In jumping now to my three later complete performances, I am bypassing others that could reasonably be posited as representing a standard, including the Toscanini/Albanese/Peerce/Merrill NBC transmission released by RCA, and several well-regarded studio and broadcast performances. So it’s true: with anything resembling a comparative critical discography out of the question, I’m cherry-picking—but trying to pick the best cherries for the points I’m pursuing. I’ll be going in reverse chronological order, and my first choice is an in-house recording with seriously unbalanced sonics. It’s the premiere performance ^(I)of the locally famous 1966 production at the New York City Opera, which was directed by Frank Corsaro and conducted by Franco Patané, with Patricia Brooks, Placido Domingo, and Dominic Cossa in the principal roles. This might have been recorded in the pit, or just offstage—the soloists and chorus are distant in relation to the orchestra, and during the applause there is indecipherable conversation that has the tone of in-company reactions. It’s not an artifact for the market; but for anyone who was there, it stirs fragrant memories.

The season of 1966-67 was the splashiest of my operagoing lifetime. In the previous Spring, the NYCO had moved into its new Lincoln Center home with Ginastera’s big-scale, 12-tone Don Rodrigo, directed by Tito Capobianco, designed by Ming Cho Lee and Theoni Aldredge, and with Domingo and Jeannine Crader (a spinto soprano who should be better remembered) in the leads. The repertoire of that season was entirely 20th-Century—the oldest work was Prokofiev’s Love for Three Oranges (1921)—and the majority of the operas were of postwar origin. Among other offerings, there was a new production of Dialogues of the Carmelites, directed by Nikos Psacharopoulos with sets by John Conklin. Beverly Sills and Walter Cassel were around for a revival of The Ballad of Baby Doe, and Patricia Neway and Sherrill Milnes for one of The Consul, staged by the composer. Now, in the Fall, as the Metropolitan was taking up residence next door with Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra and a string of ambitious new productions with star casts, the City Opera had opened with Capobianco’s quite beautiful staging of Handel’s Giulio Cesare (sets again by Lee), with an impressive cast headed by Sills and Norman Treigle, soon recorded by RCA Victor. There had been a new Bohème, a new Tosca (again Capobianco, with Crader, Michele Molese, and Milnes), and a new Magic Flute directed and designed by Beni Montresor. Then the season’s last new production, this Traviata.

“Let’s face it: Method” I said in my review. I was partly right. Corsaro was, assuredly, an Actor’s Studio actor and director. He had scored a hit on Broadway with Michael Gazzo’s A Hatful of Rain (with Shelley Winters and Ben Gazzara), and at the City Opera had so far directed Floyd’s Susannah, Shostakovich’s Katerina Ismailova, and Prokofiev’s The Flaming Angel—then-recent operas we often term “through-composed,” but from the directorial standpoint better named “through-acted.” He had done nothing of a numbers-structured sort, nothing from the 19th-Century repertory. For Brooks, too, while she had been given  standard-repertory assignments (Musetta, Susanna), Violetta was her first crack at a major E-19 role. She was a highly gifted and thoroughly trained actress of the modern sensibility, and had a method, but not The Method. (She had studied with Uta Hagen, whose emphasis was on craft, not emotion for emotion’s sake, and she had a dance background, as well. And, to use an old term: she possessed the ideal physique du rôle for Violetta.) The collaboration between Corsaro and Brooks produced what remains the most consummate, emotionally gripping Traviata of my experience, one that quite transcended the director’s preoccupation with neo-Freudian psychosexuality and grew to tragic stature. For all of us who had been awaiting evidence that the dramatic content of E-19 opera could be realized through fusion with then-modern standards of credibility, and re-thought in those terms without violating the integrity of the works, this was a triumphant event—a rough equivalent, I’d venture, of Bellincioni’s translation of Violetta into the modern mode of the 1890s, in an integrated production that provided it with an appropriate setting.