Enigma and paradox surround the life of Austrian conductor Clemens Krauss (1893-1954). Was he really the love child of a high-up Viennese churchman and a teenage dancer in the Imperial Opera Ballet? Did he accept Nazi dictats to take his own career to the highest positions in Vienna, Berlin and Munich while secretly running – in tandem with two English sisters and his soprano wife Viorica Ursuleac - a Scarlet Pimpernel-style escape chain for Jewish fugitives? And did he actually die, not from lack of oxygen in Mexico City’s altitudes, but of grief and frustration (rather like Erich Kleiber) at being passed over for the chief conductorship of the post-war Wiener Staatsoper?

Krauss’s relatively few commercial discs for Decca proved him an equal master of Richard Strauss tone poems and Johann Strauss waltzes and operettas (including the laid-back, apparently off-the-cuff Fledermaus to beat them all). Now, however, he can be heard in a chain of off-the-air Wagner and Strauss releases to be a musical colourist of genius and a matchless chamber musician-like pacer of ‘live’ opera. Try Act III of his first (and last) Bayreuth Die Walküre (Pristine or Orfeo) where he matches, essentially without rehearsal, every vocal dramatic turn of Hans Hotter’s Wotan – a role that he himself had taught the singer some years earlier. Or, in a 1940s Munich Holländer, the terrifying way in which he bleaches all colour out of the string tremolando that prepares the way for the most massive-ever brass statement of the Dutchman’s motif. Or the panoply of colours, Debussyan almost, in the forest around Mime’s cave at curtain rise in Siegfried.

Before Krauss’s actual arrival in Bayreuth in 1953 – invited by Wieland Wagner to replace a Hans Knappertsbusch disgruntled by a new age of experimental stagings – music staff gossip had dismissed him as ‘just a Strauss conductor who knew nothing of the real Wagner style’. While passing through the room in which one of the authoritative Wilhelm Pitz’s chorus rehearsals was in progress, Krauss put paid to that myth by calling out a detailed correction to the rhythm of a phrase in the first Parsifal Grail scene. (He had, of course, been conducting the big Wagner scores since at least the 1930s, as can be heard on one of Koch Schwann’s Wiener Staatsoper compilations.) In his first season he triumphed in Bayreuth with both the Ring and Parsifal. Wieland hailed Krauss’s swifter, lighter interpretations as the work of the ‘Italian’ style conductor he had been so long seeking and offered him everything – but Krauss died the following spring.

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