Vocally, Preziosilla is designated as “prima donna mezzo-soprano,” but what that has become over the 160-some-odd years since her creation is a story of the mutation of vocalities. Verdi originally conceived her as a soprano, somewhat along the lines of Oscar in Un Ballo in maschera, and there is plenty of that in her writing, including high Bs and a dashing run up over the C. He reconceived the setting, but the change from the bright, open sound and quick handling of the older Mediterranean mezzos (the young Conchita Supervia would have been ideally cast, though I don’t think she ever sang the role) to the dramatic mezzos and even contraltos of the century just past, has resulted in some comically clumsy bits of casting (Martha Mödl? Jean Madeira?), and like Melitone, the part has often been grievously cut. To fulfill Trelinski’s grim version of the role, the Met has brought in a Romanian mezzo, Judit Kutasi. With whatever personality she might offer under severe constraint (the costume alone saw to that), she wasn’t able to establish a character of any description. Her singing was wobbly and tuneless.

Leonora di Vargas. Though offstage for a long stretch that comprises all of Act 3 and the first scene of Act 4, Leonora is the central character of the opera, its emotionally torn heart in dramatic terms and the singer of three fully elaborated arias of the highest quality (including the score’s best-known excerpt) and of one side of the superb exchange with the Father Superior in Act 2. She also undergoes the most radical of the opera’s several identity transformations, from coddled daughter of prominent family to cave-dwelling, one-meal-a-week hermit, and from female to male-identifying person-with-a-vagina. Her embodiment in this production, Lise Davidsen, was also, on merit, the focus of most of the preproduction buildup and positive critical response. I have had several previous occasions to write about her since her Met debut and the release of her first recordings, and to acknowledge her welcome gifts. As Leonora, she worked diligently to fulfill Trelinski’s attempts to fit her character into his tortuous sociopolitical thesis. She is a conscientious artist of a modern sort, who has revealed enough acting talent to make me suspect real creative potential, but who has taken the vows of strict auteurial obedience that is the current price of admission to a career in opera.

Among the roles one can imagine her assuming, there could hardly be a worse one, vocally speaking, than the Forza Leonora. In my past writing about her, I have noted that her silvery-blonde upper octave sets her off from the voices of all she has sung with; that no other voice currently fills our big opera house like that upper range; and that her intonation is consistently excellent. I should add that to date, while in her Lisa and Eva there have been moments of hesitancy and an occasional cloudiness in the upper-middle range, there has otherwise been no interruption in the steadiness and purity of her tone, no instability or suggestion of incipient wobble. I’ve also noted that the voice’s color spectrum is not wide; that her musicality inclines toward the abstract; and that from the upper-middle down, the voice narrows to a clear but skinny sound that does not fill out phrases that call for warmth, presence, and richness. That the timbre is distinctly Northern is no necessary hindrance to fine Verdi singing—so were those of  Frida Leider, Elisabeth Rethberg, and Birgit Nilsson, to name a few. But the combination of this lack of timbral variety with a coolness of temperament and the sheer weakness of the mid-to-lower range is fatal in a role of this top-to-bottom calibration. The effect of the big, unshaded top is only one of momentary startlement when it is not the outcome of well-grounded, firmly molded phrases. Davidsen will return for Fidelio next season. That should at least be stylistically and linguistically more comfortable for her.