Richard Caniell, producer of the ever-recommendable Immortal Performances label, writes to point out that on that company’s restoration of the 1941 Met broadcast (with Stevens in her role debut, René Maison as Samson, the young Leonard Warren as the High Priest, Norman Cordon and Nicola Moscona as Abimélech and the Old Hebrew; Wilfrid Pelletier, cond.), the splendid performance of a substantial stretch of Act 2 with the exciting Cézar Vezzani (who recorded the Mill Scene, too) and the good French contralto Marie Dûchene is included as a bonus. So, if one has on hand that package plus the 1946 Columbia complete recording, one has among Maison, Luccioni, and Vezzani a fair sampling of the French-culture dramatic tenors that made the role of Samson work during the interwar years.

Finally, Will Crutchfield was kind enough to forward clips of four Louise Homer recordings of  “Mon coeur s’ouvre à ta voix” recorded between 1903 and 1928, all additional to the one I cited in my article, which dates from 1909. All versions are of a single verse only, ending with some version of the “concert ending” line purloined from the tenor role. There are interesting variations among these, including different treatments of that ending, and of course the impression of the voice as conveyed by an early acoustical take through later acoustical versions and on into the electrical era changes, too. But what is notable are the things that remain consistent: the steadiness of the sizable tone, general purity and openness of vowel formation, the command of a clean and well-knit line, and (the thing I was primarily calling attention to), the mastery of registral blending as the voice dips down to the lowest notes and winds its way back up. All that doesn’t get much better in a contralto voice.

Please bear in mind, dear readers, that none of these biweekly articles—not even the deceptively comprehensive-looking three-part Chaliapin survey—can come close to exhausting its topic. In the Samson piece, for instance, I could have reported that in the Met production the fall of the temple was the feeblest representation I’d ever seen (just the widening of a crack and a light cue, the merest of gestures), meaning that, taken with the undersung, dramatically slack ending of Act 1and the avoidance of coming to grips with Samson’s hair malfunction and blinding at the close of Act 2, all three acts of an opera pointedly constructed toward these happenings wound up as Shaggy Dog tales (for those of you who remember such).

I intended, too, to say something about “Printemps qui commence” as an evocation of the ancient fear of the sound of the female singing voice as irresistible lure to male downfall (see the post of Nov. 9, 2018 on The Queen of Sheba and the Lockruf), and why, apart from its lack of presence in the theatre, Rachvelishvili’s singing of it could not conceivably fulfill that function—it was stripped of the sensuality so clearly written into it. And I meant to point out how the quick little downward portamento that Stokowski puts into the first interval of the strings’ repeated falling figure in the introduction to the Mill Scene achieve an atmospheric effect I don’t remember hearing before. I could have described all the performances in greater detail, and gone more deeply into the discographic  materials. Except that I couldn’t; there simply wasn’t time. Which is why I hope you will accept what may at times be frustrating omissions, and hope further that you will continue to send along your notes of emendation.

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I’d like to conclude with a few thoughts—reminders to myself, I’d call them—that have lingered since my symposium conversation with Dean Bronstein. They’re elaborated on in Opera as Opera, and pop up in one form or another here with some frequency. But sometimes it’s worth pulling back from the specifics to frame things again in more general terms.