At last!  At last!    Reginald Goodall's 1968 'Mastersingers' is due for release at the end of the month.
  Cast includes Norman Bailey, Alberto Remedios and Margaret Curphey on 4 CDs.  CHAN 31484.   I've   
  been shopping around and settled for hmv.online @ £21 99.

 
  A case, JimD, of feel the quality and never mind the width!   If you saw the original production,
  you'll get my point.   

No offence taken, Ted.    Your loss!

Wagner was a very bad librettist. Nothing of his "poetry" gets lost in a translation, because there's nothing to lose.

I don't think it's a bad idea to translate a libretto. If it's done properly, you're really adding something new to a work of art. Recenlty, I heard a radio programme about a group of scientists from Cologne who are researching the connection between music and language. It's a very interesting field of research.

I think you're on to something though, young or not. Even the German is hardly everyday German and much less tied up with the setting on a note-by-note basis than some other music is. Which means on the one hand that a translation doesn't necessarily do much harm but on the other hand it also means that there isn't necessarily a great deal of point! 

Mahler often conducted Wagner in Hungarian. But of course you know that.

I think if there were any youtube footage of Mahler conducting we'd have heard about it by now... (unless maybe there's some more material recorded with smoke out there waiting to be decoded!)

 Ah, harpy, I was lucky enough to see Linda Esther Gray in the WNO and ENO productions, conducted by Reggie Goodall.    As I write, I'm looking at the Decca digital, 3 audio cassette set.   The time must be ripe for a remastered recording on CD.    Healthy sale figures for 'The Mastersingers' on Chandos could encourage Decca to follow suit.

Well, I'll certainly be buying.  I used to have cassettes of a broadcast from the 1980s - but they were inside a car of mine that was stolen, along with tapes of Goodall's late WNO Valkyrie.  As I think I may have said here before, I was rather more distressed about the tapes than the car (which was a heap).

Goodall's Mastersingers is slow.  Objectively, it's much too slow, along with much of Goodall's other Wagner (that WNO Valkyrie was something of an exception).  But somehow, miraculously, it works, and does so triumphally.  Goodall was interviewed by John Amis for R3 about his conducting, and one of the few polysyllabic responses that Amis managed to elicit was about how all the contrapuntal strands in the Mastersingers overture must be heard, and this dictated the tempo.  It's true that with Goodall you can hear everything.


Like Stanley, I saw Linda Esther Gray with Goodall at the ENO, and both were magnificent - as indeed they are on the recording.  But the discs were let down by a supporting cast that, Gwynne Howell's King Mark apart, was not in the same class, and by the fact that the WNO orchestra simply wasn't up to the task (they're much better on Goodall's Parsifal recording).  A recording  of the ENO broadcast (IIRC with Gray, Alberto Remedios, Norman Bailey, Felicity Palmer and John Tomlinson) from August 1981 - if such a thing exists - would be a better prospect.