One very honest man was the conductor for this Lohengrin, James Sullivan. He was also the director of Arizona Opera and he was a much better conductor than he got credit for. We were staging my part with Sullivan there and the great stage director, Jerry Siena, who had been a fine tenor at NY City Opera. I was singing as we were staging when Sullivan stopped me for a minute and said to me, in a sort of quiet way, "You have it all Joe. Take Milnes. He has this big voice but not much color. To me, your voice has the size like his but it has so many colors in it." Time stood still for a couple of seconds and then Siena said, "Let's get back to work." I appreciated Sullivan honest appraisal to me. A lot of people were not telling me the honest truth because they didn't like it.

Such a thrilling Scene!

This is spectacular. I wish I had this recording to reference when I worked on this scene with Jane Eaglen a few years ago! Thank you for sharing and BRAVO.

"a pool of astonishingly black, angry despair", !! i would have liked to see that!!

There are a lot of stories about this production. It was the Arizona Opera Orchestra first Wagner and they played louder than god! Regional orchestras always play louder than the Met or San Francisco. The King Henry for this cast was Dr. Richard T Gill who had been an economist at Harvard before he discovered he could sing opera. He was a big star and the Met and other houses. He had a very big voice but he was used to those great acoustics at the Met. In Tucson he found it impossible to sing over that orchestra. He brought the conductor to him in a tizzy and said to him, "If you don't bring that orchestra down in volume for my aria (Mein Herr und Gott) I am going to walk off the stage and refuse to sing the rest of the opera. If he had an understudy he would have gotten fired for that. But he didn't and the conductor held back the orchestra and he was able to sing over it.