Where are today’s great Wagnerian voices? This is a question that every generation of critics and discerning opera-goers asks themselves, only to be accused of cleaving to ancient, dust-gathering recordings and dyed-in-the-wool nostalgia for a supposed golden age. Those of us who complain about the singing standards of contemporary Wagnerians are directed to look up old reviews from, say, the 1950s, when some critics at Wieland Wagner’s post1951 “New Bayreuth” festivals regularly complained that Astrid Varnay or Martha Mödl’s Brünnhilde, Wolfgang Windgassen’s Siegfried or even Hans Hotter’s Wotan were not to be compared with the glorious Flagstad and Leider, Lauritz Melchior and Max Lorenz, the great Wagnerian names of the 1930s.

Fifty years on, live recordings from Bayreuth proliferate as never before. The Varnay-Windgassen-Hotter performances of the Ring – vividly captured from radio broadcasts, and, most exceptionally, in the Testament issue of a Decca recording, made in 1955, but until last year, never commercially released – garner ecstatic reviews and fly out of the shops. At Bayreuth last week, the Testament Ring, conducted by the all-but-forgotten Joseph Keilberth, occupied pride of place in the little bookshop opposite the Festspielhaus.

They may have been disparaged in the 1950s, but compared with what we hear today, Varnay’s Brünnhilde, Windgassen’s Siegfried and Hotter’s Wotan truly belong to a – if not the – golden age of Wagner singing.

Certainly, the record companies of the time thought so. In the 1950s and 1960s, EMI, Decca, Philips and Deutsche Grammophon flocked to Bayreuth, battling with each other for the rights to record complete Wagner operas live. A con-tractual tussle between EMI and Decca is one of the reasons why the 1955 Keilberth Ring could not be issued at the time.Where are the record companies at Bayreuth today? While the postwar festival performing history is well documented on audio and (later) video recordings until the end of the 1990s, no multinational company has set foot on Bayreuth’s green hill for the best part of a decade. The last live recording to be issued commercially was Daniel Barenboim’s (vocally unmemorable) account of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, nine years ago.

Accentuating the disparity between now and the Bayreuth 40 or 50 years ago, the festival is collaborating with the Munich-based firm Orfeo to release authorised Bavarian Radio recordings. This year, it was Knappertsbusch’s last broadcast of Parsifal, a work he conducted at Bayreuth between 1951 and 1964. Although two commercial live recordings exist (1951 and 1962), this one preserves the mouthwatering cast of Jon Vickers (Parsifal), the young Thomas Stewart (Amfortas), Hans Hotter (Gurnemanz) and the voluptuous Barbro Ericsson (Kundry). It’s hard to imagine Bayreuth engaging this level of talent today.

As for the singing in the current Ring, well, words (almost) fail me. Let’s get the good news out of the way first: Gerhard Siegel’s Mime (admittedly, one of the Ring’s gift parts, and always easier to cast than Brünnhilde, Siegfried or Wotan) was the only individual performance for whom no qualification and no invidious comparisons need to be made. He is the optimum casting worldwide for this role at the moment, as Covent Garden audiences have been discovering over the past few seasons and will experience yet again during the Ring performances at the Royal Opera House this autumn. In terms of vocal impact, verbal clarity and characterisation, I have never heard his superior in 30-plus years of Ring-going.

In Die Walküre, Adrienne Pieczonka’s light-voiced but radiant Sieglinde proved an oasis of lyricism in a parched soprano desert, among the principal roles, at least. (There were several promising voices among the Valkyries, in one of the best teams I have encountered in the theatre recently, so all hope is not lost.) Hans-Peter König (Fafner and Hagen), and Kwang-choul Youn (Fasolt and Hunding) are two of the best youngish basses working in Germany at the moment, although they lack the star quality of René Pape and the ideal schwarze Bass (black bass) traditionally associated with these roles. Arnold Bezuyen’s Loge, though far from exceptional – he might prosper in a more probing staging than this lame effort by the octogenarian tyro, the playwright Tan-kred Dorst – just makes it to the credit side of the equation.

The really big roles ranged from the wretched (Endrik Wottrich’s throaty, strangulated Siegmund) to the just about passable: Stephen Gould’s Siegfried has the notes, but the strained sound he makes suggests to me that his time as leading Heldentenor will be brief indeed. Linda Watson’s by now experienced Brünnhilde veers wildly between gleaming, incisive passages, harsh, forceful yelling and tender moments where she fails to sustain the pitch. She doesn’t tire, but her text, like that of her Siegfried, is all but unintelligible. Albert Dohmen delivers his native German with authority, but his dry tone lacks the majesty of a

Bryn Terfel, his persona the physical charisma of a John Tomlinson.

What makes these singers worth enduring is the Festspielhaus itself – Wagner’s own, great period “instrument” – and the glorious chorus and orchestra, always the heroes and heroines of the festival, but especially this year in the Ring, under Christian Thielemann’s magisterial baton, and in Tannhäuser, conducted by a surprise newcomer, Christoph Ulrich Meier. Thielemann’s former assistant delivered the single most satisfying performance I heard at Bayreuth this summer, the orchestral music full of spellbinding Italianate lyricism, the 120-strong chorus simply matchless. In this respect, at least, 21st-century Bayreuth need fear no historical comparisons.

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