TESTAMENT

SBT 2 1390
It is as if a much-treasured and irreplaceable family
heirloom feared lost for ever has suddenly reappeared
thanks to the unexpected care and generosity of some
beneficent, distant relative. The benefactor in this instance
is Testament. The heirloom in question about to make its
belated entry into the record market is the very first stereo
recording of Wagner’s Ring cycle made 50 years ago at
Bayreuth.
And glorious it sounds in its newly remastered version,
so much so that it is hard to believe it has not been
released before. Indeed, so many years have now elapsed
since the 1955 Bayreuth recording was made that many of
us who knew about it never believed that it would ever
materialise. Yet it is a musician’s dream, sung and played
by an ensemble unmatched in its perfection and produced
ten years before Maestro Solti finished conjuring up his
magical version, which was to become the standard
Wagner Ring recording. I dare make this claim because I
became deeply involved in the Bayreuth project. It came
about when Wieland Wagner, grandson of the composer
and imbued with the genius of his forebear, had translated
to the stage a production still considered by most as a
benchmark of excellence and taste. He had at his disposal
a cast of unparalleled talent and, thanks to Bayreuth’s
considerable resources and not forgetting its famous
acoustic, Decca was able to record this exceptional
production for posterity.
The freshness of the sound is especially noteworthy. But
it was only after weeks of rehearsal that the talented Decca
team with whom I modestly claim kinship was able to
pinpoint the correct disposition of its microphones. Even
extraneous production noises caused by lighting bridges
which moved during performances or Wolfgang
Windgassen’s over-exuberant forging of Siegfried’s sword
were overcome by this matchless team of engineers led by
Kenneth Wilkinson, then Decca’s senior recordist. Little
did we think then that the results of our teamwork would
languish unheard until many of the participants in this
almost forgotten enterprise had gone to their own Valhalla.
To hear these recordings is to thrill again at the
splendour of the orchestral playing so brilliant that we did
not resent the hours spent sitting in the darkness of the
theatre or of our recording room while the sun shone
enticingly outside. The Bayreuth Festival orchestra
comprised some of Germany’s best players from both west
and east and they came together in holiday mood,
Lederhosen and all, to give of their best in quite superlative
performances. Holding such an ensemble together
required the experience and masterly direction of the
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conductor Joseph Keilberth, with his intimate knowledge
of the theatre and of the Ring cycle. Inspired by the
wonderful singing of his cast, he gave performances which
no one would want to miss.
I congratulate Testament for its persistence in finally
making possible the release of these extraordinary
recordings.
� Peter Andry, 2006
JOSEPH KEILBERTH 1908-1968
A major name in German-speaking countries, Joseph
Keilberth is still not well-known in Britain, perhaps
because he was never greatly interested in making studio
recordings for a prestigious international label. He was
born and brought up in Karlsruhe (‘by chance, as I really
come from a musical family in Munich’); the move came
because his father had been recommended as principal
cellist to the Karlsruhe orchestra, the Badische
Staatskapelle, by the noted Wagner conductor Felix Mottl.
After studying piano, cello and composition at the city’s
Hochschule, Keilberth began his performing career as a
cellist, taking over the baton impromptu one day when a
heart problem struck down the conductor of the ensemble
for which he was playing. After this he rose through the
ranks at the town’s Staatstheater, growing up, musically
speaking, under the influence of Mottl, still very present in
the orchestra and especially in its Wagner interpretations.
At first répétiteur, then Kapellmeister and, in 1935,
Germany’s youngest general music director, Keilberth
conducted his first Ring there in 1936. In the same year he
first conducted the Berlin Philharmonic and guest
appearances followed in other major German cities. In July
1940, on the recommendation of Wilhelm Furtwängler, he
moved to Prague, and to the concert hall, as chief
conductor of the Deutsche Philharmonie, the Czech
capital’s resident German ensemble.
In August 1945, after the war’s end and the sudden
dispersal of his orchestra, he accepted the difficult task of
rebuilding musical life in shattered Dresden, having first to
retrieve his new orchestra, the Dresden Staatskapelle, from
its refuge in the American sector. He began with Mozart
and Strauss, including the symbolic local première of Die
schweigsame Frau, a work banned by the Nazis because
its librettist was Jewish. Just one month after signing his
Dresden contract, Keilberth was offered the chief
conductorship of the Berlin Philharmonic. Out of respect
for his new post and for the dispossessed Furtwängler (then
awaiting de-Nazification) he refused the offer.
Keilberth’s work in Dresden continued with more

Strauss and the appointment of the young Rudolf Kempe as
his deputy. Between 1948 and 1951 he also appeared
regularly at the Berlin Staatsoper, a guest engagement
terminated after the Russian-controlled regime accused
Carl Orff’s opera Antigonae of ‘formalism’ (Keilberth had
recently given the work’s première in Dresden). In 1949 he
was heard for the first time by the Wagner grandsons,
conducting a memorial concert for Richard Strauss in the
Festspielhaus. They were impressed and in 1950 Keilberth
was invited to conduct Meistersinger in next year’s
reopening Bayreuth Festival. He refused – because he did
not want to share the performances with Hans
Knappertsbusch, holding to the old Bayreuth tradition of
‘one work, one conductor’. In the words of his son and
biographer Thomas, ‘Keilberth thought that in so doing he
had ruined his chances of working at Bayreuth for ever
but, to his great surprise, the Wagners invited him to
conduct all the 1952 Ring performances’.
These caused a stir because of Keilberth’s ‘strict’ tempos
which were comparatively swifter than the Bayreuth
traditionalists and press had got used to from the work’s
most recent conductors there – Karl Elmendorff, Heinz
Tietjen, Hans Knappertsbusch and Herbert von Karajan.
There was talk of the ‘speeded-up film style’ of his Wagner
– a style that actually owed much to major forerunners like
Felix Mottl and Richard Strauss – and debate whether
Keilberth was just ‘increasing speed’ or ‘forcing the pace’.
‘Keilberth’s Rhine Journey is made by fast steamer’ was a
typical comment at the time. Clearly Wieland Wagner’s
first ‘Latin’ conductor had been found.
According to Thomas Keilberth, the two men got along
well, trusting each other and finding a common sense of
humour. Also, Keilberth genuinely watched and cared for
what happened onstage and knew how to accompany
singers. In the rehearsal room, only Wieland’s liking for
Freudian and Jungian sexual psychology did not appeal to
him – Keilberth believed that ‘the erotic element is already
sufficiently expressed by the music’. But there were
problems elsewhere. The ‘one conductor, one work’
dictum was soon broached. Keilberth found himself
sharing the 1953 Ring with Clemens Krauss (in fact they
got on so well that they felt able to share rehearsals), and
the 1955 Holländer and 1956 Ring with Knappertsbusch (a
‘difficult’ relationship between ‘polar opposites’ in both
musical and personal matters, according to Thomas
Keilberth, where ‘the one doing the taking over always
faced an uphill battle against the style imposed by his
predecessor’). Keilberth also criticised Wieland’s ‘tendency
to play around with what conductors were naturally good
at’, having his point proved when he had to take over
Wieland’s new Tannhäuser production at the general
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rehearsal because Igor Markevich could not coordinate pit
with Wieland’s stage requirements at his chosen tempos.
After more objections from Keilberth about conductor
choices and, says Thomas Keilberth, ‘perhaps because, as
a relentless innovator, Wieland simply felt that the
conductor had been around for too long’, the festival
director invited him to take ‘conjugal leave’. In his diary
for 25 August 1956 Keilberth noted: ‘He calls it “conjugal
leave”; I call it “being chucked out”’.
By this time Keilberth had succeeded Eugen Jochum as
chief conductor of the Hamburg Philharmonisches
Staatsorchester, and had been reunited with his old
colleagues of the Deutsche Philharmonie Prague, now
resident in western Germany and renamed the Bamberg
Symphony Orchestra. He continued working with the
Bambergers for the rest of his life, leading them on tours
around Europe, to North and South America, and to the
Far East, and making recordings. He was a serious
candidate in 1955 to take over the Berlin Philharmonic
following Furtwängler’s death. An increasing number of
guest appearances with the Bavarian State Opera in
Munich led to his appointment there as GMD in 1959, a
true return to his musical roots. He also became head of
the Musikalische Akademie there. In 1959 too there came
the first of several invitations by Wieland to return to
Bayreuth that Keilberth always declined. In 1963 he led his
company into the rebuilt Nationaltheater with a gala (and
recorded) Meistersinger. Guest engagements outside
Munich continued and he accepted the post of honorary
conductor of Tokyo’s NHK Symphony Orchestra.
According to the Bavarian State Opera’s Intendant, the
stage director Rudolf Hartmann, Keilberth’s oftenexpressed
wish was ‘to die, if possible on the podium, best
of all like Felix Mottl, during a performance of Tristan’. His
wish was granted, during the Act II love duet, on 20 June,
1968, a date marked in his diary, according to his son,
with a light cross. It was 57 years, almost to the day, since
his mentor Felix Mottl had suffered a fatal heart attack on
the same spot.
� Mike Ashman, 2006
With thanks to Thomas Keilberth
DAS RHEINGOLD
The first stereo recording of Wagner’s Der Ring des
Nibelungen was made by Decca, not at a series of studio
sessions conducted by Georg Solti and produced by John
Culshaw in Vienna between 1958 and 1965, but at ‘live’
performances at the Bayreuth Fespielhaus in the summer of
1955. The conductor was Joseph Keilberth and the

producer, near the start of his long career in the recording
industry, was Peter Andry. His team, comprising
technicians from both Decca and their German affiliates
Teldec, included the British engineers Kenneth Wilkinson
and Roy Wallace; Gordon Parry, later a member of the
Solti/Culshaw Ring team, was also present.
In recent interviews with Malcolm Walker (a former
editor of Gramophone magazine), Roy Wallace, the stereo
engineer on the project discussed the ‘challenge’ of
recording at Bayreuth. ‘For a start, you had the orchestra
underground beneath a canopy. Here we just managed to
place three Neumann M49 microphones in about the only
place they could possibly go. You didn’t have a chance to
move anything, and just hoped for the best! The other
three M49s had to be hung from the lighting bridge, about
20 feet above the stage. This was brilliant; it worked
beautifully. These mikes were all fed into the Deccaconstructed
six-channel mixer model ST2 (designed by
Wallace himself). Two AEG TR9 tape machines were
operated by my German colleagues Hans Redlip and
Hans-Joachim Klemp as recording had to be continuous’.
Two complete cycles of the Ring were given in
Bayreuth that summer with a different Brünnhilde,
Sieglinde and Gunther. Decca’s aim was to capture the first
cycle with Astrid Varnay, Gré Brouwenstijn and Hermann
Uhde in those roles. Material from the second cycle could
also be used as back-up where these artists were not
involved, but in principle the recording team only had
some experimental tapings at the orchestra/stage
rehearsals, one general rehearsal and one performance to
make up a finished master for each of the four operas. The
remarkably low number of tape edits in each performance
(just 21 for Siegfried, and these are mostly for technical
reasons such as joining the tapes from the two recording
machines rather than to correct musical or other
imperfections) shows just how successful their work was,
and how well played-in was the ensemble they were
recording. This was the fourth year in succession that
Joseph Keilbeth and many of the soloists had been
performing this Wieland Wagner production of the Ring.
‘Peter Andry was the producer and Kenneth Wilkinson
balanced the mono sound assisted by Joe van Biene’,
explained Roy Wallace. ‘I had Gordon Parry in the stereo
room with me, reading the score and telling me what was
going on. Sadly the AEG tape machines proved unreliable
and the Ampex machine which I had brought from London
as a backup had to be substituted on one occasion.’
In an interview shortly before his death, Kenneth
Wilkinson talked about his Bayreuth visits with excitement.
He had been there with producer John Culshaw in 1951 to
record at the Festival’s post-war reopening – Parsifal and
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the long-buried Götterdämmerung for which Testament has
now secured the release rights (SBT 4175) – and returned
for Lohengrin in 1953, and this Ring and Der fliegende
Holländer in 1955. ‘Culshaw never seemed to like it very
much but I just had to come back here again’. ‘Wilkie’ also
remembered his arguments in 1955 with the Festival
theatre’s chief electrician as to whether Decca’s three stage
microphones were in view of the audience or not and the
team’s surprise when they realised that the lighting bridge
on which they had hung them was going to be at different
levels during the performance of the show.
Like the 1951 Götterdämmerung, the Decca 1955 Ring
did not appear – until now. ‘It was intended most definitely
to release the recording at some future date because I did
all the rough first edits at the time’, said Wallace. ‘As to
why it wasn’t, I believe that John Culshaw (who returned
to Decca in a senior producer role in August 1955 after 21
months with Capitol) wanted to make a studio recording of
the whole cycle’. That much is true, and Culshaw, a true
modernist child of 1950s technology with its stereo
revolution and opera-in-the-home philosophy, was
certainly (as Kenneth Wilkinson observed) no fan of
preserving what he regarded as messy, unpredictable ‘live’
performances on disc. There were, however, other, legal
reasons.
Correspondence in the EMI Archives at Hayes shows
that around early 1950s Bayreuth there was a cut-throat
race on- and off-site between Teldec/Decca and
Columbia/EMI to record the Festival’s opera productions –
not unlike TV companies vying for best positions at a
sporting event. Also in the equation were the new joint
directors of the Festival itself, the composer’s grandsons
Wieland and Wolfgang Wagner. To reopen a major
international festival in the American zone of an occupied
country only recently at peace, they needed all the funds
they could raise and recording royalties could be a
powerful contributor to their budgets. Contractual
wrangling over the first year’s performances (1951) had
resulted in Columbia/EMI obtaining a seven-year embargo
on any other company’s releasing recordings of the Ring
and of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. The architect of
this situation was Walter Legge, then Columbia’s principal
producer. He had additionally sewn up EMI’s position by
negotiating notionally exclusive recording contracts with
many of the leading Ring artists, including Astrid Varnay
and Hans Hotter. Clever as this was on paper, in practice
the result stymied release and recording of the Ring from
Bayreuth in an age of one of its greatest performing
ensembles. Also, as Legge himself had predicted in a 1950
letter to Wieland Wagner, it meant that pirates would have
a field day with the ‘live’ radio recordings made every year

on the first night of each production (and at every
subsequent cast change) by Bavarian Radio. No officially
approved recording of a Bayreuth Ring would appear until
1973 when Philips finally issued DG’s (mostly) 1967
recording of a Karl Böhm-led cycle that was supposed to
have been made by EMI, inevitably with few of the 1950s
singers still in the cast.
EMI’s ‘ban’ on the entire Ring was based on the fact that
they had released only Die Walküre Act III (conducted by
Herbert von Karajan at the 1951 Festival) under their
exclusivity contract. Decca now wanted to make a
Rheingold (with Hans Hotter, an EMI artist, as Wotan) and
a Götterdämmerung at the 1954 Festival. They enlisted the
help of Wolfgang Wagner who initiated a correspondence
with Walter Legge in March 1954. Perhaps piqued by
Wolfgang’s description of EMI’s Walküre Act III as a
recording which ‘does not do honour artistically either to
the Festivals or to your firm or to Mr von Karajan’ and to
being reminded that it sold less well than rival Festival
releases, Legge never replied directly. A second letter from
Wolfgang to John Macleod of EMI International, citing the
recent appearance of the pirated Allegro Ring (the
Keilberth cycle from the 1953 Festival) as proof of the
public’s desire for a ‘complete live Ring from Bayreuth’,
restated his case against EMI’s Walküre release in stronger
terms: ‘the issue of this act impetuously demanded by Mr
Legge and Herr von Karajan never had our real approval.
We released it only to placate these gentlemen… it will
never be, for you or for us, an artistic event’. But EMI
dragged its heels, proposing temporary ‘exchanges’ for
Hotter that were never realised – recording a young Georg
Solti in a Glyndebourne Giovanni that summer, or projects
with Rafael Kubelík – and never directly addressing the
question of their rights to the Ring. Meanwhile,
Telefunken’s supremo Herbert Grenzebach gently lobbied
Wolfgang Wagner from Berlin, while taking legal advice
about EMI’s exclusivity clause. Finally Grenzebach advised
London Decca to accept Der fliegende Holländer alone for
1955 and to wait on events for the Ring. Even while
Decca’s team was recording in the Festspielhaus, the
chances of a release for the project were receding and the
start of the Culshaw/Solti/Vienna studio Ring three years
later put an end to it for any immediate future.
The first attempt to record in Bayreuth had been made
as early as July/August 1904 when G & T (the
Gramophone and Typewriter company) sent their
‘recordist’ Will Gaisberg and their ‘studio pianist’, the
conductor Bruno Seidler-Winkler, to work with an
evidently improvised selection of (mostly) Festival singers
in a range of Wagnerian and non-Wagnerian repertoire.
Gaisberg and Winkler set up their equipment in the town’s
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(now demolished) Hotel Sonne, making between 52 and
74 recordings of which only 39 (18 of them of Wagner
material) were released. Recording of lengthier excerpts
from the operas began with the electrical era. In 1927
Columbia defeated their rivals The Gramophone Company
in an auction organised by Siegfried Wagner’s British-born
wife Winifred and made the first recordings actually inside
the Festspielhaus (or, according to some sources, the
restaurant space which doubled as the orchestra rehearsal
room) – excerpts from Parsifal conducted by Carl Muck
and from Rheingold, Walküre and Siegfried under Franz
von Hoesslin. The commercial and sonic success of these
records made Columbia more ambitious and they returned
the following year to make most of Tristan Acts I and II and
a heavily cut version of Act III. A crew from an affiliated
company, Columbia Films, was also in attendance (this
material, including rehearsal excerpts in the theatre and
some film shot at the first day of the Tristan sessions,
appears now to be lost). Another almost complete opera,
Tannhäuser, was recorded in 1930; like the Tristan , it was
conducted by Karl Elmendorff. It bore many of the
hallmarks of the contemporaneous performances prepared
and conducted by Arturo Toscanini in the Festival itself. In
1936 Telefunken became the first German company to
record at Bayreuth, concentrating on the German stars of
that summer’s performances under the baton of the
Festival’s new director of productions Heinz Tietjen –
Franz Völker and Maria Müller in Lohengrin Act III (there
also exists a contemporary and much pirated radio
broadcast of the same cast in this act under Furtwängler),
Völker again in Walküre and the forging songs and Forest
Murmurs of Max Lorenz’s Siegfried. All other recordings
emanating from the Festspielhaus up until its wartime
closure in 1944 derive from the radio broadcasts which
began (but only with isolated acts of one opera per festival)
in 1924.
The rivalry between EMI and Decca at the post-war
reopening of the Festival led to every production in 1951
being recorded at least once, although not all the material
was released. By 1955 the Bayreuth management had tired
of the legal and contractual wrangles that seemed
inevitably bound up with more than one company sharing
the franchise and returned to Winifred Wagner’s pre-war
monopoly policy. Decca alone recorded in 1955 (further
years were stopped by their change of heart about ‘live’
performances and EMI’s exclusion zone on Meistersinger
and the Ring); Philips in 1961 and 1962; DG in 1966-67
and 1970-71. The coming of video (and later DVD) led to
another change of policy – selected productions would
now be both filmed and recorded at specially arranged
sessions before a year’s Festival rehearsals and

performances started. This process began with the
‘centenary’ Ring recorded in 1979/80 by Philips and Unitel
and has included all the Festival repertoire (including a
further Ring cycle). The last sound-only ‘live’ performance
recordings to date were the Lohengrin made by CBS in
1982. and the Solti Ring made (but unreleased and
subsequently destroyed) by Decca in 1983.
In casting their ‘New’ Bayreuth productions Wieland
and Wolfgang Wagner were keen to take advice about
younger, newer singers from all countries (such as Varnay,
Wolfgang Windgassen and George London), less keen on
interested reminders about the old guard (Walter Legge
suggested both Maria Müller and Herbert Janssen for roles
in 1951 and questioned the experience of ‘young’ Otto
Edelmann for Hans Sachs). For his first post-war Ring
production that ran from 1951-58 Wieland soon built up a
core of major principals – Astrid Varnay was always the
Brünnhilde, with Martha Mödl sharing the role from 1953
onwards; Hans Hotter sang Wotan/Wanderer for the
production from 1952; Josef Greindl (the only regular
member of these casts to appear at Bayreuth before 1951)
took over the ‘baddies’ from Ludwig Weber in 1952 and
became the production’s regular Fafner, Hunding and
Hagen; Gustav Neidlinger was Alberich from 1952-57;
Wolfgang Windgassen took over Siegfried and Maria von
Ilosvay Erda in 1953; Paul Kuen was Mime and Hermann
Uhde Gunther until 1957. Elsewhere Wieland
experimented – the eight years of the production saw
seven different Sieglindes (including Mödl, Varnay and
Birgit Nilsson), six Siegmunds, ranging from the veteran
Max Lorenz to the relative newcomer Jon Vickers, and five
Gutrunes (including both Mödl and Varnay). The Wälsung
twins heard on the 1955 Walküre were the only pair to
sing their roles two years in succession. Rhinemaidens and
Norns were also changed regularly.
The Bayreuth orchestra has always attracted star
players, even if their experiences and inclinations were the
very opposite of Wagnerian. Both Richard Mühlfeld, the
great Meiningen player for whom Brahms wrote his
Clarinet Quintet, Trio and Sonatas, and Franz Strauss, the
Munich horn player (and father of Richard), were in the pit
for the first Festivals. Longevity too has always been a trait.
Two of the wind players in the 1955 orchestra – flautist
Nicolaus Jung and clarinettist Heinrich Geuser – began
their Bayreuth careers at the 1924 reopening after the First
World War and played at every subsequent Festival until
the late 1960s. But before 1951 the conductors – with the
exceptions of Karl Muck, Fritz Busch, Furtwängler and
Toscanini – were not such glamorous names. In
determining to change that aspect of Bayreuth Wieland
and Wolfgang were careful – and this was quite radical at
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the time – to keep an eye out for musical directors who
were prepared to collaborate with their staging ideas.
Wieland clearly preferred maestros with ideas about
Wagnerian tempos (swift) and sonorities (lean) as new as
his own staging plans – he called such practitioners ‘Latin’
conductors and included under this banner Joseph
Keilberth, Clemens Krauss and Wolfgang Sawallisch in
addition to the ‘foreign’ names he brought in – André
Cluytens, Igor Markevich, Thomas Schippers. But all
conductors in Wieland’s time were carefully rotated and
then replaced (some, like Karajan, swiftly). Only Hans
Knappertsbusch – a characteristically trenchant critic of
Wieland’s productions but hailed by him on at least one
occasion as Bayreuth’s ‘chief conductor’ – was spared such
treatment.
Decca’s stereo recording reveals clearly the
unconventional layout of Bayreuth’s covered orchestra pit
and may surprise listeners accustomed to previous
monaural recordings from the Festival. Indeed, it will also
sound strange compared to normal orchestral tradition,
where the first violins are usually heard coming from the
left and the basses from the right, and initially gives the
impression that the left and right channels of the recording
have been reversed. But this is not the case.
The seating plan for the orchestra was established by
Wagner himself in 1875, when preliminary rehearsals were
held for the first Festival the following year. The conductor
stands or sits at the ‘top’ of the pit in the highest position.
The orchestra is seated step by step lower down. The
violins come first – to the right and left of the conductor
but, contrary to usual practice, the firsts sit on the
conductor’s right. On the next level down, spread out
across the pit, come the violas and cellos; below them are
the woodwind, the bass clarinet normally at the left hand
end. The bassists play on the same level (but on special
platforms), split into two groups. Either below them (or
sometimes on the same level), also split into two groups on
platforms, are the harps. Right at the back, at the deepest
point of the pit, come the brass, the timpani and the
percussion.
With minimal variations, this arrangement has survived
to the present day (see pictures on pages 11 and 16). Not
surprisingly, the special conditions of the Bayreuth pit can
cause problems and various conductors have tried to
change it, or simply found it unworkable. Before the war
Furtwängler attempted to have parts of the cowl (the
sloping roof that renders orchestra and conductor invisible
to the audience) removed; he said this was for acoustic
reasons – to let more sound of the bottom of the orchestra
out into the house – but Heinz Tietjen and Winifred
Wagner, convinced it was due to his personal vanity,

efused. In 1956 Wieland and Wolfgang Wagner had holes
bored and slits made in the cowl but admitted to the press
after the opening night of Parsifal that they had failed: ‘1-0
to Richard Wagner and his Festspielhaus’, commented
Wolfgang. A request for similar action was made by Solti
(and refused) during his only appearance at the Festival in
1983. Small adjustments (not affecting the visibility of the
orchestra) were made later, however, at the request of
Daniel Barenboim.
In 1951 Herbert von Karajan (and Walter Legge, who
was recording his performances for Columbia/EMI) started
to reseat the orchestra along more conventional lines (the
effects of this can be heard on their Meistersinger
recording). Although this appeared not to be a success,
Karajan went even further next year for his Tristan
performances but, as late as after the general rehearsal,
yielded to persuasion from orchestra members and the
Wagner grandsons to return to Richard Wagner’s original
plan.
Note: the rushing sound that can be heard on this
performance during the descent to and return from
Nibelheim may come from the Mixtur-Trautonium, an
electronic instrument designed by Oskar Sala for the
composer Carl Orff and, at the latter’s suggestion, used at
Bayreuth in this and subsequent years to simulate the
offstage musical effects of the Rheingold anvils and the
Parsifal bells.
� Mike Ashman, 2006
THE SINGERS
Hans Hotter (Wotan) was born on 19 January 1909 in
Offenbach am Main, Germany. He studied with Matthäus
Römer in Munich and worked as an organist and choirmaster
before making his opera début at Troppau in 1930
as the Speaker in Die Zauberflöte. After singing with the
companies in Breslau and Prague, he joined the Hamburg
Opera in 1934 and then moved to the Munich Opera in
1937. There he built up his repertoire of Wagnerian roles
and appeared in the world première of Friedenstag by
Richard Strauss in 1938. Four years later he was in another
Strauss première, that of Capriccio, as Olivier, and what
should have been his third creation, Jupiter in Die Liebe
der Danae at the 1944 Salzburg Festival, went unrealised
when Hitler ordered all theatres to be closed, though the
dress rehearsal did take place. Hotter had previously made
his Salzburg début in 1942 as Count Almaviva in Le nozze
di Figaro. His international career had begun in 1939
when he sang the Wanderer at La Scala, but the war
prevented further excursions. When peace returned, he
sang Don Giovanni and Almaviva at Covent Garden
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during the Vienna State Opera’s visit in 1947. He was
heard in Wagner at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires in
1948 and the Metropolitan in New York in 1950 and
continued to extend his international career with marked
success. He was also a regular visitor to Bayreuth, where
he sang between 1952 and 1966 and his Wagner
portrayals could be seen in many important houses and
festivals. He sang regularly at Covent Garden from 1947
until 1963. His concert career flourished too, with Lieder
recitals an important part of his musical activities. For
more than 20 years, Hotter also undertook some opera
production. He produced the Ring cycle at Covent Garden
in the 1960s, and was responsible for other productions in
Vienna, Munich, Hamburg, Zurich and Dortmund. Most of
these were of Wagner operas, but there were some others,
and his final production, in Chicago in 1981, was Fidelio.
Late in his career, Hotter was also lauded for his
interpretation of Moses in Schoenberg’s opera Moses und
Aron. He officially retired from the stage in Vienna in 1972
in the role of the Grand Inquisitor in Verdi’s Don Carlo.
After his retirement, he still occasionally appeared in small
parts. His performance of Schigolch in Berg’s Lulu at San
Francisco in 1989 and again in Paris in 1991 received
particular critical acclaim, and just after his 80th birthday
he was the Speaker in two performances of Gurrelieder at
the Royal Festival Hall in London. He died in Munich on 8
December 2003.
Georgine von Milinkovič (Fricka) was born to Croatian
parents in Prague on 7 July 1913 and died in Munich on
26 February 1986. She studied in Zagreb and Vienna prior
to making her début in 1937 in Zurich, and she moved on
the Bavarian State Opera in Munich in 1940. In 1941, she
caused a sensation as Kundry in a Dutch Radio
performance of Parsifal. Following the war, she sang at the
Prague Opera for three years and expanded her career
throughout Europe. She appeared at many of the major
festivals including Bayreuth, Salzburg, Holland and
Edinburgh. She was also a favourite at the Royal Opera
House, Covent Garden, and the Vienna State Opera. She
remained on the roster of both the Bavarian and Vienna
State Opera companies until 1968.
Rudolf Lustig (Loge) was born in 1902 in Vienna, where he
studied with Hermine Geyer prior to beginning his career
in 1933 at the National Theatre in Weimar in the title role
in Les Contes d’Hoffmann. Following the war, he moved
on to heavier dramatic parts in performances spanning the
globe, often appearing with the major stars of the day,
including Birgit Nilsson, to whose Isolde he was a frequent
Tristan. He also made several appearances with his wife,

soprano Anna Palo, who was a member of the opera
company in Aachen, where he finally settled for the
remainder of his long life. He died in Vienna in October
1988.
Gustav Neidlinger (Alberich) was born on 21 March 1910
in Mainz. After studying under Otto Rottsieper at the
Frankfurt Conserv-atoire, he made his début in 1931 in
Mainz, where he remained until 1934. After singing in
Plauen in 1934 and 1935 he became a member of the
Hamburg Opera from 1936 until 1950 and then moved to
Stuttgart. He also sang frequently in Vienna from 1956 and
also appeared occasionally at La Scala, Covent Garden,
the Paris Opéra, the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires and the
Metropolitan in New York, where he performed only in the
1972 season as Alberich in Siegfried. He first sang at
Bayreuth in 1952 and continued to appear there until 1975
as Kurwenal, Klingsor, Telramund, Hans Sachs and, most
notably, Alberich. He retired in 1977 and died on 26
December 1991 in Bad Ems.
Paul Kuen (Mime) was a native of the Southern Bavarian
Allgäu region, where he was born on 8 April 1910 in
Sulzberg, near Kempten. He originally wanted to be an
organ builder, but ultimately began vocal studies in
Munich with Heinrich Knote and Adalbert Ebner. He made
his début in Konstanz in 1933, and this launched him on a
successful career that took him all over the world singing
character tenor roles in the leading theatres of Europe and
the Americas. He later turned to teaching and among his
pupils was the well-known Lieder singer Christian
Gerhaher. He died in 1997.
Toni Blankenheim (Donner) was born on 12 December
1921 in Cologne and studied with Paul Lohmann in
Frankfurt and Res Fischer in Stuttgart. He made his début
as Mozart’s Figaro in Frankfurt, where he was on the roster
from 1947 to 1950. He then moved to Hamburg, where he
was a well-known name for many years as well as a
stalwart member of the Bayreuth Festival ensemble, taking
on a large array of assignments ranging from smaller
character parts to Klingsor in Parsifal and Beckmesser in
Die Meistersinger. He also made a speciality of
contemporary opera, and figured in world premières and
first German performances of works by Henze, Martinu°,
Searle and Krˇenek, to name only the most important
composers. In the first German performance of Kalevi
Aho’s Der Geburtstag, he sang the only role in the work,
which kept him uninterruptedly on the stage of the
Hamburg State Opera in every performance for well over
two hours. Blankenheim also enjoyed an international
TESTAMENT
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career with guest appearances at La Scala, Milan, the
Maggio Musicale in Florence, the Edinburgh Festival,
France, Croatia and all three North American countries.
Josef Traxel (Froh) was born in Mainz on September 29
1916 and died in Stuttgart on 8 October 1975. He began
his studies in Darmstadt, but they were interrupted by
military service. He was allowed to take time off from
convalescence in a military hospital to make his unofficial
début in Mainz as Don Ottavio in Don Giovanni, but
when he returned to the front he was captured and
confined to a British prisoner-of-war camp until the war’s
end. He then made a belated proper début at the theatre in
Nuremberg in 1946 and moved on to the Stuttgart State
Opera in 1952, the year that also marked his first
appearance at the Salzburg Festival in the second ‘official’
world première of Richard Strauss’s Die Liebe der Danae
(the first had been a public dress rehearsal for the elderly
composer’s benefit at Salzburg just prior to the closure of
all theatres in Germany). During his Bayreuth years
(1954–1958) his roles ranged from Froh in the Ring and
the young sailor in Tristan und Isolde to Siegmund (Die
Walküre) and Walther von Stolzing (Die Meistersinger).
There then followed an international career, which took
him throughout Europe and to the United States, where he
appeared in both Wagner and Donizetti roles. He was also
a much sought-after Evangelist for perform-ances of the
Bach Passions. From 1963 he taught at the Stuttgart Music
Academy.
Hertha Wilfert (Freia) was born in 1921. She studied with
Mimi Poensgen-Warmbrunn and made her début in 1947
in Wiesbaden. Two years later she moved on to Hanover.
As well as singing Freia and Gerhilde in the Bayreuth
Festival Ring productions from 1954 to 1956, she also
appeared as Venus in Tannhäuser. She was a regular guest
in Munich, Frankfurt and Berlin, where she largely
interpreted leading roles in the German and Italian
repertoire, including Leonora (Il trovatore) and Aida. She
also appeared at the Maggio Musicale in Florence in the
title role of Weber’s Euryanthe concurrently with her
Bayreuth assignments.
Maria von Ilosvay (Erda) was born on 8 May 1913 in
Budapest. She studied there and in Vienna, in which latter
city she won an international singing competition in 1937.
She toured North America under the name Esther von
Ilosvay from 1937 to 1939, primarily singing Dorabella in
Così fan tutte with the Salzburg Opera, and while in New
York she created a sensation in the American première of
Jacques Ibert’s opera Angélique. In 1940, she joined the
ensemble of the Hamburg State Opera, where she

emained on the roster until the end of her career, while
making guest appearances throughout the world and at
many of the major festivals. She died in June 1987.
Ludwig Weber (Fasolt) was born in 1899 in Vienna. In
1919 he began to study singing with Alfred Boruttau, with
whom he remained for five years. His professional career
began in 1920 when he was engaged by Felix Weingartner
to join the Vienna Volksoper, and he first appeared on
stage in the small part of Fiorello in Il barbiere di Siviglia.
Between 1925 and 1933 he successively joined the opera
companies in Barmen-Elberfeld, Düsseldorf and Cologne,
while fulfilling a number of engagements elsewhere. He
first sang at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich in the
1931 Wagner Festival, and in 1933 was invited to join the
resident company, where he remained until the end of the
Second World War. During the war years he was also one
of the stalwarts of the Salzburg Festivals. One of his biggest
successes in Munich was his performance of Boris
Godunov, which some rated as his finest operatic
portrayal. Weber first sang in London at Covent Garden in
1936 as Pogner, Gurnemanz, Hunding and Hagen, and his
La Scala début took place in 1938. In 1945 he joined the
Vienna Staatsoper and became one of its major stars until
his retirement in 1966. In 1955 he sang Rocco in Fidelio
on the opening night of the rebuilt Vienna Opera House,
and the following night there he sang the Commendatore
in Don Giovanni. He first appeared at Bayreuth in 1951 as
Gurnemanz, Hagen and Fasolt, and continued to sing
there regularly for a number of years in a variety of roles.
After retiring from the operatic stage, he devoted himself to
teaching. He died in his native Vienna on 9 December
1974.
Josef Greindl (Fafner) was born on 23 December 1912 in
Munich and died on 16 April 1993 in Vienna. From 1932
he studied at the Munich Academy of Music with Paul
Bender and Anna Bahr-Mildenburg and in 1936 made his
formal operatic début as Hunding in Krefeld, where he
remained until 1938. He then moved to Düsseldorf, where
he took part in 1941 in the première of the opera Die Hexe
von Passau by Ottmar Gerster. In 1942 he joined the Berlin
State Opera under the directorship of Heinz Tietjen, and
remained on the roster until 1948. Around 1949 he
became a member of the Städtische Oper (later Deutsche
Oper) Berlin, and remained on its roster until 1970, giving
altogether 1,369 performances, and at the same time was
from 1956 to 1969 also a member of the Vienna State
Opera. In 1943 he made his first appearance at the
Bayreuth Festival as Pogner in Die Meistersinger. He
returned regularly to Bayreuth from 1951 to 1969, and his
TESTAMENT
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roles included Pogner, the Landgraf (Tann-häuser), Hans
Sachs, Daland, Gurnemanz, Titurel, King Heinrich
(Lohengrin), Marke (Tristan und Isolde), Fafner, Fasolt, the
Wanderer and Hagen. Greindl’s international career took
him to London, Paris, Milan, Buenos Aires, the Met in New
York and the Salzburg Festival. In addition to his Wagner
roles, he also sang Sarastro, Don Alfonso, Rocco, the
Commendatore (Don Giovanni) and other major parts, and
participated in a number of important premières, including
Carl Orff’s Antigonae in Salzburg in 1949 and the first
German stage performance of Schoenberg’s Moses und
Aron in Berlin in 1959. In 1961 Greindl was made a
professor at the Saarbrücken Music High-School, and in
1973 he was made a professor at the Vienna Music High-
School.
Jutta Vulpius (Woglinde), a member of the same family as
Christiane Vulpius, the wife of Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe, was born in Erfurt on 31 December 1927 and
studied in Weimar with Franziska Martienssen-Lohmann,
who also taught Ingrid Bjoner, Hildegard Hillebrecht and
Elisabeth Grümmer. She made her début in 1951 as Queen
of the Night at the Komische Oper in East Berlin, and soon
afterwards appeared for the first time at the State Opera
there as well. Unlike many of her colleagues during the era
of German division, she enjoyed an excellent career on
both sides of the Wall, making guest appearances in many
West German cities and other Western European capitals.
She sang a Flowermaiden in Parsifal at Bayreuth between
1954 and 1956, as well as Woglinde in 1955. She was also
featured in the world première of Paul Dessau’s opera
Einstein.
Elisabeth Schärtel (Wellgunde) was born on 6 October
1919 in Weiden in the Upper Palatinate and studied, inter
alia, with Elisabeth Bahr-Mildenburg at the Munich
Academy. She made the usual German career at the time,
during which she moved from smaller theatres in
Regensburg and Freiburg to medium-sized houses in
Braunschweig and Nuremberg, then finally to Cologne
where she joined the roster in 1960. She made guest
appearances in even larger theatres such as the Vienna
State Opera and the Deutsche Oper in Berlin, as well as at
such festivals as the Maggio Musicale in Florence and
Bayreuth, where her repertoire ranged from Wellgunde to
Ortrud. In 1961 she was awarded the Max Reger Medal.
Following her retirement she became a professor at the
Academy in Nuremberg.
Maria Graf (Floßhilde) was trained by Anny Konetzni at
the Vienna Conservatoire. She sang in the Vienna State

Opera chorus from 1950 to 1944, and appeared
occasionally in small roles such as Tebaldo in Don Carlo.
Her formal solo début took place at Innsbruck in 1955,
from whence she moved on to the Municipal Theatre in
Münster, where she remained on the roster from 1956 to
1960. She was also on the roster in Frankfurt from 1958 to
1960, then at Karlsruhe from 1960 to 1969, where she
appeared in a number of roles including Helen in the first
German performance of Sir Michael Tippett’s King Priam.
She also made a number of appearances at such major
Italian opera houses as the Teatro Regio in Parma, La
Scala, Milan, the Teatro Comunale in Florence, the Teatro
Comunale in Bologna and the La Fenice in Venice, largely
in German repertoire operas. She also appeared in France
and Spain. On her retirement she returned to Vienna.
THE PHOTOGRAPHERS
Siegfried Lauterwasser (1913-2000) How did Siegfried
Lauterwasser come to Bayreuth? The Wagner family
owned a holiday villa at Überlingen near Lake Constance.
Wieland used to take his films to be developed at the
Lauterwasser photo-graphy shop and made the
acquaintance of Siegfried Lauterwasser. One day, when
TESTAMENT
booklet note
English
Wieland spotted some photo-graphs of sailing boats on
Lake Constance in their shop window, he enquired
whether Lauterwasser was able and willing to photograph
large ships on a darkened stage. He agreed and that is how
he came to Bayreuth, where he photographed the festivals
for almost 35 years and discovered the world of European
opera, singers, musicians and conductors.
For more information visit the Website:
www.foto-lauterwasser.de
Alexander Lauterwasser (b.1951) is the son of Siegfried
Lauterwasser. He has been researching the formative
process of vibration, sound and music for 15 years. On
account of its capability to absorb resonances, water is
particularly suitable to illustrate the effects of different
sounds and frequency ranges in the form of moving waves.
To achieve this, the sound is introduced into the water
from beneath its container: the resonance patterns caused
by the sounds are then displayed by means of special
lighting from above, so that they can be photographed or
filmed. See the back cover of this booklet for the effect
created by the Prelude to Das Rheingold.
For more examples of his work visit the Web site:
www.wasserklangbilder.de