In the fall of ’65, Mirella Freni and Gianni Raimondi made their Met debuts, as Mimì and Rodolfo, again without benefit of a new production as stimulus. Again, there was a freshness of behavior, points of unusual connection with the emotional substance of moments, in their physical acting. And they, too, came with the recent experience of work with Zeffirelli on these roles, for they had been the leads of the 1963 La Scala Bohème that launched his reputation. Putting all this together (along with following the reports of F. Z.’s progress elsewhere), I reached the happy conclusion that the world of opera had been blessed with the arrival of a young regisseurial phenom who could at one and the same time make the stage look wonderful and get opera singers, including great and established ones, to think anew about their roles and probe the lives of their characters more deeply. And consider: in January of 1963, the La Scala Bohème, which was widely reported to have rejuvenated that work; in January of 1964, the Covent Garden Tosca that many thought did the same for that one; and in March of 1964, the Met Falstaff—three cornerstones of the Italian repertory, set in long-immovable spots in three of the world’s most important opera houses. That commands respect.

I am going to pass over the Hindenburgian crash-and-burn of Samuel Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra in the Fall of 1966—a too-big-to-not-fail story, given all the circumstances—except to remark that Zeffirelli’s work as librettist was, I think, rather good; that for the only time in his New York career, his set designs were more emblematic than strictly representational; and that whatever influence he had on his performers was lost amid the grandiosity and the technical chaos of the dress rehearsal and opening night (the two occasions I was in attendance). And within the scope of an article like this, I can give no more than a very partial view (just an impression, really), of his life’s work after these early triumphs and one traumatic stub of the toe. But the impression would include these observations:

Rather like our more “conservatively” inclined composers in the decades of the atonal/serial hegemony, Zeffirelli, who was searching for ways to keep tradition alive rather than to discard it, found himself in an evermore minoritized aesthetic position. And trying, again and again, to elicit fresh responses from international-level singers once the excitement of a generational statement has worn off (and in our fevered arts-trend cycle, this happens in the twinkling of an eye) must be exhausting; the temptation to let them do whatever thing they do while distracting the audience with scenic goodies must be hard to resist. Zeffirelli refused to join the conceptual postmodern parade, along whose route the ambition to merely make the stage look wonderful and get singers to act better was turned aside. With these somewhat sere and yellowed thoughts in mind, let’s see what we can retrieve from the two Bohème videos at hand. One is the studio offspring of the seminal La Scala production, done two years later with the the same orchestra and conductor (Herbert von Karajan), and most of the La Scala principals. It is up for grabs, gratis, online. The other is the DVD of Zeffirelli’s Met production, not born till the season of 1981-82 (this is the performance of Jan. 16, 1982, James Levine, cond.), but in the direct line of descent from the Milan version.