This was the first-ever live recording to be issued of a whole act of an opera at Bayreuth, product of Walter Legge's enterprise in arriving there for the house's re-opening. No doubt the presence of his wife, Schwarzkopf, for Eva, and of Karajan, his protege, drew him to the Green Hill and its historic theatre. When the set first appeared on innumerable 78s, Alec Robertson complained of the unmusical aspects of tape recording, then in its infancy and spent much of his limited space on its allegedly unsatisfactory nature. I think he would have had to withdraw his comments if he had heard the clear, fresh sound here produced by the team at EMI's Abbey Road studio. It is true that the grand scale of the opening scenes still sound confined and a shade confused, but thereafter voices and orchestra shine out as they do in the contemporaneous Die Meistersinger (EMI, 9/90).
Pre-war listeners such as Desmond Shawe-Taylor, who still had Leider and Schorr in their minds, found something wanting in the performances of Varnay and Bjorling, the one lacking steadiness, the other a true line. While that is sometimes so, today we would love to have the immense security and authority of Varnay as Brunnhilde and the firm gleam of Bjorling (no relation to Jussi by the way) as Wotan. Although Varnay was to improve on her reading, as can be heard on the complete Krauss set (Foyer, 6/88), she is already a formidable and engrossing interpreter, alive to every aspect of the fallen goddess's predicament and responsive to her father's attacks. Bjorling, for the most part articulate, authoritative, wonderfully so at the start of a simple, unforced account of the Farewell, misses something (but not too much) of the inner quality Hotter was soon to bring to the part at Bayreuth (vide the Krauss set again) and at climaxes comes near to barking. The young Rysanek rises superbly in her reply to Varnay's revelation that she is soon to be mother of Siegfried.
The emerging Karajan fills the music with fiery incandescence from start to finish, drawing exact and dedicated playing from the new Bayreuth orchestra—listen to the lovely string sound just after the Farewell and the clarity of the Magic Fire Music. How sad that the rest of this cycle, said to have been committed to disc, appears not to have survived. By the time he returned to The Ring Karajan was no longer such a direct, unfussy conductor, nor could he recapture in the studio the frisson, as here, of a live occasion. This disc is well worth having for him and for the often superb Varnay.'