In my Gramophone Collection on Elektra (9/13), five of the recordings were conducted by Karl Böhm. This one, from the first night of a production by Wieland Wagner, just about beats them all. It is both immensely exciting and deeply moving. According to the booklet-note, Birgit Nilsson had sung the leading role only once before, in Stockholm (in Swedish, I wonder?); here, the year before making the famous studio recording under Solti, she already sounds completely at home in the part. The opening monologue is everything it should be: a haunting invocation to her father Agamemnon that embraces her loneliness, the recollection of his murder, and a triumphant anticipation of violent revenge; every phrase perfectly calibrated, culminating in a spine-tingling top C. There’s another gleaming top C at the end of the scene with Klytemnestra; but equally memorable is the delicacy with which she calls her mother – maliciously, as the Trainbearer points out – a goddess. She is achingly tender in the recognition scene with Orestes, vividly obsequious as she lures Aegisthus to his death and tireless in her final, fatal dance. Absolutely magnificent.

Klytemnestra is sung by Regina Resnik: like Nilsson, she really acts with her voice. She too is tender when she recalls the past, and she recounts the horror of her sleepless nights as grippingly as on the Solti recording. Leonie Rysanek begins with the ‘curiously smoky’ tone that I noted in her 1961 New York performance but opens out later. Eberhard Waechter’s Orestes, his first words grim and dark, is excitingly urgent, while Wolfgang Windgassen, the reigning Siegfried of the day, makes a forthright Aegisthus, a part that can all too easily be camped up.

Gerhard Unger, another leading singer not too proud to take small parts, is the Young Servant, as he was for Solti and for Böhm’s studio recording: an effective cameo, though his hoarse laughter would be better suited to the Captain in Wozzeck. His first words are almost inaudible but in general the balance is excellent: so good, indeed, that you can really hear the scampering solos for violin and viola. The conducting is beyond praise, Böhm packing a massive punch at the orchestra’s rising octaves in Elektra’s soliloquy, for instance, but time standing still in the recognition scene. The usual cuts, of course, and the disc break oddly comes after, not immediately before, Elektra’s ‘Nun denn, allein!’. But don’t miss this stupendous performance.