After hearing these two postwar interpretations, recorded just two years apart, I was eager to get back to the point of origin. I made brief stops with the young Cigna—also vibrating fiercely, but in the context of a much bigger instrument, and emotionalizing quite overtly in “Poveri fiori“—and with the expectably captivating Muzio, but my aim was at the sopranos of the Milan and New York premieres, both of whom recorded the first aria, and the most prominent of their verista  contemporaries, Eugenia Burzio, who recorded both. In truth, there is not a lot to remark on with the premiere sopranos, save perhaps to note that as with all the others mentioned, they possess defined, clear, musical chest voices, and that their vowel profiles are more like Olivero’s than Tebaldi’s. Pandolfini, the creatrix, offers a straightforward, well-proportioned interpretation in what sounds like a bright, medium-sized voice, again strongly vibrated, but firm. The beauteous Cavalieri, who had worked her way up into opera from café-concert beginnings, shows a clear, light voice that blooms very prettily toward the top, and a way with the phrasing that is certainly musical, but possessed of no particular insight. She offers one variant at the end (“che al nuovo dì“), staying on the lower F rather than taking the optional first of the two upward octave glissandos.

Burzio is quite another matter. Her recordings have always been items of controversy among collectors, at least of the Anglo-American strain. “Too much,” “Over the top,” or simply “Tasteless” are among the commonly heard reactions, along with attributions of faulty technique. I’m not entirely in disagreement. Some of her recordings can give the impression of a singer whose chief artistic goal is to arrive at a condition of emotional breakdown as early and often as possible. But I am more interested in the distance between her aesthetic world and ours, and in how that might bear on Adriana and Adriana. To go from Netrebko back to Burzio is to travel between planes of reality. Burzio’s first utterance on her Adriana records, “Ecco, respiro appena,” is enough to define the distance: the vowels are even more open than Olivero’s (but minus the intrusive vibrato), the tone almost prepubescent, and as she makes her way through the opening phrases—indeed, whenever she sings at anything less than a piena voce in the fourth above the passaggio—we might think we’re hearing a bit of Toti dal Monte’s traversal of Cio-cio-san. Yet as the voice moves higher and takes on greater intensity, or dips down into its nether regions, it’s obvious that it is no lyric-coloratura, for there is ample strength, body, and bite in the tone, and darkness when needed.

Burzio was in fact a dramatic soprano. Sergei Levik, in his indispensable memoir, terms her voice “enormous,” and rates it as (with Félia Litvinne always apart) one of the three most striking soprano voices he had ever heard. (He heard many.) ^(I) Burzio’s use of this almost white, childlike coloration in the lower head register is in part an extreme instance of an adjustment many Italian sopranos used to express a girlish innocence (listen to Lucrezia Bori, a strong lyric, or Amelita Galli-Curci, a coloratura, for simpler, “purer” versions of it). But it’s also a technical usage, and whether one cares for it or not, as such it has the virtue of requiring no vowel modification or positional “flip” as she moves in and out of her clear, vibrant chest range.