Der Ring des Nibelungen

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.