But what about these singers? Sure—voices, and we’re starved for them now. But they all made better impressions in person than they do here. In live performance, one was aware of Giorgio Tozzi’s inclination, increasingly evident as the plot thickens, and reaching an off-putting endpoint in the “Aprite un po’,” to pound his emphases to the edge of gaucherie. But his handsome, house-filling sound, his handsome, house-filling physical presence, and his scene-playing talent carried you along most of the time. By the same token, one detected the often suffocating involvement with moony, off-voice effects of Lisa della Casa’s Countess, always with the same message of sad, underplayed internality. One would think that getting up close with all this nuance might help, but as recorded it only increases one’s impatience. In the theatre, her physical beauty and elegance, sometimes quite radiant, and her ability to rise to the important vocal moments in Acts 3 and 4, added things up on the positive side. And the space of the opera house—that cubic footage of air—made one less aware of the thickness of voice and rather ponderous way of outlining the text (especially in recitative) of George London’s dark bass-baritone Count, leaving one more in appreciation of the size and quality of the instrument. We won’t hear the aria, with its climactic F-sharp, this heroically voiced again, and the recording does convey that.

The performances of Roberta Peters (Susanna) and Rosalind Elias (Cherubino), two more physically appealing singers with well-controlled voices suitably matched to their roles, are extremely competent and what we would call “in the frame,” if there were a frame. Corena is right on with what he normally did. Carelli’s voice is also appropriate to his assignments, and though he overdoes the mouthy unctuousness of Basilio, he captures Don Curzio’s tradition-stipulated impediment well.^(I) I was distressed to hear this recording again, and to find so much well-remembered world-class talent, in representative form, producing so empty a result. The Giulini concert of two years later, though itself “international,” tells us that still did not have to be the case. The style of no style, the school of no school—is that what “Americanization” is?

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The final stop on my Figaro time-travel tour is the video from 1985—thus, a generation closer to us, yet more than that now behind us. The upper right-hand corner of the DVD package bears the sobering inscription “James Levine Celebrating 40 years at the Met.” That marks the release date—for which, the blurb on the back tells us, “Mozart lovers have been waiting patiently”— as 2011.This is another item acquired on my visit to the Met gift shop, and I suspect my copy is the last of the run. It moves us (forward, in my narrative) into a different world, not least because its very medium changes all the priorities of evaluation. The full-range, spacious sound, with ample compensations for the voices to balance them with the orchestra, reaches into every acoustical cranny of either our listening room or our head, taking us far from theatre reality. Even more importantly—though both sight and sound are zoomed in on—the eye now assumes its dominance over the ear. That brings us into a transformed relationship with acting, first in the sense that “acting’s” physical component is valorized over its vocal one, and then in the sense that the close-up element of that physical component, and of character exchange, is valorized over the stepped-back one—the opposite of the priorities of the opera-as-opera circumstance. In this instance, we have a predominantly well-acted performance (as well-acted as we would be likely to see from good professional actors in an attempt at Beaumarchais’ play), expertly tracked and transformed by the camera eye. As an example of vidop, it’s superb.