Royal Swedish Opera Archives Vol. 7 – Wagner

New generations of singers and orchestral musicians were schooled in this tradition, simultaneously with the education of an informed “Wagnerian” audience.

Nearly all Wagner’s operas were on the repertoire practically every season, an offering that no international opera house would be capable of today. Stockholm Opera audiences were accustomed to great world-famous singers like Set Svanholm, Joel Berglund, Sigurd Björling and Birgit Nilsson returning regularly to perform Wagner on their home stage, at the same time as its other leading artists thought nothing of assisting as master singers, pages, valkyries and flower girls.

On this album, Berglund as Gurnemanz preaches in the first act of “Parsifal” to a congregation which includes Kerstin Meyer and Ingvar Wixell as squires, while in the magic garden of the second act Svanholm’s Parsifal is tempted by flower girls called Elisabeth Söderström, Hjördis Schymberg and Kjerstin Dellert … We meet two very eminent though nowadays less well-known artists in the persons of Anna-Greta Söderholm and Margareta Bergström, putting up doughty resistance to more famous male colleagues.

Following generous excerpts from “Tannhäuser” and “Parsifal”, technically variable house recordings which above all bring us very near the Royal Opera Orchestra of the time, with its unique Wagnerian tradition, we conclude with a real prize: Birgit Nilsson and Set Svanholm in the final duet from the last “Siegfried” production to have been sung in Swedish at the Royal Stockholm Opera, a recording made in 1955 and preserved “by mistake” – luckily for us!