Between 1958 and 1965 the Decca record company made the first complete recording to be released of Richard Wagner's tetralogy, Der Ring des Nibelungen. Of the four component operas, there had been two previous studio recordings of Die Walküre, and a monaural radio recording of Götterdämmerung, which was released on record in 1956, but Decca's was the first Ring cycle planned and recorded for the gramophone.
The recording of The Ring was conceived and produced by Decca's senior producer, John Culshaw, who engaged the Vienna Philharmonic, the conductor Georg Solti and leading Wagner singers including Birgit Nilsson, Wolfgang Windgassen, Hans Hotter and Gottlob Frick and, in roles they did not play onstage, well-known singers such as Kirsten Flagstad, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Joan Sutherland. Culshaw and his engineering colleagues set out to capture on disc performances that would recreate in listeners' minds the drama that Wagner intended, compensating for the lack of visual images with imaginative production, making use of stereophonic techniques that became possible shortly before the start of the recording of the cycle.
The recordings were made in the Sofiensaal, Vienna, and issued on long-playing records. They were subsequently transferred to compact disc, in which form they have been continuously available since 1984. In polls for the BBC and Gramophone magazine the Decca Ring has been voted the greatest recording ever made, and it has won numerous honours, including Grand Prix du Disque and Grammy awards.
Background
Before the introduction of the long playing record in the late 1940s a complete recorded Ring was, as the producer John Culshaw put it, "unthinkable". Piecemeal excerpts had been issued on 78 rpm records, but a complete Ring would have required well over a hundred discs. The Decca record company began recording complete operas on LP in 1950, starting with Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail, but it was believed throughout the industry that studio recordings of Wagner operas would be uneconomic. There were studio recordings of Die Meistersinger (Decca, 1950–51), and Tristan und Isolde (EMI, 1952), but in general it was thought that the only financially viable course was to tape live performances. Decca taped the 1951 and 1955 Ring cycles at the Bayreuth Festival, but the results were not considered satisfactory and were not issued at the time.
Culshaw believed that recording live performances was a second-best approach: he strongly advocated studio recordings in which the absence of the action and staging seen in the theatre would be redressed by imaginative production, "creating something like a 'theatre of the mind' which enabled the listener at home to get involved with Wagner's characters and the sweep of his great music-drama". For this, he believed, stereophonic recording, developed in the mid-1950s, was a key factor. Alan Rich, music critic of the New York Herald-Tribune, later concurred; having heard the Decca set of Götterdämmerung he wrote that few opera house productions were able to "rekindle the flame of the composer's plan", but in this recording "the most difficult to stage music drama, perhaps, in the entire repertory becomes a complete experience with no staging at all".
Decca hoped to record Die Walküre with Kirsten Flagstad as Brünnhilde, but she had retired from the operatic stage in the early 1950s, and when Culshaw invited her to record the opera in 1957 she declined to attempt a complete recording. The result was a set of Act I conducted by Hans Knappertsbusch with Flagstad as Sieglinde, and a separate one of the Todesverkündigung scene from Act II, and the whole of Act III, conducted by Georg Solti with Flagstad as Brünnhilde. Both sets were recorded in the Sofiensaal, Vienna; the orchestra was the Vienna Philharmonic.
1958: Das Rheingold
By 1958 Decca, with its pre-eminent technical team −The Times called them "Decca's incomparable engineers" − was ready to embark on a complete studio recording of the four Ring operas. At Culshaw's instigation the company decided to begin with Das Rheingold, the first and shortest of the four. Culshaw engaged Solti, the Vienna Philharmonic and a roster of established Wagner singers. The cast included Flagstad in one of her last recorded performances, in the role of Fricka, which she had never sung on stage.