There are some wonderful things about this performance, most of them coming from the Tamino of Fritz Wunderlich, who lives up to his reputation as the great, great tenor who was never to be. His commercial recording of this role is good, but here he’s great: beginning with the “Bildnis” aria we get heartfelt, meltingly beautiful singing, so natural it’s like speech. Just to be picky, I’ll mention his occasional tendency to sing a teensy bit sharp, but even that lessens as the performance goes on. In all, it’s simply ravishing. Walter Berry’s Papageno is flavorful and very light, but he has severe pitch problems that keep recurring. The Queen of Erika Köth is nicely articulated but hardly perfect. She fudges the end of the first aria and flats on some of the Fs in the second, but the tone itself is properly pointy.
At the other end of the spectrum, Gottlob Frick is authoritative as Sarastro, his dark, dark tone expressive and handsome; but the low notes sound as if they might escape at any moment. Lieselotte Fölser, otherwise unknown to me, sings Pamina poorly. She can be silvery and sweet, but her mediocrity is always clear. The rest of the cast is good, but this is not one of the Salzburg Festival’s great moments. Joseph Keilberth leads a beautiful reading, occasionally tending toward the deliberate, but always with a sense of Mozart’s line. The pious Sarastro moments are suitably austere, and while the fun spots, like “Wie? Wie? Wie?”, lack a bit of sparkle, they allow us to actually hear just what’s going on. The sonics are good. Except for Wunderlich, this is unnecessary.
