Settling in to do my listening for this week’s entry, I jotted down some impressions from the first scene of our “problem opera,” one of a number that’s now on the verge of being a problem no more (see last post). Of the Leonora, Zinka Milanov, I noted the presence of an easy, natural-sounding chest voice on even casual low phrases of the opening recitative (the D naturals at “decidermi non so” and “scendevanmi“), enabling these syllables to drop out into the auditorium, at once present yet conversational. I doubt I would have given this a thought in the seasons when I actually saw her in the role; I would have taken it for granted. Then, as the wonderful ensuing aria, “Me pellegrina ed orfana,” wound its way, I made sure to mark how the voice shaped the line on a cushioned messa di voce, from which her seemingly instinctive accenting emerged without fuss, and which led the arcs of phrases, and finally of the whole aria, to their destinations—”this,” I wrote, “in addition to the beautiful quality, here at peak.” Of her Alvaro, Mario del Monaco, I observed that the “darkling, bronzed timbre” (a brooding, rim-of-the-volcano quality especially apt for this role, as for Otello), was “at its freshest & best.” Then I also scribbled: “The faults of ea. we used to complain about.” I wasn’t writing about Milanov’s studio recording of Forza (RCA Victor, 1958), or Del Monaco’s either (Decca/London, 1955), or of a hot night at the Met or La Scala or a summer festival, but of a composite of two evenings in the March of 1953, in New Orleans (VAIA 1252-3, issued in 2005).

This Big Easy Forza is one of three live performances from the ’50s I decided to focus on as I try to memorialize this season’s Met production that wasn’t, and summon something of the impact the work once had with reasonable regularity. Another is the video (also released as audio-only) of a March, 1958 performance at the San Carlo in Naples. There, the Leonora was Renata Tebaldi and the Alvaro was Franco Corelli. The third (audio only) is from May, 1953 at the Maggio Musicale in Florence, and has Tebaldi and Del Monaco together, as they often were in those years.

When the San Carlo video was pulled from the RAI archives in 1994, Will Crutchfield wrote about it in the New York Times. It’s the sort of piece that, in its willingness to assume of its readers a thirst for, or at least a tolerance of, expert evaluation, has vanished from our mainstream press as surely as the level of performance it describes has vanished from our opera houses. ^(I) As I did with my “faults of ea.” notation, Will concedes early on the reservations one must have about the performance if one is applying the highest standard. They are not insignificant. But then he goes on: “If you’re over 50 [remember, this is 1994] and think you might be romanticizing your memories; if you’re young and think the old-timers are just trying to intimidate you with their stories . . . and, especially, if the beauty of the human voice means a lot to you—get the video.” And later: “[watching it] . . . is likely to blow away the optimism we all try to feel about Verdian singers doing pretty well after all these days . . . ” (The complete article is accessible at http://www.nytimes/1994 , and well worth a scan.)

A while back a tenor friend of mine, Richard Slade, handed me a CD album he’d picked up at a library sale or flea market. “This,” he announced, “is where everything started to go wrong. You want it? It doesn’t need to live in my house.” Since I’d never heard the particular performance, I said “Sure,” and stuck it on a shelf in my house. The performance was the 1976 RCA Victor studio recording of La Forza del destino. The cast: Mmes. L. Price and Cossotto; Messrs. Domingo, Milnes, Giaiotti, and Bacquier, all in good-to-excellent form. The conductor: James Levine, still young and noted for whipping up a batch of Verdi. “If that lineup was around today,” I hear you say, “I’d snatch up a ticket quick.” Well, me too.

Here in New York, we were supposed to get Forza this year. It was scheduled for the current Metropolitan season, to be directed by the controversial Calixto Bieito in his local debut, and conducted by the selfsame Levine, young no longer. But the Forza della borsa turned out to be stronger than that of destino, and the production was cancelled. ^(I)  I’ve been wondering if we shall ever again have Forza, and if so what on earth it will look and sound like. It’s my personal model for what we can’t do any more, though I could well have chosen any of the bigger Verdi pieces, or anything at all of Wagner. But Forza has been my test case since the early 1970s, when I began asking myself if, given my pick from the international pool of singers at or near their vocal primes, two casts could be assembled that would satisfy the work’s basic requirements according to standards that had prevailed fairly recently—in the 1950s, let us say—and had to answer “No.”

Among the basic requirements for La Forza del destino—by which I mean things that are just basic, absolutely required in order to jump the lowest hurdles—the first must be visceral impact. This doesn’t come of sheer loudness, of course. Tonal quality, musical shapeliness, interpretive nuance, and soulfulness must be present in some acceptable portion, onstage and in the pit. But all these will fall short without the straight-from-the-gut energies of heavy-calibre voices in high-functioning condition. Of Verdi’s operas that present the core narrative of 19th-Century opera, that of a protagonist couple seeking the social position of which they are deprived, several (Otello, Don Carlo, Aïda) should probably be rated as artistically superior to Forza. But among those that offer it in naked form (Ernani and Il Trovatore would be the others), it is at once the most artistically mature and the most savage. And its epic embrace, with its story of doomed love and implacable vengeance playing out over long stretches of time and distance and amid vividly set scenes of warfare’s desolations, the survival mechanisms of the common people, and the beneficence of religious refuge, is unique in Verdi’s output.