When I am asked, as I am every decade or so, who I rank highest among the tenors I’ve seen, I say that vocally speaking, three stand a notch above the rest: Lauritz Melchior, Jussi Björling, and Franco Corelli. (I set aside Beniamino Gigli and Helge Rosvaenge, whom I heard only on farewell concert tours.) They were very different in temperament, musical and dramatic sensibility, and vocal personality, and we must stipulate that there is a qualitative distinction between the kinds of devotion inspired by the Wagnerian hero and the Franco-Italian romantic idol. But these three had in common that the sheer sounds of their voices, each possessed of a unique timbral aura and brimming with excitement potential, induced an addictive response, a Pavlovian reflexive hunger, in their acolytes. In the 1950s, Björling was the only one of them active at the Met, Melchior having finished his long career there, and Corelli having not yet arrived, and we devotees were in a constant state of anxiety about him. His cancelations, which came in batches, and the tales of alcohol dependency and/or other health issues—hearsay at the time but all too accurate—kept us wondering whether or not he’d show up on any given occasion, how he would sound, and how much longer he would be around. In the season of 1953-54, following the premiere of the Peter Brook/Pierre Monteux Faust, Björling was scheduled, to our great anticipation, for three consecutive Saturday broadcasts (of Faust, Rigoletto, and La Bohème). He sang none of them. Luckily, I’d heard one of the earlier performances in the Faust run, but after one or two appearances later that season, there came the deflating short-notice cancelation of his participation in the Toscanini/NBC Symphony Ballo in Maschera^(I), and Björling was not heard again in New York until his celebrated (and recorded) Carnegie Hall recital in September of 1955. I was in attendance that evening, too. Later that season, in February of 1956, he returned to the Met—as it happened, in Ballo. I wasn’t there for that. But six weeks or so later came this Manon Lescaut, in which Björling returned to a role for which he’d been acclaimed in 1949 opposite Dorothy Kirsten, when the opera was returned to the repertory after a long absence.

I recount all this to convey something of the atmosphere that enveloped a Björling  performance in those years. It was not unlike the tension, filled with high expectation and fearful suspense at once, that attended a Callas evening, and though it had less of the element of worry over the voice itself, it shared a sense of fragility, of impermanence, in the artist’s person that went beyond the career-mortality nervousness that trails every beloved singer, and  it heightened one’s investment in one more triumphant occasion. Another factor, almost impossible to convey now to younger devotees, was the ratcheting-up effect of the big-label recording wars. Long-playing microgroove vinyl was new, and the giddy prospect of multiple versions of complete operas, portable and affordable, together with the connoisseurship of equipment to make them sound good, was exploited to the full by the classical recording giants in the ’50s, and then, with the fresh tailwind of stereo behind them, all over again in the ’60s. And in the ’50s, many of the rounds fired and dollars bagged in the bloody skirmishes among competing versions were by the soprano/tenor pairings of the three leading companies: Tebaldi/Del Monaco for London, Callas/Di Stefano for Angel, and Milanov/Björling for RCA Victor (U. S. label identities). Unless I’m miscounting, in the years from 1952 to 1960, Björling recorded ten major roles (one of them, Turiddu, twice), in addition to the tenor solo part in Verdi’s Manzoni Requiem and his appearance as a “guest” in Die Fledermaus. They included, regrettably, none of his French roles, his Faust or Roméo or Massenet Des Grieux. (It should be kept in mind—another point that often doesn’t occur to the young—that none of his broadcast material circulated except among the subscribers to “private” label series.) The seemingly tireless churning of the recording industry, with its comparisons to rival editions and to re-releases of earlier versions (in Björling’s case, of many a treasured aria disc from the ’40s) and, of course, to every new live occasion, kept the argumentative pot simmering and gave the sense of precariousness a little nudge.