This nearly-50-year-old performance still retains its status as a “classic”, and the digital remastering that would appear to be the raison d’etre for its current release is splendid: the original LPs were engineered in a fashion that blended voices and instruments into a murky mish-mash, and the re-mastering for CD, while helpful, was not ideal. Now, the mish-mash is more like a voluptuous wash: Isolde’s lament right after Tristan’s death is a case in point–we are now properly overwhelmed by the sheer outpouring of grief coming from both orchestra and soprano, rather than wondering where our attention should be placed; and elsewhere, Furtwängler’s absolute understanding of precisely how to wed orchestral fabric to vocal line has never been clearer.
As to the performance, Flagstad (with Schwarzkopf’s high Cs), though sounding (like it or not) somewhat matronly for the youthful Isolde, does not miss a vocal or dramatic trick, and remarkably, at her advanced age, she could keep up with Furtwängler’s leisurely tempos. (Just for the record, and to offer perspective, Furtwängler takes almost 35 minutes longer with the score than Böhm.) Ludwig Suthaus is neither as potent as Melchior nor as insightful as Windgassen, but his is still a superb Tristan, filled with passion of every kind. His ravings in the final act–helped immeasurably by the fabulous Philharmonia’s mirroring of his feelings–are correctly unbearable. The young Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Blanche Thebom remain equally impressive and Josef Greindl is imposing as Marke.
We could quibble: Take for example Furtwängler’s surprisingly inflexible pacing of the Narrative and Curse (compare it with Böhm’s or even Barenboim’s, the latter even with the appalling Waltraud Meier), and occasionally the huge, drawn out arc of the opera seems like it needs a bit of a kick to get it moving; but still, if you don’t know this recording, you don’t know Tristan.
