Björling was back to Sweden for the duration of WW2. When he returned, the span of the voice had broadened somewhat, without any loss of limberness or focus. I have always considered his Roméo from the Met broadcast of 1947 to be the finest traversal of a major Franco-Italian romantic role I know of, with his own studio Manrico and a couple of Gigli’s earlier complete recordings the only serious competition. When Rudolf Bing declared his intention to make more use of Björling, and cast him in the name role of the Don Carlo that launched his regime in 1950, we seemed to be heading into the Jussi Björling Decade at the Met. But that happened only in the patchy sense I have indicated. Whereas Tagliavini and Di Stefano fell aside, Bergonzi arrived only late in the decade, and Del Monaco’s best nights were in strictly dramatic roles, it has to be conceded that in terms of night-to-night, season-to-season, reliably high-quality tenorizing, Richard Tucker was the company’s mealticket. I’m sure he canceled here and there, too, but I can’t recall an instance.

In 1956, I was nine years into my Met standee career and precociously attentive to singing, but certainly not yet at a level of technical expertise or familiarity with the score of Manon Lescaut to give you an accurate recounting of the goings-on. But certain impressions have remained from that day to this. They include long stretches of singing by Björling, especially as the performance moved along, that were of the special quality of vocal and emotional expression that I expected; some bars when both he and Albanese were drowned in the Mitropoulos flood of Puccinian sound; and some points of letdown and worry over high climactic phrases. I had been listening for this last, inasmuch as there had been fleeting moments in the ’53 Faust, and again at the Carnegie Hall recital, in which there’d been a veil, a sense of the voice fighting through a bit of occlusion and not quite attaining its old free ring, on the high notes of the arias. Not having heard the Manon Lescaut broadcast till this St. Laurent release (it has circulated on a couple of other labels, but I haven’t heard those versions), I have been eager to hear what came over on the radio.

With respect to stage/pit balance, all’s in order—our hero and heroine never vanish from earshot. All the Björling virtues of tonal beauty and color (particularly in passages of melancholic hue), of guidance of the line, are present in profusion, and there is an almost reckless passion in his assault on the emotional peaks of the role. I think I was hearing aright in terms of the voice gaining in warmth and freedom in the course of the performance—it loosens up from midway in Act 2 onward, and by the great outcries of Act 4, it’s pouring forth without constraint. But yes, I was again listening for the condition of the acuti (in fact, I re-listened to several passages, and then listened again with earphones), and yes again, there are some—mostly early on—that, though firm and on the button in terms of intonation, have something of that veiled or occluded sound. Eager and well-aimed effort is thrown into them, but they don’t pop out with quite the awaited thrill. It is worth quibbling over this for two reasons. The first, aesthetic/dramatic: the writing is shaped so as to set up the release of these notes, not as athletic achievement but as sensory/emotional consummation. The second, technical: it is always of value—and most of value in the case of a great singer—to try to understand what goes slightly off track when it does; it might be instructive.