Page 176 - Birgit Nilsson Book

Fingers crossed, we promised Decca that there would be no noise from our cameras or lights. We transgressed only once. During a pregnant silence between the rising notes at the start of Siegfried’s Funeral March a lens turret was hastily rotated from wide-angle to close-up, making a dull clunk. “Unmusikalischer Kameramann” cried the good-humoured and amazingly tolerant Georg Solti (the knighthood came later), and the take ground to a halt. But our relationship remained a trusting one and, wonder of wonders, Decca allowed us to eavesdrop in the control room where the tension before the takes began reminded me of the countdown to a rocket launch. In those days of simple two-track recording, just left and right stereo, all the mixing had to be done at the moment of record- ing. Culshaw was like some captain of the skies, surrounded by faders, filters and flickering meters, with trusted colleagues on either side acting as musical look-outs and steersmen, bringing sound channels in and out according to Culshaw and Parry’s master plan.
During recording breaks, known then as Zigarettenpausen, we even trained our long-distance directional microphones on Solti and Culshaw, unbeknown to them, when vital questions of tempo and balance were being thrashed out. I doubt whether the give and take between a great Wagnerian conductor and a recording producer with his own Wagnerian concept has ever been more faithfully captured.
Technically, we had the good fortune to be able to plug in to Decca’s superbly mixed sound — derived from at least twenty-four chan- nels — to which our gifted Austrian Tonmeister added — live — Maestro Solti’s rehearsal directions and Captain Culshaw’s commands from the bridge. We taped over forty hours of Decca takes of Götterdämmerung, covering the rousing male chorus scene and the thrilling trio which concludes Act Two, and in Act Three, Siegfried’s Death and Funeral March, Gutrune’s lonely vigil and the entire Immolation Scene.
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