A certain largesse, a nobility of spirit, touches this enterprise at every point. First, those responsible for the release of these CDs have undertaken a task of which the financial rewards can hardly be proportionate to the effort involved: all has been done out of devotion. The booklet by Dr John Barker leads one to suppose that the prime inspiration has been a desire to see justice done to Albert Coates: ''one of the great (and certainly the greatest of the British) Wagner conductors of the first half of this century''. Nobility was a mark of Coates's conducting too. Breadth and dignity, seriousness and passion, and perhaps above all a love for the special sonority of Wagner's scores: these deeply impress themselves on the listener's mind. So do the noble voices of the Brunnhildes, Frida Leider and Florence Austral. Then, as one thinks back to those early years, long before any complete recording of The Ring, it is impossible not to admire the vision and the experimentation of these pioneers, inspired in their turn by the nobility of Wagner's immense work.
These were not the first large-scale Wagner recordings. Act 2 of Tannhauser had been recorded as long ago as 1909, and in the early 1920s, as the booklet reminds us, Coates himself had conducted representative selections from The Ring and Tristan and an abridged version of Die Meistersinger, sung in English. But these were before the advent of electrical recording, which made it possible for the first time to present something credibly resembling a Wagnerian orchestra, and the singing was in German. Of the four operas, Das Rheingold came off worst with only the Prelude, the finale and two brief excerpts in between. Die Walkure managed without Fricka and Hunding; Gotterdammerung lost Alberich, the plotting scene of Act 2 and the return of Siegfried's body to the Gibichungs' hall. Six bars here, six pages there, disappear likewise (Siegfried, incidentally, was relatively well looked after, in composite sets with Melchior in the name-part). Even as the records were being issued, grumbles began about what had gone missing; but Herman Klein, reviewing the Gotterdammerung records in Gramophone (4/29), expressed the general, more temperate viewpoint: ''whilst we are waiting for the very solid 13 hours' production involved in the complete recording of The Ring, I for one shall be content to accept these generous excerpts at their face value''. The 13 hours production would have resulted in roughly 160 78rpm sides.
So here are 33 weighty 12-inch originals accommodated within the tiny compass of four CDs. They have been transformed in other ways too. Gone, in large measure, are the filthy surfaces that clogged up the playing of so many of those black-label HMVs. Of course some of the old surface still chugs away; one is aware of it amid the storm at the start of Die Walkure and again at the end as though the fire on Brunnhilde's rock were defying the monsoon rains. But the orchestral sound is quite astonishingly vivid for all that, forward and full-bodied. Rather exceptionally for those days the balance sometimes favours the orchestra; in several passages one would like the singers to take a step or two forward, even while recognizing that this, too, was a noble feature, for it no doubt formed part of the plan to do justice to the orchestral score for the first time on records. At other times, as in Friedrich Schorr's magnificent account of Wotan's farewell, the voice is well forward and without detriment to the orchestral sound.
Schorr and Leider of course are among the acknowledged great singers of the century. The other great singer here is Austral, a glorious voice with an evenness of production that puts most modern Brunnhildes to shame. We never used to think much of Laubenthal, as I remember, but nowadays he would probably be seen as a godsend. Widdop is splendid too, with an imaginative Sieglinde in Gota Ljungberg. The very epitome of the giant-voiced Hagen, Ivar Andresen, makes a stunning effect with his ''Hoiho''s. Norns, Rhine Maidens and Vassals do well. Both London and Berlin orchestras under their respective conductors play magnificently. The only criticism I think worth making is that the almost comically inadequate orchestral version of the end of Das Rheingold under Coates should not, to my mind, have been substituted for the real thing under Blech with Schorr at his incomparable best.'