Walter Legge - Musical Legacy

Musical Legacy

Legge's artistic judgment was sometimes questioned. He was aesthetically conservative; he wrote to a friend, "If producers and scenic designers are allowed to continue their writing of graffiti and vulgarity and stupidity on masterpieces … not to mention Chéreau at Bayreuth – we shall be forced to insist that they write the libretto and music to match the rubbish they put on the stage!" Legge predicted to John Culshaw and Georg Solti that their Decca recording of Das Rheingold would not sell; it became a classical best-seller. He was responsible for three recordings of The Magic Flute, conducted by Beecham, Karajan and Klemperer, each of which has incurred the disapproval of critics for omitting the spoken dialogue. His recording of Fidelio under Klemperer has been compared unfavourably with Klemperer's contemporaneous live recording from Covent Garden, on the grounds that Legge's chosen singers were less effective than their ROH rivals. He was suspicious of stereo recording, and resisted it for as long as he could.

Nevertheless Legge's legacy is "a vast number of outstanding recordings that set standards unlikely ever to be surpassed". His recordings of The Dream of Gerontius (Sargent), Tristan und Isolde (Furtwängler), Tosca (De Sabata), Der Rosenkavalier and Falstaff (Karajan), Così fan tutte (Böhm) and the core German symphonic repertory (Klemperer) have remained in the catalogue for decades, first on LP and then on CD.