All true. But: these were heavy-calibre grand opera singers! Their voices commanded the largest auditoriums, even at less than full volume! Their strong, large-framed bodies dominated the stage space through sheer presence, magnified by unshakable egos and competitive ferocity! I must insist that if you are under 65, you may have heard a big voice or three (a Dimitrova, a Zajick, a Pape or Furlanetto, perhaps an Atlantov or Obrazstova when you and they were a lot younger), but unless you happened on late-time Vickers on a good night in a compatible role, you have not heard the like of this Forza quartet in live circumstances—certainly not in each other’s company.  I’m sure you can sense this if you listen to this performance in dedicated time. But the recording’s sensory impact, though considerable, cannot duplicate that of the real-time, real-space event!

I’ll talk more about the virtues of the New Orleans visitors below. First, to our second live Forza, just two months later, in Florence. This occasion was out of the ordinary, even at the time, on two counts: Renata Tebaldi was singing her first Leonora, and Dmitri Mitropoulos was in the pit. In my experience of Mitropoulos as an opera conductor, he could usually be counted on for some excitement, but tended to drive tempi over the edge. And in eliciting towering waves of sound from the Met orchestra, he could send singers under for the third time (there are phrases from Albanese and Bjoerling in Manon Lescaut that are still sending up bubbles). The Maggio Musicale’s orchestra (Florence’s resident band), wasn’t quite a top-of-the-line ensemble, but it was a solid, experienced Italian opera orchestra, and when a major conductor came in for the Maggio, it could respond. And Holy Smoke! By the time the first scene is over, neither we nor the singers have caught a breath. The “Me pellegrina” is given its melancholy, expansive space, but from the sound of Alvaro’s horses’ hoofbeats to the end of the scene, there’s no let-up in the building tension. The drama peaks, then peaks again. This seems to suit Tebaldi and Del Monaco just fine. Her voice has some uncharacteristic flutter, as yours would, too, if you were singing your first Leonora under this guy, but she’s right with him with big, vital tone and sharp dramatic reactions. Del Monaco, whose propensity was always to press ahead, ready or not there in the pit, revels in meeting his match. At a couple of points in Alvaro’s music where we usually time a little take and proceed in more orderly fashion for a bar or two (to Leonora: “Pronti destrieri,” etc.; to the Marchese: “Pura siccome un angelo,” etc.), it’s hard to tell who, the tenor or the conductor, has decided to dispense with such shilly-shallying, but either way, there’s complete agreement about it.

By no means are all of Mitropoulos’ tempi faster than normal, and by no means are subtleties of accent passed over. In the overture, the violins’ swell-and-diminish into the fifth bar of the “Fate” theme receives exactly the right little nudge, as does the accented pulse of the woodwinds in the introduction to “Madre, pietosa Vergine.” Later in the overture, the brass entrance with Guardiano’s “A te sia gloria” theme (letter J, if you have a full score) has the mellow solemnity Verdi wanted, followed by gentle but insistent accents. At the big tutti recapitulation of the rising phrases taken from Leonora’s “Non mi lasciar, soccorrimi,” where for some reason many conductors treat the following hammered chords with a stringendo rather than the ritardando grandioso that is marked (just before Letter N), Mitropoulos brings us to an emphatic, suspenseful stop. In the Convent Scene, where both Tebaldi’s voluminous warmth and Cesare Siepi’s plush, shaded bass glory in opening out, there is a supple, rubatoed pacing (Siepi always loving to linger—fortunately, he and Del Monaco don’t meet till the final trio), and a magical settlement at the close. The genre numbers of Act 3 have an uplift, a vitality that makes the whole sequence into a brilliant little entertainment. Throughout, instrumental gestures always have a defined shape, an intent. That’s something that’s also true of the very different Walter reading with the Met, but we don’t always get these things—it takes a true theatre conductor in charge of a true theatre orchestra. This isn’t always the neatest of performances, but it’s a wonderful one.