Completing the ring.(Viewpoint)(radio broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera)(Column)

The Metropolitan Opera's sixth season, in 1888-89, marked the first time the company took on the challenge of an integral staging of Der Ring des Nibelungen, with a roster of the era's most distinguished Wagner singers--several of them artists well-known to the composer himself--leading the cast. It must have sounded thrilling, but we have, alas, little direct evidence of that. With few exceptions, the voices of those great Wagnerians have been lost to posterity, although the formidable Lilli Lehmann made a number of recordings, still potent despite their primitive sonics, some twenty seasons after she won glory with her first Met Brunnhilde.

By the time the Metropolitan Opera's other great Lehmann, the peerless Lotte, made her company debut, in 1934, Met Wagner performances had begun to reach new audiences via the medium of radio. Lotte Lehmann's Sieglinde reached a national U.S. radio audience in the 1930s, as did Leider's Brunnhilde, Schorr's Wotan and the triumphant company debut of Kirsten Flagstad--presented by a variety of sponsors that included Lucky Strikes, Listerine and RCA.

In 1940, sponsorship for the Met broadcasts was taken up by the Texas Company, manufacturers of Texaco petroleum products, and there it remained, for more than sixty years, as the airwaves carried the Brunnhildes of Flagstad, Traubel and Nilsson; the Sieglindes of Varnay, Rysanek and Crespin; the Siegmund of Vickers; the Siegfried of Melchior; the Wotans of London, Hotter and Edelmann. That run of sponsorship will be broken, of course, when this season's Met Chevron Texaco broadcasts come to an end, on ...