Pinza is in representative form on the ’42 transmission. His unique joining of full-voice masculine thrust with a seductive, tensile mezza-voce, his musical quickness and dramatic alertness, anchors this performance as it did so many others. However, if you can tolerate the  sound quality and want to hear Pinza at his very peak, the Salzburg performance is a must. ^(I) Four years earlier and under festival rather than repertory conditions, the voice has more freshness and brilliance; the soft singing an even more magical float; the Champagne Aria, taken at his usual headlong clip, more precision; and the partnering with Lazzari greater deftness.

The remainder of this cast—save for Baccaloni with the preponderance of Leporellos, Richard Crooks or James Melton for an occasional Ottavio, and Nicola Moscona as a frequent Commendatore—held together through the early 1940s at the Met. Among the female principals, what stands out to me upon rehearing is not that they are vocally or interpretively  superior to all others (though that could well be said of Bidù Sayão, perfectly mated with the role of Zerlina), but that they are constantly in search of an emotional commitment conveyed through the voice by direct, temperamental means. They play the manifest content of their scenes and arias, their singing uncomplicated by thoughtful-sounding choices or anyone’s ideas of subtext. So we find ourselves accompanying them on their journeys rather than thinking about meaning. Rose Bampton, then recently converted from the contralto persuasion, isn’t a major dramatic soprano of the kind Met audiences were used to as Anna (e.g., Ponselle, Rethberg, Milanov), but the freshness and ductility of her upper voice and the considerable body of her midrange hang together well enough to enable a persuasive traversal of her demanding music. The beauteous Czech soprano Jarmila Novotnà, often a Cherubino and Octavian but a Violetta, too, has a vulnerable, lovable quality but a characteristic pungency as well, rather like that of my favorite postwar Elvira, Sena Jurinac, and quite unlike either of her other famous successors Della Casa and Schwarzkopf. Regrettably, she is deprived of “Mi tradì,” per Met custom of the time. (It’s in the Salzburg version, where it’s sung by Luise Helletsgruber. She’s also on the Glyndebourne recording, so I’ll reserve comment for the next post.) Sayão’s Zerlina I would describe as placing extremely sophisticated interpretive gifts in the service of simplicity, and note that this lyric-leggiera voice has a firm, musical chest register available at the bottom, and at the end of “Batti, batti,” bravura flourishes almost like Patti’s at the top.

The other three men—Charles Kullman as Ottavio, Mack Harrell as Masetto, and Norman Cordon as the Commendatore—are all Americans, though in Kullman’s case, an American with substantial European experience before his arrival at the Metropolitan. He has an overfondness for droopy downward portamentos (not uncommon then), is guilty of the occasional diphthongized vowel, and undertakes no McCormack-like feats of breath sustainment in “Il mio tesoro.” (Neither, in fact, does Salzburg’s stylish Ottavio, Dino Borgioli—in fact, his phrasing, in the slowest version of the aria I know of, is almost identical.) But Kullman is in far fresher form here than when I heard him in the part a few years later. He has the dynamics under good control, and I find the color and sturdiness of his strong lyric tenor welcome. Harrell, a distinguished recital and concert singer and, some thirteen years down the road, the first Olin Blitch in Floyd’s Susannah, is a lively Masetto. Of Cordon’s Commandant, I’ll have a few words in a moment.