For all its peculiarities and incompleteness, the late-Thirties Berlin Maskenball certainly gives us a fascinating northern view of the opera. But for an interpretation that captures some Scandinavian tinta while retaining all that is essentially Verdian (which would have to include performative fluency in its original tongue), it obviously gives up too much. And if we are looking for Swedish models, the names that pop up immediately are those of Jussi Björling and Birgit Nilsson. Riccardo was one of Bjorling’s best roles, and he the best tenor of his time for it. Throughout his career and beyond, it was widely lamented that of the two recordings he had been scheduled for (the RCA Toscanini broadcast of 1954 and the 1960-61 Decca/London recording under Solti), he was unable to answer the bell for either. We do, though, have the young Björling as heard on the 1940 Met broadcast, and if you want that great Act 2 love duet in as complete a fulfillment as we can hear, you want Björling and Milanov together in this performance. Three caveats, though: 1) the musically and dramatically crucial Act 3 aria is missing; 2) Björling isn’t always caught well by the mike, and 3) while as expected, Björling sings through the early scenes with the greatest of ease and the loveliest of timbre, he doesn’t really get into his voice the playful, excited undertone of a man on a caper, and does not seem to understand the point of the writing in the quintet, where he simply sings along on a nice legato, eliding some of the staccati and rests.^(I) As to Nilsson, I wrote of her work in the Solti recording at the time of its release that she wasn’t a great Verdi soprano, but a great soprano singing Verdi—a large, beautiful voice in total, shapely command of the music, but to rather abstract effect, with the sense of an anguished woman in a terrible predicament lacking. That can’t be Verdi.

So I held these two paragons in reserve, and turned back to the recordings of Amelia’s arias by Elizabeth Rethberg. You will never hear them sung better, her large, pure, blond soprano arcing without hindrance through the line, every note filled in and balanced, every phrase expressively shaped. If you are looking for an overtly emotional, veristically inclined interpretation, these may not fully satisfy you. But her studio recording of the Aïda arias and the Nile Scene with Lauri-Volpi and De Luca, her Met Boccanegra broadcasts, and many other recordings attest that she was very much a Romantic singer—just a classically inclined one, here singing a character trying very hard to contain overwhelming emotions. I followed Rethberg with Ljuba Welitsch, a singer of markedly different temperament but a silvery, penetrating timbre that served so well for her Salome and Chrysothemis, and whose impingement on the space of the old Met as Aïda and Donna Anna I well remember. She was not as complete a singer technically as Rethberg (the low range was not as well grounded or blended with the rest), but she sings the Ballo arias with fine tone and phrasing. She is also the Amelia of the 1949 Edinburgh festival Ballo under Vittorio Gui. There are some scrappy moments, mostly in that unsolved passaggio area, but many where the voice soars out with its unique liveness and cut, and the “Morrò,” with the ingenuous, girlish sound of her midrange opening up into the sizable, well-tuned top and with the sense of all this telling in the theatre space, is more affecting than the studio version. Her tenor partner, Mirto Picchi, not generously recorded or much remembered nowadays, is actually my candidate for the Italian tenor who most completely captures the lilt of “La rivedrà” and the seductive operetta lightness of the other early numbers, yet can surmount the higher, fuller requirements of the later scenes. Regrettably, “Ma se m’è forza perderti” is again omitted, though everything before and after it in the short scene is sung well and with a strong sense of the situation.