The latest on “Opera as Opera”: We are promised a shipping date of July 16. Full info on ordering, including pre-orders, will be posted here and on the “Opera as Opera” page of my website within a few days. 

I recently laid out a pocketful of change for the DVDs of the Dec., 2011 performance of Don Giovanni at La Scala. I intended it mostly as catch-up listening/viewing on Anna Netrebko, in connection with my reactions to her Tosca (see my post of May 25), but didn’t get around to it. I also hadn’t listened yet to an older purchase, the Naxos Immortal Performances CD restoration of the March, 1942 broadcast of D.G. from the Metropolitan, the LPs of which I’d first heard upon their first release on Eddie Smith’s Golden Age of Opera label in the late ’50s, and had referred to periodically ever since. And I decided that, with D.G. on the mind, I would indulge a curiosity about the 2016 studio version emanating from the P. I. Tchaikovsky Opera and Ballet Theatre of Perm, the final installment of that company’s recorded Mozart/Da Ponte cycle.

Knowing that, whatever they might contain, the 2010s representations would give views of the work radically different from that of the Met in the 1940s, I thought about the experience of a young person coming to this Top Ten opera now in contrast with my own early familiarization with it, conditioned by Met performances similar to the 1942 airing and by the only complete recording then in existence, a studio version on 23 78-rpm discs in three volumes, based on the 1936 Glyndebourne Festival production. And having learned by now that my style of thinking and writing is insufficiently Hemingwayesque to explore these examples in a single post, I’ve decided on a two-part article, with the Met and La Scala up for consideration today, Glyndebourne and Perm two weeks hence. It’ll be a trip, I’m sure, but possibly a trip without a destination, because that is in the nature of the times.

The Met performance is conducted by Bruno Walter and stars Ezio Pinza—a collaboration quite worth a few words of its own. They were close in many ways. They first worked together at the 1934 Salzburg Festival, Walter already long established as one of Europe’s most important symphonic and operatic conductors, and Pinza as the Metropolitan’s leading basso. (It had been for him, in fact, that Gatti-Casazza, burned at the box office by previous Mozart projects, had restored Don Giovanni to the repertory in 1929 after a 21-year absence. And it was because of Pinza’s vocal and personal magnetism that the Don—and later Figaro—became for many years the property of basses and bass-baritones, rather than of baritones.) Walter worked with Pinza to reconfigure his portrayal of the Don, nudging him toward the the embodiment of “a magnetic rogue,” rather than a ” conquering male.” ^(I) After the big success of the 1934 production, D.G. stayed in the Salzburg repertory, with Walter always the conductor and Pinza the Don, except for one season, when Mariano Stabile took the role. (A recording of the 1937 revival survives, though barely; we may take a sideways glance at it, too.) In Bruno Walter, Pinza felt he had found a conductor worthy of the respect he had held for Toscanini—”but neither distant nor harsh”. Moreover, Pinza and Walter’s younger daughter, Greta, both in much-deteriorated marriages, fell in love and appeared headed for a marriage of their own, very much with Walter’s blessing. Then Greta was shot by her husband in a murder/suicide. The bond between conductor and his could-have-been son-in-law remained strong till Pinza’s death in 1957.