In JW's long and crucial review of this set when it was first issued (crucial because its thoughtful enthusiasm must have helped this pioneering issue lead towards a complete English Ring on disc), he commented that one of Goodall's special gifts was to give his singers ''an atmosphere in which they can give performances of the fullest understanding of which they are capable''. He put into apt words what I felt when listening to the reading once more on this CD reissue, before looking at what he had said. It is that and the sense of an ensemble prepared with long and patient care that gives the performance its unique quality.
In no other version, not even Furtwangler's (EMI, 2/91) or Krauss's (Foyer/Silver Sounds, 6/88), is this feeling of a unanimity of purpose so keenly conveyed. All the singers have selfevidently been trained in the same school, namely Goodall's, which places emphasis on beautiful tone, a long-breathed line and clarity of diction (it's ironic indeed that EMI for once print a complete text on the one occasion when it's hardly needed so clear are the words). That would have been set at naught were it not for the fact that the singers, at least in this opera, are near-ideal for their roles and what's more, through lengthy rehearsal and repeated performance in the same staging, are inside them. And let it be added that 17 years later it would be hard to find their counterparts.
Alberto Remedios's Siegfried deserves pride of place in any roll-call of his own opera. He sings with unflagging tone and energy, even when set tough tasks by Goodall's measured speeds. Exasperation with Mime, poetry in the Forest Murmurs, loneliness when Dragon and Mime are dead, defiance before Wotan/Wanderer, fright then emotional release with Brunnhilde, are all within his abilities in as appealing an account of the role as any on disc, one that encompasses the human and the heroic. At the end of the long evening he can fully match the splendour of Rita Hunter's singing. How wonderful it is, in her case, to hear every note strong, firm and true, yet with room for warmth and a touch of vibrato when needed to create emotional depth.
Norman Bailey's Wotan/Wanderer is perhaps still underrated. He, unlike some of his successors, probed into the depth of the role, realized the character's internal anguish and conveyed that with a mastery in wedding tone and word that makes the music sound as if it had been written in English (implied praise here for Andrew Porter's exemplary translation). He finds suitable antagonists in Anne Collins's authoritative, eloquent Erda and Derek Hammond-Stroud's intelligent Alberich. Gregory Dempsey's Mime is full of sardonic wheedling without recourse to exaggeration.
Enough was recently written at the time of Goodall's death about his qualities as a Wagnerian for further praise to seem superfluous. His gifts were always most impressive in the theatre rather than the studio so that his Ring stands as his true monument (hopefully to be joined by the longed-for Sadler's Wells Die Meistersinger which the magnificent Peter Moores Foundation would like to help issue from existing tapes). Hearing this performance again, so soon after Furtwangler's Ring, I was struck just how much more Goodall's approach owes to Knappertsbusch's (on various 'unofficial' labels) than to Furtwangler's. It has the grandeur, the depth, the philosophical strength of the former rather than the incandescence and immediacy of the latter. That can best be judged by listening to the three conductors in the Prelude to Act 3. Here one of Goodall's famously slow tempos makes sense when you hear the whole passage and its relationship to what follows. Even the sluggish pacing of first Forging song has its justification in Wagner's instruction, kraftig, doch nicht zu schnell (''Powerful, but not too fast''), as JW pointed out in 1974.
Within his chosen scale, Goodall is always alert to relevant detail and how it illumines the whole. His players, as devoted to him as his singers, respond in like fashion. There are the occasional smudges in notes and ensemble attendant on such a live version, but the sense of a real occasion caught on the wing outweighs any such disadvantage and makes one overlook the odd coughs. The balance between stage and pit is very truthful, comparable with that in the Bohm/Philips live 1967 Bayreuth version (8/85).
I was half afraid that this particular legend wouldn't live up to the memory of it, so I was relieved to find myself once more absorbed from start to finish when listening to this splendidly individual Siegfried.'