Soprano
Christel Goltz was a discovery of conductor
Karl Böhm; before she became a singer,
Goltz had been a dancer and was physically the antithesis of the typical operatic soprano: small, lithe, and energetic. Despite her diminutive stature,
Goltz had a big voice that easily made it out to the farthest tier, and it is said that when the character Narraboth killed himself in
Strauss' Salome, that
Goltz would leap over his dead body during the "Dance of the Seven Veils"; sopranos, do not try this at home. It was in dramatic roles such as Salome and Elektra that
Goltz made her mark, and by all accounts in performance she was extremely effective at them. The only sizable studio recordings she made -- Salome with
Clemens Krauss and Elektra with
Georg Solti -- were in such roles. Early in her career,
Goltz also created roles in works of Carl Orff and Swiss composer Heinrich Sutermeister; excerpt performances of these can be heard toward the end of the second disc of Preiser's In Memoriam Christel Goltz 1912-2008 and are among the most interesting selections to be found on this two-disc set.
Preiser's research into the work of the seldom-recorded
Goltz is so comprehensive that it even includes one of the recordings she made singing in the chorus of the Dresden Opera in 1939, before she appeared there in a role.
Goltz is easy to recognize in the chorus as she doesn't blend in with the rest of the voices. Indeed, the quality of
Goltz's voice was not her strongest asset; she was a singing actress and her sense of pitch rather often goes awry, to a hair-raising extent in the Oberon excerpt featured here. In terms of tone, at times she sounds more like Susan Alexander Kane than, say, contemporaries such as
Birgit Nilsson and
Irmgard Seefried. Her French is not particularly good, and although her Italian was better, one can see why
Goltz would prefer to sing in her native German.
Goltz was a major star in postwar German opera and one can see why Preiser would want to devote a two-disc set of her recordings as a tribute in the wake of her passing; there's hardly anything out there for her, except for live opera performances in which she serves as a cast member.
Nevertheless, for rare opera buffs, the bit from Sutermeister's otherwise unrecorded opera Romeo und Julia, heard in recordings made in 1944, may prove too strong to resist, and these -- along with the
Strauss selections -- don't sound so bad. It's a lot to take on, though, to gain a little, and a little of this goes a long way.