Lauritz Melchior: The Golden Years of Bayreuth (Great Voices Special Edition)

The year 1924 was a happy one for lovers of Wagner: the Bayreuth Festivals reopened (after ten years of silence) and the best teachers and artists of the time assembled to hlep Siegfried Wagner realize his father's intentions. The festivals from 1924 to 1931 also marked the early dominance of the man critic Paul Hume called, "...not the world's greatest Wagner tenor...the only one!" Almost eighty years later, Melchior's vocal achievements, still unequaled, seem to have gone beyond what is humanly possible. His son Ib, drawing from his life experience and sensitively interpreting the papers his father left, reveals to us a man who was larger than life in still another way--a man as good as he was great.