This is almost as important a document as the Onegin from the same source reviewed above. As with that issue, Ward Marston has done an amazing job in, as it were, picture-cleaning a faded, unsatisfactory original by carefully editing and re-mastering three tapes of the performances. Not only is this performance now heard complete but the sound is also excellent for its day, taking us into the Met at a performance of a new production, lauded in the press a few days before this broadcast. It marked the house début of Hans Hotter – and what a début! – and the first appearances of Astrid Varnay and Set Svanholm in their respective roles at the Met. Then there is the ever-observant Fritz Reiner giving a finely structured, taut and impulsive reading of the score.

This was probably the start of the long and fruitful partnership of Varnay and Hotter in Wagner. As in later performances, they seem to inspire each other to astonishing feats of musical and dramatic truth. Hotter’s Dutchman is reasonably familiar on disc from the 1944 wartime broadcast under Krauss. Riveting as that interpretation may be, in the context of the theatre he rises to even greater heights of haunted angst as he lays out the character’s wretched torment in an account of the monologue that is surely the most complete in vocal and histrionic terms on disc, one underlined by Hotter’s marvellous feeling for the text.

Then the start of the duet in Act 2 is sung with just the kind of intimacy and pure legato it calls for, before rising to elevated ecstasy as his dream of a saviour seems to have materialised. In writing of Hotter’s reading, Paul Jackson in Sign-Off at the Old Met (Duckworth: 1997) rightly describes the ‘curious luminescence’ that ‘enriches the closing pages of the score’. In all, there is no hint of the wobble that could afflict Hotter’s singing as he rises to the role’s appreciable demands.

Similarly, Varnay is in easier, fresher form than in her later Bayreuth Senta. She seems the possessed girl to the life in the Ballad, clearly thought through by her and Reiner. Then in the duet and again in the finale she flings out ecstatic phrases as only a true heroic soprano can. The fervour and confidence of her singing, full and rounded, only serves to underline the inadequacies of recent interpreters, such as Jane Eaglen on the Daniel Barenboim version, but then the whole cast there, Steersman apart, is inferior by a mile to what we have here.

Svanholm is another singer of true Wagnerian proportions and he releases a stream of secure, insistent if not always pleasing tone. Sven Nilsson is a lightweight but very experienced Daland, projecting a real son of the sea. Herta Glaz is a nicely steady Mary. The only disappointment is the loud, unpoetic singing of the Steersman. The chorus, though not the equal of others on disc, is more than adequate, the playing rather more than that.

As a whole, this is a traversal of the score I would have ranked high in my ‘Collection’ article (3/02) on the piece, had it then been available. Among historic recordings it deserves an honoured place with the Clemens Krauss (which is in less amenable sound) or the early post-war Bayreuth sets. Wagnerians, and those who want to hear Hotter in his absolute prime, will surely want this issue. Its price is a further incentive to purchase.