I hate saying anything negative about the women. We must always believe the women. But occasionally they make it hard. Grace Moore is once again pleading her case here, and I am often in her corner, because I think she’s been too easy a target over the years, and at times she does seem to have done work she should get credit for, and as with Mary Garden, Louise was her favorite role, which she had studied with Charpentier and with which she had success in Paris. Besides, it is clear that she is shirking nothing, pouring energy into her performance and doing her best to convey emotion as she is given to understand the means for doing so. But first, the voice is getting rather raggedy, with an often nasty-sounding mix in the lower-middle range, giving way to a less-than-suave turnover in the upper-middle and at times a sort of bashing approach to the top. She seems worried that some of her more emotional interpretive moments may not get out into the house, and should be given a good boxing on the ears. And for a woman who studied the part with Charpentier, sang it often, and spent quite a bit of time in France, there are some weird American diphthongs scattered about. Perhaps it was just a bad afternoon, and it’s very possible that it came over better in the theatre than over the air. But though she makes it through and sings some of the purely lyrical passages well, this isn’t consistently joyful listening. And to further raise my sexist profile, I am compelled to report that Doris Doe has lots of trouble in the important part of The Mother. Support simply goes out from under her at or above the upper D, so her only comfortable stretch is with her plea in the Couronnement (cut approximately in half in the common manner), which stays predominantly in the lower register.^(I)

Last in this little survey of the earlier Louise recordings is the first studio effort that called itself “complete.” This is a monophonic inscription released in the U. S. on a 3-LP set by Epic in 1956, and it is truly an Opéra-Comique performance, with the company’s orchestra and chorus under Jean Fournet, and soloists who sang regularly with the O-C. So the sense of comfort, of dwelling inside the culture, that we heard on the Columbia recording is here extended to an ensemble that comprises all the work’s roles, and to an edition that takes in much more of the music. With respect to cuts, it also points to two factors that may have affected them. One is that most of these seem to have indeed become standard performance redactions, possibly blessed by the composer, since he lived to such an advanced age and was involved in both the Columbia and Paramount ventures. (And these cuts are either identical, or nearly so, with those of the Met performance.) Another is that decisions about what can be included are related to the number of discs in a set. The restoration of all the excisions I’ve mentioned (plus a few I haven’t) would surely have necessitated a fourth LP, and thus more preparation and recording time, more vinyl and vinyl-related labor, and so on, and so the commercial question becomes one of whether that fourth LP, along with promotion of the claim to true completeness, is apt to produce enough extra réclame and revenue over what the release of an accepted standard performing edition would fetch. Things would be different now, but in the ’50s the mandate to open all cuts and scour for pencilled early drafts was not upon us.