Wagner: Der Ring des Nibelungen – Solti

There is a particular sound that Solti’s brass make in the immolation of Valhalla — a sound like the roof of the world coming down in slow motion — and no engineer since John Culshaw has quite matched it, though Decca has tried.

That’s the thing about this project. Every decade or so somebody remasters the Solti Ring, and every time there is something more to hear. Half-speed mastering this time, Dolby Atmos, the whole apparatus of twenty-first-century sound science trained on tapes made in the Sofiensaal between 1958 and 1964. The results, on a single-disc sampler timed at just over seventy-six minutes, are startling. Donner’s hammer-blow near the close of Das Rheingold has always given listeners a jolt. Here it nearly takes the paint off the wall.

I have lived with this cycle since graduate school. Wept through it. Taught seminars on it, argued with colleagues about whether Solti’s tempi in Götterdämmerung run too hot. The performances have not changed. What has changed, again, is the window through which we view them, and the view keeps getting cleaner. Solti died on September 5, 1997; this release marks twenty-five years since, which tells you something about how the industry now measures time — not in artistic generations but in marketing cycles. Never mind. The music does not care why it was reissued.

What strikes hardest, hearing these “great scenes” wrenched from context, is how much this cast now feels like ghosts speaking through polished glass. Birgit Nilsson’s Brünnhilde remains a force of nature: that steel-cored soprano, riding the orchestra at full cry without apparent strain, is the closest thing on record to what Wagner must have imagined and only rarely got in his own lifetime. Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s few phrases as Gunther, George London’s Wotan-adjacent snarl, the velvet menace of Gottlob Frick’s Hunding — these are voices trained in an operatic culture that doesn’t exist anymore. Not because singers today lack talent, but because the repertory systems of German and Austrian houses that let a singer live inside these roles for a decade before recording them have largely vanished.

Not everyone here is at their absolute best, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. Hans Hotter’s Wotan, glorious as it is in “Leb wohl, du kühnes, herrliches Kind,” already shows the fraying at the top that would trouble him increasingly through the 1960s — the register occasionally covered, pushed rather than released. Wolfgang Windgassen’s Siegfried was never an ideally youthful instrument; there’s a graying tenor quality even in “Forging Song” that no amount of remastering can un-hear. And Kirsten Flagstad, singing Fricka rather than the Brünnhilde she’d made immortal a generation earlier, sounds — there’s no kind way to put this — matronly, though her diction remains a masterclass in itself. None of this diminishes the whole. If anything it humanizes it. These were extraordinary singers having, in some cases, a difficult day at the microphone, and Culshaw’s genius — along with producer Erich Kleinwort’s — was catching lightning anyway.

Solti himself gets less credit than he deserves for restraint here. People remember the whip-crack energy, the visceral surges in the Ride of the Valkyries excerpt included on this disc, but listen to how he shapes the final pages of Das Rheingold, how the Vienna Philharmonic’s strings breathe under him rather than merely execute. This was a conductor who understood that Wagner’s longueurs are structural, not accidental — that the boredom, if you let it happen, is part of the architecture leading toward transcendence.

Against Karajan’s more sensuous, more claustrophobic Ring for the same label, or the granite grandeur of Furtwängler’s various broadcast survivals, Solti’s cycle remains — even in this truncated sampler form — the most purely thrilling document of Wagnerian interpretation the release era has given us. The Vienna Philharmonic plays as though its life depends on it. Maybe it did.

Buy the full sets if you can afford them; they’re being reissued piecemeal through next spring. But if you want to know, in seventy-six minutes, why people still argue about this recording sixty-some years on, start here. The goosebumps are not a marketing illusion.