Feeling myself in the hands of expert interpreters with this performance, I had a wonderful time re-encountering Mozart and Da Ponte’s Le Nozze di Figaro after an overly prolonged absence. And I was curious as to how the performance might have been heard by a contemporaneous professional auditor. So I went to the March, 1961 issue of Opera, where I found a review by Harold Rosenthal, then the magazine’s Editor. He begins by raising a point that may seem quaint now, but perhaps merits reconsideration, at least on a brief detour. Noting that this sort of “oratorio” presentation had a certain logic fifteen months earlier, when the EMI recording sessions were actually underway in London and the forces thus assembled, he now “. . . really wonders what true artistic purpose is served by giving us half an opera . . . Figaro, of all operas, relies for effect as much on what happens on the stage as on what one hears”—and he goes on to cite several examples of stage happenings (among many possible ones) that the lined-up singers must pretend to have experienced while in fact ignoring them as they blithely proceed with the music. (“True artistic purpose” is the key phrase here, because despite the cast changes, the event’s raison d’être was surely the intuited promotional one, a sally in the Walter Legge/Schwarzkopf/EMI/Philharmonia campaign for supremacy in the live/recorded synergies warfare of those heady early-stereo days. As a Rosenthal review six months later confirms, the EMI recording was just on the brink of release.)

Here in New York in those postwar decades, we had grown accustomed to “concert opera” presentations. But they had always had some fairly clear “true artistic purpose.” The precedent was set by the series of NBC Symphony performances under Arturo Toscanini. Here was a crack orchestra and a conductor whose greatness was universally conceded even by those who disliked some of his interpretations, and whose connection—personal and professional—to Puccini and Verdi represented the last such purchase on “authenticity” in the performance of their operas. In the years immediately following those broadcasts (all soon released as RCA Victor recordings), we’d had Arnold Gamson’s American Opera Society and Thomas Scherman’s Little Orchestra Society, enterprises on a less starry level (though Gamson’s cast for La Périchole of Tourel, Simoneau, and Singher could not have been surpassed then or now), but offering us the music of works of which we otherwise had no live experience, e. g., Frau ohne Schatten, Vespri Siciliani, Rienzi, Rossini’s Otello and Guglielmo Tell. In the summers, the Lewisohn Stadium Concerts brought standard repertory favorites, with one or two stars apiece and a full orchestra of quality (basically, the NYPO on seasonal hiatus), at genuinely “popular” prices. These were pure concert presentations, played in the predawn of the era of the “semi-staged” mutation, which features two half-operas, the musical half as true to itself as the performers’ talents will allow, the “staging” half not, and, to anyone with an eye for acting and supporting theatrical elements, as often subtracting from the musical half as adding anything to it.