With respect to the baritone role of Sir Richard (Riccardo) Forth, Puritan Colonel, there is still no competition nearly 150 years on for Mattia Battisttini, at least if we accept (pace Muti) a highly ornamented, virtuosic model for interpretation. Born in 1856 and with a debut in 1878, he is one of the oldest singers we can hear plentifully on records, his earliest being made in Warsaw in 1902 and the last in Milan in 1924, just as he turned 68, with nary a wobble having invested his steadiness of tone. His recording of the Puritani double aria came in Milan in June of 1911, in two of the five sessions of that month, during which he recorded 29 sides.^(I) As with all his records, we marvel first at the pristine condition of the voice, the timbre still fresh, virile, and biting, the full span of the chiaroscuro available at the snap of his fingers, and that of the dynamic range as well, as with (in the cabaletta) a burst of dark, full-voiced ornamentation followed with no break by a ravishing subito piano for “dolce, o dolce memori-a.” We can justly observe that at times the extremes of color and volume are applied seemingly purely for their own sakes, but the execution is consummate, and this rendition would get a Puritani evening off to a rip-roaring start. A strong but rather hard-sounding final G is the only blemish we can note. Giuseppe de Luca, of the 1918 Met cast, whose full lyric baritone and patrician musical style must have been ideal for the role in a less elaborate manner than Battistini’s, appears to have not included “Ah! per sempre” among his own numerous recordings. But Mario Ancona, in the Manhattan lineup, did, as well as coupling up with Marcel Journet for the Riccardo/Giorgio rouser “Suoni la tromba.” He was, as Max de Schauensee remarked in his liner notes for a Rococo collection of Ancona’s recordings, one of several prominent baritones who “orbited around the brilliant sun of Battistini.” And in Ancona’s singing we can hear some of the same lean, strong core—more direct-sounding than the tonal format of such excellent postwar Italian baritones as Rolando Panerai (the Riccardo of the 1953 Callas/Serafin set) or Giuseppe Taddei (rich, fat tone, inclining toward the looser hold)—and tautly knitted line that mark Battistini’s vocalism. We hear, too, a dash of Battistini’s play with color and ornamentation, though on a less extravagant scale.

Our remaining principal is the bass, Sir Giorgio, retired Puritan Colonel and surrogate father to Elvira. The original “Puritani Quartet” had two principals we would probably call basses today, with Tamburini, the Riccardo, of a cantante sort and Lablache, the Giorgio, closer to the profundo, with more than a trace of buffo in his background. The distinct category of “baritone” was just solidifying at that moment, with the likes of Battistini, Ancona, and de Luca in the offing. Our Giorgio, Christian Van Horn, has a solid bass, with a reliable, well-gathered top, though a rather weak low end. Taken note for note, he produced the most present sounds of the evening, for which one is grateful.  However, as I’ve noted before, most recently with regard to his Hoffmann villains, his work never seems to proceed any further than the basics of producing tone and fulfilling the blocking, so that his character’s potential for eloquent participation in the drama and/or the music-making is left standing at the gate. Arimondi, the Manhattan’s 1906 Giorgio, had a powerful, long-ranged bass and was evidently effective in certain roles. But on those of his recordings that I’ve heard, I’ve found little evidence that he would have offered the suppleness of line or the empathetic tone that Giorgio’s narrative of Elvira’s half-mad miseries, “Cinta di fiori“—or for that matter his earlier scene with Elvira— needs. Jose Mardones, up at the Met, may well have provided those necessities. While many of his records convey only a love of activating his cannon-like, wide-roaming tone, some, like an aria from Meyerbeer’s L’Étoile du Nord, show a capacity for more modulated, intimate expression. But so far as I have discovered, he did not record “Cinta di fiori,” the role’s only excerptible piece. Which leaves us, pending further investigation, with Ezio Pinza. His version is an acoustical, which means that we find this great singer in freshest estate, guiding the repeated undulations of the verses with a sure hand, letting forth his pealing upper range in the little codetta (“piange, s’affanno,” etc.) and giving sonorous closure with low A-flats (“mo-orte,” “suo dolor“).