The LP era’s first Tannhäuser LP was recorded by DG in 1949 and is a veritable rarity among vinyl collectors. It appears on CD for the first time through the good graces of Gebhardt. Specialist Wagner acolytes refer to it as the “Schlusnus Tannhäuser”, and rightly so. Veteran baritone Heinrich Schlusnus wraps his gorgeous, evenly modulated baritone around the role of Wolfram with lyrical authority at every point, especially in the first act. The other men don’t quite rise to their colleague’s vocal genius, yet what we’d give today for a Landgrave of Otto von Rohr’s supple, honeyed timbre. Günther Treptow’s beefy tenor, with its baritonal overtones, is a perfect voice for the title role, but his high notes seem thinner and less ardent than his norm in Wagnerian Heldentenor parts. As Elisabeth, Trude Eipperle is sensitive but tends to wobble, while Aga Joesten’s squally, acidic Venus proves as seductive as Edith Massey’s bathetic pleas for “egggggggggs” in the John Waters film Pink Flamingos.
It takes about 20 minutes into each act for the orchestra to click and cohere, and the English horn soloist makes some unlovely, duckbilled sounds. Still, the recording quality is excellent for its time and ideally balanced between pit and stage, figuratively speaking (many early mono opera sets, by contrast, mike the singers too far front). In order to minimize vinyl surface noise, Gebhardt unfortunately filters a great deal of high-end information and overtones from the LPs. The effect is not unlike wrapping your loudspeakers in layers of gauze, or turning your tuner’s tone controls down to zero. Given DG’s excellent remasterings of similar-vintage mono material (Jochum’s Bruckner Eighth, Walcha’s Bach), we can only imagine how well this Tannhäuser could and should sound if transferred in the right way. Until then, Gebhardt’s stopgap is the only game in town.
