Apart from the customary camera-opera impossibilities of shot selection in group scenes (all of Act 2, the Bohemians’ romper-room doings in Acts 1 and 4), the studio video is fatally hampered by the lip-synching, not because it is ill-timed, but because the performers, trying to look casual and natural, are so clearly not singing. It’s not an uncommon failing in videos and opera films of the time, but it’s especially damaging in a situation where all are striving for a flow of lifelike behavior. When the primary element of action is so patently fake, and when what the music is telling us and the camera showing us are so contradictory, we can’t believe anything. So to extract anything much from the goings-on, one must try to see past that, rather as one tries to listen through the limitations of early recordings to sense what the singing really sounded like. For me, Freni is the most interesting case study, pro and con, inasmuch as I saw her in the part this same year and, as I indicated above, enjoyed her. She certainly had the loveliest timbre of any pure lyric Italian soprano since the end of World War 2, and here it’s at its young-prime best, the intonation always on center, the vibrato even, the amplitude sufficient for the part. She was never an “actress with the voice ” of any great specificity or imagination (two of my previous Mimìs, Bidú Sayão and Licia Albanese, were ahead of her there), but in strictly vocal terms I have heard none better until one moves up to the Tebaldi grade in calibre.

As I said, though, I had thought her physical interpretation full of nice touches. Attempting to reconstruct that experience on the video, I find her face getting in my way. It is close to a blank slate, its expressive passivity worsened by the lack of even a pretended singing commitment. It’s a quality that reflects the rather generic message of sweetness she was to send in roles going forward; in my experience, she was best in parts (e. g., Susanna, Adina) where a combination of pure lyricism and generalized bounciness would serve. The tactic I undertook here was to ignore her face where possible and watch her little body moves, then mentally back away to theatre distance, where the face does not count for so much, and see how they must have registered. And yes, at times, I could see some of what had interested me, the body language of a young woman who, however inwardly passionate, presented herself as modest and somewhat shy, slow to open up—not out of manipulative intent, but from a set of reflexes trained to follow the proprieties. The ideas, whether hers or Zeffirelli’s, are mostly right, but we can’t receive them as we would in the theatre because of the predominance of closeups.  Unfortunately, backing away from the screen will not help.

Moving from the studio to the Met stage brings a shock. From the unnatural ease of ventriloquists with operatic voices, we move to the unnatural efforts of opera singers caught up close and personal—the distractions of Teresa Stratas’ lower face as she reveals how she’s darkening her vowels to lend body to her welterweight instrument; the little punches and hoists of Jose Carreras’ respiratory system as he seeks to send the vaulting Puccinian line up and over; the general look of the sound-production workroom in full swing, and of the camera now scanning for points of focus on the huge stage. We do, though, get some sense of the empathetic connection between Zeffirelli and Stratas, whose gifts he particularly valued. About her theatrical chops there had been no question since her early days in tiny roles, and she and Z. latched onto each other in both stage and operatic film projects. As seen here (and it’s quite a contrast with her work in the contemporaneous production of the Weill/Brecht Mahagonny  —see the post of Sept. 21, 2018), she’s something of an anti-Freni. Her face also gets in the way, but by way of constant activity, much of it in the form of expressions that convey the wish to show us in moment-to-moment detail what she’s feeling, but seem to well up from inside only in the passages where she drops the effort in favor of passionate singing in Acts 3 and 4. Her tragic inclinations are moving when tragedy makes its entrance betimes, but for me they show themselves too soon—for her, the fact that her artificial flowers have no fragrance is already a tragedy, rather than the last wistful disclosure she makes to Rodolfo while worrying that she may have importuned too much. These are mistakes that only an unusually talented singing actress could make—Freni is innocent of them—but they detract, nonetheless. Stratas is in good voice, though being in good voice was never for her as simple a matter as it was for the young Freni.