Beczała had the evening’s greatest success. Like so many tenor roles of the immediate post-Verdian decades, Loris calls for the type of spinto voice developed over the last half of the master’s career, but with eased requirements in the way of elaborate shapings and turnings. I’m not saying Loris is easy—it puts its own kind of stress on the voice. But, relieved of the finesse wanted by a part like the Duke of Mantua (see Rigoletto: “Ich bin ein Berliner,” 1/28/22), and able to sing straightforwardly into the relatively uncomplicated line and sentiments of Loris’ music, Becała caught hold of a tonal fullness in the higher range and a “tear-in-the-voice” emotional quality I had not previously heard from him. That was gratifying. As De Siriex, Lucas Meacham (in for the originally announced Artur Rucinski) sang out with a strong, bright tone and rhythmic quickness. Rosa Feola, the Olga, had the right attitudinal intentions. The voice, though, is pretty but rather pallid in timbre and focus, lacking the pert edge needed to score the character’s silly points. As for the three potentially dramatic comprimarios of Act 1: Cirillo was cast with a bass of some heft but a labored top; the Gretch recited plainly with an approximately appropriate voice; and the Dimitri was a light soprano unable to effectively project her few important lines.

˜ ˜ ˜

The re-assignment of the “simple passions” to the operatic artist that Shaw pleaded for back in 1895 was at that very moment taking place. I’ve surely written enough of late on the general characteristics of veristic vocalism to render repetition unnecessary here. But  with a borderline work like Fedora, whose birthdate happens to fall in the earliest recording years, it’s especially interesting to see if we can find reasons for its early success in the prevailing singing aesthetic of the time. Despite the score’s paucity of excerpts of immediate appeal, the opera, the play, and some of the singers added up to a sufficiently hot package to inspire a surprising amount of early commercial interest, though only a few of the resulting sides (most of them competing versions of “Amor ti vieta“) stayed in circulation very long. First attention naturally attaches to the creators of the protagonist parts, Bellincioni and Caruso, each of whom recorded a single selection from the opera. I wrote of Bellincioni at some length in the Traviata article, and will add here only that, while the prominence and inconsistency of her vibrato assuredly detract from our listening pleasure, she shares with many Italian soprano voices of that time a bright, projective tone and open vowel formation, wedded to a strong bonding of the lower and middle ranges, and that this, allied with her native linguistic heritage, gives her instrument built-in declamatory advantages over a set-up like Yoncheva’s and so many others’. And something I noted about her then is also true of most of the singers I choose as exemplars here, and that is that they don’t sound “veristic” in the sense that we usually mean, i. e., emotionally overintense to the detriment of technical control. There were such singers, and more came later. But the majority of these will sound to us like classical purists.