And so to a brief excursion to fin de siècle Connoisseurland. My home base for this tour will be the 3-CD Marston set Meyerbeer on Record, Vol. 1, supplemented by other items in my collection. (I’ll mark the Marston selections with an “M”—most have, of course, appeared in many re-issues since their original release dates.) My aim here is not discographic. I’m only calling attention to a few items I believe tell us something we won’t hear from latterday singers, and that may hold clues to the onetime popularity of the work in question.

I grew up on Caruso’s recording of the Act 1 romance (on Naxos, but restored and transferred by Marston—the 1909 version with viola, not the 1904 with piano; both are in Italian), and still find it incomparable for its combination of rich tone, velvet at lower dynamics and golden at louder ones, with complete mastery of the music’s line. A properly prized version is Fernando de Lucia’s, which perhaps sets the rapt atmosphere the best of any. It is late for de Lucia (1917), and he sings it a full tone down, in A-flat. (Caruso, like the superb Dmitri Smirnoff and others, sings it in A, the key it is printed in in my Italian-language score.) De Lucia’s top was short from an early time, which would seem to rule out the role for him (and he never sang it), unless we read Shaw’s observations of 1891about the loss of brilliance entailed by Jean de Reszke’s many downward transpositions, which necessitated the basses mumbling in the depths in the Duel Septet. I regret not having the version of the great Russian dramatic tenor Yershov at hand—I recall it as comparable to Caruso’s. A couple of rarities presented by Marston are the rendition of Raoul’s entrance by Mario Corpait, exemplary in establishing  a sense of importance in every phrase and pause, and that of the romance in French and in the original key of B-flat by Georges Granal, a dramatic tenor I became familiar with only recently while researching La Juive materials. He offers no special insights but is far from unmusical, and this is a most impressive voice.

Among many versions of Marcel’s “Piff! Paff!”, my favorite for the combination of voice and style is Marcel Journet’s (M—though even he is not the real basso profondo that Shaw correctly called for, you can still compare his juicy low notes and his inflectional manner with the efforts of Ghiaurov or Diaz and hear what the difference is); while the most imposing for pulverizing vocalism is that of Jose Mardones. Like Diaz, he throws in a top G, and I don’t really care for it; but the voice, like the character, takes no prisoners. Pol Plançon (M) is for my taste far too elegant for this character, and he finesses all those ascents up to D. Plançon also sang St. Bris (the photo is magnificent), which would seem more his kind of personage. But I wonder if he sang out enough.