Page 177 - Birgit Nilsson Book

Our heroes were not only the great singers undertaking their epic roles, led by Birgit Nilsson as Brünnhilde, but also Decca’s own team of stars. We watched the young Christopher Raeburn (later Decca’s outstanding opera expert) shepherding his singers about the platform from square one to square eight — even as they sang — to create the shifting aural perspectives which were an integral part of Culshaw’s sound design. We saw Erik Smith, who a year or two later switched companies to become a sort of Dutch Culshaw for Philips, supervising the recording of the shrieks and sound effects which gave the Decca Ring some of its spine-chilling realism. Realism was ultra-important, most of all to Gordon Parry, a man visibly obsessed with all things Wagnerian. We witnessed the fruits of his researches in the Blue Ballroom, where he had assembled authentic hunting horns answering each other in sepulchral semitones for Hagen to summon the vassals to the Gibichung Hall.
Sworn to secrecy, we aided and abetted the Decca team in its most famous practical joke. When Brünnhilde calls for her horse Grane to jump with her into the funeral pyre, a real horse was to be led onto the stage. Our film camera followed the noble steed in from the street and safely captured the surrealistic moment when it ascended the principal staircase to the ballroom. Electronic cameras picked up its dramatic arrival in the studio. Birgit Nilsson, in full cry, “corpsed” immediately. It took five minutes for the Philharmoniker to regain their customary composure. The horse behaved perfectly.
Editing and assembly of this mammoth project took many months back in London. In those pioneer days video tape was physically spliced, not copied electronically, and every edit involved cutting and joining with silver-backed sticking plaster (or thus it seemed) after meticulous examination by editors in white coats. Finally we were able to run the assembled film and video sequences back through a BBC Television control room, adding commentaries as we went. We felt as the Wright Brothers must have in 1903; our multi-media experiment, at that point the longest music documentary ever made, was airborne at last. It has been flying ever since, a tribute to the indefatigable Georg Solti with his matchless team of singers and musicians, and to those high priests of flawlessness, the Decca Recording Team of 1964.
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