the hammering chest-voice attack some dramatic sopranos rely on when things get loud. In the Immolation Scene she builds from a place of genuine stillness; you feel the character’s clarity of vision, her willing walk into the fire, as something earned rather than imposed. There are moments earlier in the evening when the voice thickens under pressure, when the line roughens at the passaggio — but these are live performances, and the roughness is human, which is something.

Let’s talk about the competition, because with Götterdämmerung you cannot avoid it. Karajan’s 1960s DG disc — the one made with Nilsson and Windgassen when both were at their peaks, and with an orchestra that sounded as though it had been poured from molten bronze — remains the standard against which everything else is measured, whether one likes it or not. Solti’s Decca set, fiercer and more theatrical, with its famous sonic extravagance, has worn remarkably well too. Against these giants, Elder’s Manchester performance offers something different: the electricity of a single occasion, the sense of a large audience collectively holding its breath. Studio precision it is not. But complicity — that shared suspension of disbelief between performers and listeners — it has in abundance.

The recorded sound requires a word. The engineers captured these Bridgewater Hall performances at a level that will have you reaching for the volume dial almost immediately; the Norns in particular sit back in the texture, slightly shadowed, as though the hall’s acoustic is swallowing their lower voices. Compensate, and the picture opens up considerably — the orchestra blooms, the brass find their proper menace, and the live acoustic gives the big climaxes a spaciousness that is entirely appropriate to music Wagner conceived for a specially built theater on a Bavarian hillside.

Wagner was fifty-two when he finished the Ring, and Götterdämmerung carries the weight of everything — twenty-six years of work, a personal mythology built to answer Schopenhauer and Feuerbach and his own tangled heart. Elder seems to understand that. He doesn’t rush toward the ending. He lets the contradictions stand.

This is not the Götterdämmerung you would choose if you could only own one. But it is the one you might reach for on a certain kind of evening — when you want the music to feel like it is happening now, not then, not in some perfected studio past. That is no small thing.