Paul Kletzki's 1948 'Siegfried Idyll'

When we last heard from the urbane gentleman at the right, he was conducting a Wagner program that included a stereo version of the Bayreuth master's most pacific score, the Siegfried Idyll. 

It was not the first time that he (Paul Kletzki) had recorded the Idyll. The maestro had started recording for EMI in late 1946, and by the time he got around to the Idyll in May 1948, he had already set down the Lohengrin preludes and the Flying Dutchman overture from Wagner's oeuvre.

But his way with the Siegfried Idyll was special, although certainly much different from what Cosima Wagner would have heard from her window on Christmas morning 1870, when Hans Richter and a small ensemble serenaded her to mark the birth of the Wagners' son Siegfried.

The 1870 ensemble included a relative handful of instruments. Today and in Kletzki's day the work is usually performed with a bigger ensemble - even bigger than the expanded chamber orchestration that Wagner published.

Still and all, it remains a unique work in Wagner's catalogue, here in a graceful, yet carefully controlled performance from the vintage Philharmonia Orchestra, in a beautiful recording from the long-lost Kingsway Hall.

Paul Kletzki can also be heard on my other blog in music of Brahms and Mendelssohn.