Hermann Abendroth
Erb continued to sing the "Matthew Passion" Evangelist yearly at Amsterdam for Willem Mengelberg, and in the course of thirty years sang it some 360 times, in most major German town and cities, and in Zürich, Berne, Basel, Lucerne, Solothurn, Lausanne, Milan and Brussels, under Bruno Walter, William Mengelberg, Hermann Suter, Fritz Busch, Hermann Abendroth, Alfred Sittard, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Karl Straube and Eugen Papst. With the passage of decades his interpretation grew and was increasingly called authoritative. He sang it throughout the second war, and after, in Germany: a 1940 reviewer described his Cologne cathedral performance as an 'unfassbaren, übermenschlichen, unirdisch wirklichen Vollendung' ("an inconceivable, more-than-human, supernally real perfection").