Many years ago, I wrote an article using Pasquale Amato’s recording of “Eri tu” to exemplify what I considered the patent, almost across-the-board superiority of singers of the early 1900s over those of the 1960s. Much as we now pine for the singing of that postwar quarter-century, I’d still defend the choice. We are right now; I was right then. And that powerful, lean, direct sound, sometimes verging on rawness, could almost be taken as old-school Scandinavian were it not for the prominence of its vibrato, which marks it as inescapably Mediterranean. But there are at least two very good choices remaining: Pavel Lisitsian and Lawrence Tibbett, both Northerners, the former Armenian/Russian, the latter North American, though from a latitude well south of Boston. No one in that 1945-70 era sang Verdi better than Lisitsian, and no baritone voice was a better match for Renato/René/Anckarström than his. He sang perfectly presentable Italian when outside Russia. We can’t go wrong. But I would still select Tibbett, as an artist of greater dramatic vitality and imagination and one more at home in Italian, for all the Americanizing liberties he sometimes took with it.^(I) He never sang the role of Renato, owing to terrible timing of vocal condition v. opportunity. Of the several captures of his “Eri tu,” any of which will make his case, I prefer the one of Feb. 16, 1938, from the Chesterfield Presents radio program, which includes the entire recitative and aria, and which I’m hoping will be more broadly available soon.

I see no reason not to retain Hempel as Oscar: a leading soprano with leading-soprano command of the stage, technically on top of all the requirements, a northerly singer comfortable in Italian and stylistically practiced in Verdi. For Ulrica, we have easy pickings, for there were many fine contraltos, or deep mezzos (like Kerstin Thorborg, who sang the part in the early ’40s at the Met), all of a Northern sort, who sang regularly in Italian—Homer, Onegin, or Arndt-Ober herself. On purely vocal terms, I’d pick Dame Clara Butt, with that endless low range, except that in her long and celebrated concert career, she sang almost no opera, which tells us something. Ulrica must be a stage animal. If we were to select Margarethe Matzenauer and retain Amato, we would have all the Met 1913 principals save Caruso, incorrigibly Mediterranean like Zenatello, Martinellli, Gigli, and so many others we’d love to hear, but not in our Ballo of the North. Of course our conductor, whatever his nationality, will have to be a colorist capable of influencing the actual sound, the overall texture, of the orchestra toward what’s unusual in the score without making it sound like an invasive species. I could imagine Stokowski doing that, or perhaps Igor Markevitch. (His Manzoni Requiem with Bolshoi forces is a major Verdi statement, while the recordings of Damnation de Faust and, especially, A Life for the Tsar are highly suggestive of his sensitivity to tinta.) Carlos Kleiber had the ear for color, and so did Karajan. But I hear the former fussing too much over secondary details, and the latter refining the music to death. So pending further inspiration, I’m stumped.

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NEXT TIME: As promised above, I will proceed to consideration of this season’s Un Ballo in maschera at the Met, with the foregoing as backstory. That will be published one week from today, Monday Nov. 13.

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