I wonder, though, how much of that a contemporary devotee who chances to hear this recording will be able to extract from it. It’s not only that so much of Brooks’ revelatory effect depended on her physical action, on her playing of the moment-to-moment emergency of each scene, and not even that much of her “acting with the voice” is either detected only with ears squinted or is lost altogether, but that her rhetorical sense was an entirely modern one, always inseparable from her physical action; thus, many of her inflectional effects, heard in isolation, are of a nuanced, naturalistic type that comes across as what we’d call “underplayed,” though they did not seem so in the theatre. What can be heard is that Brooks was a very good singer, though again of a modern kind, her voice certainly not as intensely vibrated, as centered and bright, as those of many sopranos of Bellincioni’s time. And though she can be heard taking her vowel formation in an open and clear direction to help the tone carry in the lower-middle range, she does not connect that to a defined chest-register sound at the bottom. But the timbre is lovely, taking on warmth and body from the passaggio area upward (ample midrange tone for “Amami, Alfredo” or for the arcs up over the ensemble in Act 2, Scene 2). It’s an essentially soft-textured sound, with a built-in “vulnerable” quality, and she can pull back to beautiful piano and pianissimo moments in the upper range. She has plenty of florid technique where required, and knocks out a good high E-flat in the “Sempre libera.” She’s not Tetrazzini; but then, the reverse is also true.

The young Domingo is far and away the best of our Alfredos, and one of the best of the past seventy-five years. Always a lively and committed presence, he wasn’t ever an actor of great specificity. But he could respond to directorial attention, and did so with Corsaro, both as Alfredo and as Pinkerton in the Butterfly that soon followed. We hear his good, firm legato, the burnished shine of his high range, and the open, sometimes slightly thinned or nasalized passaggio notes, that characterized his singing at this time, two years ahead of his Met debut. Cossa, the Germont, was certainly on the young, lyrical side for the part at a time when we had recent experience of Warren, Merrill, MacNeil, Bastianini, Sereni, and others, and when Milnes was already singing the part. He makes only the conventional interpretive moves, and to merely nice effect. Still, his sympathetic timbre and well-sustained line sound mighty appealing now. Among the character parts (the City Opera had a strong contingent, but one that, again, registered better on the eye than on the ear), the one that comes across most strongly is the fine bass-baritone of Edward Pierson, as The Doctor. Patané and his forces are hard to evaluate under the prevailing sonic conditions. They sound well enough in the solo scenes, but the blurred sound hobbles the ensembles, and the conductor pushes the up-tempo passages past the point of well-controlled response.