Once more saving further comment on the singers for the coda, let’s take a look (and here we can, for we have a video) at the Naples performance, five years farther along. Tebaldi is still with us from Florence, and so is Renato Capecchi, the Melitone. She has gotten things more under control—even the numerous sustained high Bs, always a little chancey for her, are more consistent—and she has a less excitable conductor to work with. That would be Francesco Molinari-Pradelli, who was rather a drag on many a live and recorded performance in the ’50s and ’60s, but is here actually almost pert, and certainly knows how the piece goes. The rest of her colleagues are new: Corelli instead of Del Monaco, Ettore Bastianini as Carlo in place of Aldo Protti, Boris Christoff for Siepi, and as Preziosilla, Oralia Dominguez for Fedora Barbieri. There’s been an exchange of qualities, of preferences, but no loss of grand-opera stature. And of course we’re seeing these people. That raises all the considerations attached to physical acting and production, as conveyed in washed-out black and white (couldn’t it now be enhanced?) and the TV technical capacities of the day. I’m going to pass them by to keep focus on the singing, just noting that while of course a good deal of this can’t help looking quaint, in general I was impressed this time around by how well these video-pioneering performers hold up under inspection—often better, for instance, than the Maryinsky team manages forty years on.

With Tebaldi, Del Monaco, and Capecchi making two appearances each, we have here about two and a half outstanding Forza casts in the postwar 7-7.5 ranking range. While that’s enviable from our current perspective, two and a half is still not enough to mount, say, four simultaneous productions at that level somewhere in the world, which is what I’m claiming for the 1950-65 timeframe. So let me take this character by character, and open it out from these three casts, concluding with a glance at the 1975 RCA Victor recording that prompted this discussion.

Leonora:

• This was one of Milanov’s best roles, and she’s far better heard here than on the 1958 RCA version, fresher and firmer of voice, and live. The tone big and creamy, the line sinuous, the high Bs on the button and strong.
• Americans familiar with Tebaldi’s early recordings (including me) were surprised by the size of her voice when first hearing her live. Her first Mimí, Butterfly, Tosca, Violetta, Desdemona, and Aïda recordings in the early ’50s disclosed the melting warmth and seductive guidance of her voice, but only hinted at its power. And indeed she considered herself (correctly, I believe) a lyrico-spinto, not a dramatic soprano. Yet here she is in arguably the heaviest of all Verdi roles, which she sang repeatedly. I’ve never heard her expend her voice so fearlessly, even heedlessly, as she does in the Mitropoulos performance; at moments it’s scary. But in both these renditions, she reveals the direct, highly personal emotional communicativeness she managed to always project through her traditional prima donna persona.
• The third no-brainer casting choice among ’50s-early ’60s Leonoras is Callas. She sang only a handful of performances in the role, all early on, but is on one of those four studio versions, in close to peak form. I doubt that I have to validate her case for inclusion. No. 4? Anita Cerquetti—her studio Gioconda and aria recital (on Decca/London) should persuade you, but also try to hear the live 1957 Ernani, also from the Maggio, also under Mitropoulos. No. 5? We could say Antonietta Stella (her DG Trovatore and Ballo will give you an idea), or Leonie Rysanek, or Eileen Farrell, or Régine Crespin. If we stretch to 1971 (just at my Forza cutoff point) and a Romanian recording that never got much circulation here in the USA, we’ll find Maria Nistor-Slatinaru, otherwise unknown to me, singing with an ample, beautiful voice and distinguished style. This doesn’t mean that all these sopranos were equally suited to the part, equally interesting interpretively, or even that all of them sang the role. It means that all of them were fully capable of it without lowering qualifications too far. Of course, as we get into the early ’60s, we meet Leontyne Price. She’s in many ways every bit as good, or better, than some of the sopranos I’ve listed, and those were her prime years. See below.

Alvaro: 

• Del Monaco is in prodigious form on both the 1953 performances. He burns a bit hotter with Mitropoulos, but doesn’t get to the napes of our necks with his high B at “L’oblio, la pace chiegga il guerrier” as he does in New Orleans, since there’s no “Sleale!“
• Corelli, in youthful plenitude, brings the most complete equipment to this role of any singer since Martinelli—a more beautiful and malleable voice, in fact, though nothing like Martinelli’s purity of style. I often placed myself in the position of defending his lacrymose excesses in exchange for his greatvoiced feats, but here he blubbers his way through “Solenne in quest’ora” in a manner I can’t find excuses for. Still, he does so with jawdropping decrescendos on the high As. He did not record this role commercially, though the aria and all the tenor/baritone duets (with Giangiacomo Guelfi) were on a Cetra LP, and are doubtless circulating somewhere.
• Alvaro # 3: Richard Tucker, who sang the premiere of that 1952 Met production and many subsequent repetitions, and was extremely effective in the part. He made two studio recordings of it, but neither EMI/Angel nor RCA Victor quite caught the warmth and ring of this voice (American Columbia, for whom he recorded in the first half of his career, came closer).  Look for one of the Met broadcasts. No. 4: Carlo Bergonzi. The disobedient Alvaro of Sam Wanamaker’s 1962 Covent Garden production. Not quite the sheer calibre of a Del Monaco or Corelli, nor the meaty acuti of Tucker, but of the four the most stylish and tasteful, with the surest command of legato line and dynamic shading. No. 5? Flaviano Labò. Don’t believe me? He recorded the aria on a recital disc. If that isn’t enough, forward again to 1971 and search out the  complete live performance (still without the “Sleale!“) from Fidenza. For sheer vocal chops, no contemporary tenor achieves that level. I saw him as Alvaro, and will vouch for that. Other tenors who were legitimate candidates for this part were Bruno Prevedi and, for a short time, Gino Penno.

Carlo:

• Bastianini had exactly the snarly timbre and thrust we think of as apt for this role, and in the duets and cabaletta of the aria, he’s exciting. The Naples video also shows him lively and alert in the byplay of the Inn Scene. However, there was a lack of pliancy and control of dynamics in his singing that made him most successful in a part like Gérard (Andrea Chénier). In any Verdi baritone role, there comes a point—usually a key point—where suavity of phrase and grading of volume around the passaggio, ideally always available, become absolutely requisite to fulfillment of the music. When the baritone is the antagonist, this occurs when the character is allowed to reveal a capacity for love (Di Luna’s “Il balen“) or reform and forgiveness (Carlo Quinto’s “O de’ verd’anni” and “O sommo Carlo“), or, in Forza, a commitment to honor (“Urna fatale“). It’s in the expression of such moments that Leonard Warren reigned supreme, and that is so here. Warren wasn’t Italian, and his voice’s technical structure represents a departure from all previous understandings of that voice type—part of a general technical shift I examine at some length in my any-day-now book, Opera as Opera. But there is a strong case for him as the greatest of postwar Verdi baritones, and this Carlo is fully in line with that judgment.
• Aldo Protti (Florence), despite a voice that earned him a significant career (here he is near its beginning, at the Maggio in glittery company) always had several baritones ahead of him in professional standing and critical favor. The voice is strong and reliable, never in audible trouble. It’s just that there seldom anything aesthetically striking or dramatically imaginative in his singing, and his treatment of the line tends to choppiness. And, Bastianini and Warren aside, he had, internationally speaking, a swarm of competitors. At the beginning of the ’50s, Gino Bechi and Tagliabue remained active, and Tito Gobbi would still have undertaken the part. Paolo Silveri and Giuseppe Taddei were thriving; coming right along were Guelfi, Rolando Panerai, Anselmo Colzani, Kostas Paskalis, Mario Zanasi, Peter Glossop, Nicolae Herlea (he’s on that Romanian performance), and Mario Sereni. At the Met, Robert Merrill was entrenched along with Warren, who was succeeded by Cornell MacNeil. As with the Leonoras, this represents a wide range of qualities and capabilities, but the least among all these—your sixth or seventh choice—was a plausible Carlo in the context of that time, and choice No. 1 or 2 in ours.

Padre Guardiano:

• If you listen to the New Orleans performance, Wildermann may take you aback. He recorded next to nothing, and at the Met attained not much above house bass status—Ferrandos, Sparafuciles, a few Dalands, etc. That’s because season after season, he had Siepi, Giorgio Tozzi, and Jerome Hines ahead of him; then along came Ghiaurov. But in this performance, you’ll hear a large, rolling bass with a touch of quiver reminiscent of Pasero or early Pinza; untroubled emission; and fine low Fs to rival Siepi’s or Christoff’s. Siepi had the finest, most complete Italian bass voice after P&P, and this was a congenial role for him. Christoff’s throaty buzz has always bothered me in his singing of Italian music (“Naw,” he answers, when Leonora asks him if he trembles at her name, with that sound of tobacco juice trickling over gravel), but once he gets going he’s rock solid. Besides Siepi, Tozzi, Hines, Wildermann, and Christoff, there were Nicola Rossi-Lemeni, who rather misplaced the core of his sound after a brilliant start but remained an interesting, highly theatrical interpreter, and the black-voiced Giulio Neri, perhaps more intimidating than comforting (suited to Wanamaker’s view on gentlemen of the cloth?),  but pre-emptively present. By the ’60s we had Ghiaurov, iconic of presence and voice.

Tallying up, and allowing for comings and goings and overlappings, we’ve reached overkill on my goal of four complete Forza casts of first-rate principals, available anytime between 1950 and 1965. “Available,” of course, doesn’t mean regularly realized, but it indicates a standing potential that told us this spellbinding work held promise of fulfillment, and that we could usually count on two or three of its roles being well taken. We have still to account, however, for those troublesome but important characters, Preziosilla and Melitone. Few opera companies are in a position to commit their leading dramatic mezzo or their first-choice Carmen to the former, or a second high-quality, high-fee baritone to the latter, and because these are personality roles, many vocally qualified artists don’t really fill the bill. I doubt, for instance, that as a matter of physicality and temperament, we would have wanted to see Ebe Stignani, or even Giulietta Simionato, as Preziosilla, though the former sings it superbly, and the latter pretty well, as star casting on their recordings. These problems notwithstanding, Preziosilla fares quite well on our ’50s live performances. Barbieri, bashing about with her big, bright Azucena/Amneris sound, paints a vivid, splashy picture of a nervy, sly, vulgar, yet cheery sort the boys would be happy to run off to Italy with. On the Naples video, Oralia Dominguez, a Mexican singer with all the attributes of a major dramatic mezzo except for filled-out acuti, and enough florid technique to handle Rossini roles, performs with great spirit. New Orleans secured Claramae Turner, Toscanini’s Ulrica and a New York City Opera stalwart. She’s not in the Stignani/Barbieri/Simionato Major Mezzo sphere, but she copes more than respectably with this weirdly shaped version of the part, and—recalling her Carmen and La Frugola—I’m sure she brought it off. Christa Ludwig sang this part in Chicago, but to my knowledge left no traces. Miriam Pirazzini, a solid dramatic mezzo of contralto-ish hue, was the Preziosilla of the first ’50s “complete” recording, one of those with which a secondary label (Urania) won the first-to-market race in the early-LP days. One could do a lot worse.