Bayreuth was one of the first opera houses to embrace the idea of in-situ recording with the first engineers arriving in town to capture snippets as early as 1906. Complete operas can be heard from the festival’s 1951 reopening onwards, many of them still top choices as well as important historical documents from a golden age of Wagner singing.

Birgit Nilsson and Wolfgang Windgassen rehearse Tristan with Wieland Wagner, 1962. Photo supplied

Decca Eloquence’s latest 25-CD box contains several of those key live recordings with opportunities to hear the leading artists of the day, often in slightly different combinations than you’ll find on studio recordings of the same vintage.

Conductors like Hans Knappertsbusch, Josef Keilberth, Wolfgang Sawallisch and Karl Böhm mean that many of these readings are self-recommending, as does the presence of singers like George London, Martha Mödl, Wolfgang Windgassen, Astrid Varnay, Birgit Nilsson and Christa Ludwig.

Wieland Wagner’s radical approach to staging his grandfather’s work and a focus on ensemble performance brings a very special quality to recordings where you really do sense that everyone is singing from the same hymn sheet. There’s no Ring Cycle here –...