I don’t find much time for trawling the net or scanning the social media. But I have friends, colleagues, students, and readers who do, and from several of them in a two-or-three-day period I heard of the dust-up referenced above, and the range of their reactions (outraged, fatalistic, gleeful, etc.) on a topic of such central interest to me was enough to pique curiosity, and then some. The Musical Director of the Metropolitan Opera, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, has  been conducting master classes with a select group of young singers at the Juilliard School. His notions about vocal technique (or, to be more precise, his evident unawareness of the technical implications of some of his expressive preferences) came to the attention of a somewhat mysterious site called “This Is Opera.” I don’t know who’s behind this site. A couple of people told me it’s out of Croatia, a couple more that it’s not the work of a single person, but of several, in which case our new gender-woke imperative of using a plural pronoun for a single identity might be applicable. In any case, they is extremely impolite—so much so that some influential entity (presumably the Met, but perhaps Juilliard) exerted sufficient pressure on YouTube to have TIO’s initial assault taken down. A less discourteous version was then reinstated; but the reportedly lively thread of comment at slippeddisc.com (which I came to the party too late to view) was withdrawn. In a more thoroughly supported (but still strongly worded) article, Thomas Prochazka has taken up the subject on the Viennese site Der Merker, as part of his splendid ongoing series, Die Oper—Kritische Zeit fur eine Kunstform? ^(I)

At “This Is Opera,” they fires from the hip. In their manners-and-context-be-damned fashion, they’s incensed about the same devolutionary trends in operatic singing I’m concerned about—so I know how they feels. They are (returning to English) especially exercised on the failure to cultivate the chest register in female voices and the quality we call “core” in voices of both sexes, and they rag incessantly on the subject of “fake modern singing” vs. “real operatic singing.” They aren’t fussy about apples-and-oranges fairness. (Example: TIO shows us a video clip of Kristine Opolais singing the opening of “Sola, perduta, abbandonata” in the recent Met production of Manon Lescaut, and contrasts it with a recording of Virginia Zeani in the same brief passage—video vs. audio and, one could say, a restrained, inward interpretation, sung while contending with the little torture chamber of an inverted pyramid on the Met’s ridiculous set, vs. the emotionally effusive, borderline reckless, audio-only version of a latterday verista.) Nor are they always very selective with their illustrations. (Why, for example, would one choose short takes of the older Gigli ramming through some phrases, the full voice turning stiff and brittle, the once-ravishing mezza-voce into a mouthy croon, instead of an earlier sample? And however turned-on one may be by the sound of a Del Monaco high B-flat, why would he be one’s choice for any phrase from “O Paradiso“?) There’s a lot more in this vein, leaving TIO open to charges of cherry-picking, and sometimes with sour cherries. Also: fearless pronouncements look a lot less fearless when they’re anonymous.

In the early 1990s, I wrote several articles for the Sunday Arts & Leisure section of The New York Times. Some were tied to then-current live or recorded events (e.g., a piece on Frank Loesser’s The Most Happy Fella; another on the VHS release of old Firestone Hour telecasts; another on two rising young tenors, Ben Heppner and Roberto Alagna), but a couple were lengthier essays that addressed the condition of opera as an artform. They at once summed up themes I had been working through in reviews and articles for a number of years, and prefigured some of the main lines of argument in my recent book, Opera as Opera.

At that time, the NYT entered into a contractual agreement with independent authors that sought to reserve to the Times all reproduction rights, including electronic ones, in perpetuity, with no further compensation to the author. When I resisted this for what I’m sure are self-evident reasons, Jim Oestreich, then the section’s music editor, was able to extend to me the apparently seldom-invoked “Joyce Carol Oates Clause”—named, obviously, for a resister with clout. This wasn’t actually a clause, but an omission of the usual blanket surrender of author’s rights. (That’s why, at least the last time I looked, although you can find these articles listed in the cumulative NYT index, you won’t find them available for perusal or download, even for a fee.) In effect, I sold to the Times, in the words we all used to type in the upper right-hand corner of Page 1 of any free-lance submission (3¢ a word for the pulps and Westerns!), “First North American Serial Rights Only.” According to that understanding, following the initial publication all rights revert to the author, in this case me. So while some publications I have written for (the Financial Times, Opera News, Musical America) are still up and running and would presumably seek to control materials they have published, even in the absence of any written agreement, and others (High Fidelity, Opus, Keynote, The Musical Newsletter) have long since ceased publication and may or may not still exist as legal entities, the status of these NYT articles is clear, thanks to the JCO Clause.  ^(I)

The combination of a nasty technical glitch involving lost copy and an underestimate of required writing time has made this post a full day late. My apologies, and thanks for your indulgence. An Opera as Opera-related note: on his site Der Merker Redaktion.com, Thomas Prochazka, who gave my book its very first review in July, 2018, has written a splendid article focusing on the necessity of unifying singing and acting into a single unit of operatic expression, with several references to the book’s arguments. (See Die Oper: Kritische Zeit für eine Kunstform? (III), July 12, 2019. For any readers who have reached at least the gleaning stage in German, Der Merker is a go-to site for informed opinion on operatic doings in Vienna and environs.

The all-but-total concealment of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s operas, now over a century old, occasions wonderment whenever an opportunity for re-assessment presents itself—”enigmatic” is a common description of the situation. I don’t think much deep thinking is needed to solve the enigma, but it is still remarkable that in an age when operas strong and weak from every day, month, and year of the artform’s timeline pop up in productions and subsequent recordings whether or not their requirements can be more than modestly suggested in performance, these works, true cornerstones of the international repertoire for three-quarters of a century, remain rarities. In over seventy years of operagoing in one of the former strongholds of grand opera, I have seen staged productions of two of Meyerbeer’s pieces (Le Prophète at the Met and, just recently, DInorah, où le Pardon de Ploërmel by one of our smaller companies, the Amore Opera) and concert presentations of two more (Il Crociato in Egitto, starring Beverly Sills, and L’Africana [sic], with Richard Tucker as Vasco. I’ve missed a local event or two over the years, but that is all.

For this post, I first thought of exploring the two Parisian grands opéras that took Meyerbeer’s standing from that of a promising rival of Rossini to that of master of all that he surveyed, Robert le diable (1831) and Les huguenots (1836). The premieres of these operas happen to bracket that of Halévy’s La Juive (1835), to which I devote many pages in Opera as Opera, and to teeter on the edge of important developments in singing technique (ditto). But as I began listening, I became aware that to do any kind of justice to the “enigma,” one of these works would more than suffice, and I chose Les huguenots as the richer in available materials, with a note to self to get back to Robert, Le Prophète, and L’Africaine before too long. The materials include two “complete” live recordings, a wealth of recorded extracts from the last couple of decades of Meyerbeerian triumph, and some items from the scholarly and performance-criticism literatures. For this last, I’ll be consulting George Bernard Shaw, who for all his Perfect Wagnerism was quite taken with Les huguenots and wrote with some frequency on its London revivals throughout his tenure as music critic. This still leaves much untouched, but is enough to lead us into the mysteries of the work, and, by extension, its all-but-vanished world.

Every so often, the subject presents itself again, even to those of us who approach opera primarily from a day-to-day, performance-oriented p.o.v.: the European/American sensibility gap. I’m not convinced that, in terms of the responses of the large majority of devotees, it’s as wide as it is made to appear in scholarly examination or journalistic report, but there’s no doubt that it exists, and that it affects attitudes toward both creation and performance. I sometimes have occasion here to address the performance aspects, since examples of European direction and design, including some of the heavy-duty conceptual variety, do come our way. But with respect to new creation, especially of the High Modernist sort (and most European work has been of that sort for a couple of lifetimes now), our soil has yielded little to the occasional scatterings of European seed.

The sensibility gap has a way of drifting back into consciousness in the operatic shoulder season of late spring, and so it has been this year, at least for me, as I considered what’s worthy of attention over the summer. Events like the long-awaited premiere of Gregory Kurtag’s Fin de partie (a setting of Beckett’s Endgame) at La Scala, or the air-land Operation Licht that hauled several days’-worth (but still not all!) of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s immense entity (opera? postopera?) into existence over in The Netherlands, aren’t on my beat. But, casting about among recent audio and video documents of Continental origin, I spied L’Invisible, a piece of potential interest on two counts: it is by a long-established High Modern composer of whom I should know more (Aribert Reimann), and is based on plays by a writer I have always found intriguing (Maurice Maeterlinck). This sounded like a good sensibility-gap test case, so I acquired the Oehms Classics recording based on L’Invisible‘s world premiere production (October, 2017, at the Deutsche Oper, Berlin, Donald Runnicles, cond.), and began to explore.

My only previous acquaintance with Reimann’s music was a stretch of the final scene of his Lear, included in the video set Autumn Journey, a retrospective on Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, who first sang the title role. (This extract is now online.) Though Lear wasn’t Reimann’s first opera, it was the one that jump-started his reputation as a composer (he is also a noted accompanist, especially in modern repertory), but he has written a number of others. They are all based on the work of serious writers (in addition to Shakespeare: Strindberg, Goll, Euripides, Kafka, Lorca, Grillparzer, and now Maeterlinck), and are thus said to belong to the genre of Litteraturoper. I have always found this a rather baffling category, first because it would seem to take in the overwhelming majority of all operas, at least from Mozart on, and second  because, in Reimann’s case, with the exception of Kafka’s The Castle, these sources are all plays—yet these plays are being referred to strictly as literature, and not as works for performance, so the term makes us wonder about the theatrical awareness of those who use it. Well, it’s only a category, after all, and where Maeterlinck is concerned, it does serve to remind us that, unless one is exceedingly old and was taken to see The Bluebird when exceedingly young, one has in all probability never encountered his plays—even Pelléas et Mélisande, the play—except on the page.

Sixty years ago, as I was just beginning my critical semicareer with a few reviews for Opera News, one of my first assignments was to head up to Connecticut for a production of Handel’s Deidamia at the Hartt College of Music. In prospect, the main attractions were two. First, this would be a chance to check out the rear-projection scenic system of Dr. Elemer Nagy, of which I’d heard enthusiastic report as to its adaptability for small opera companies and educational institutions. Second, it would be a rare opportunity to see a fully staged Handel opera, albeit with student performers plus a ringer or two. Deidamia was Handel’s last opera, and not a terribly representative one—a pastoral/satirical tale concerning Ulysses’ recruitment of the young Achilles (disguised as a girl on the island of Skyros under the protection of King Lycomedes—never mind) for the assault on Troy, and erotic complications with the eponymous heroine, daughter of said king. It’s light entertainment of the most accomplished sort, with a bittersweet ending. The performance was well prepared, Dr. Nagy’s designs were charming and atmospheric, and I enjoyed the occasion.

Not a month later, the pièce de résistance in my first package of records to review for High Fidelity was none other than the then-recently discovered Tetide in Sciro of Domenico Scarlatti. Same island, same characters, same story! But with a few variants, and in the far different tone of the true opera seria, of the chamber variety. This was a performance on the Westminster label by the Angelicum forces of Milan, severely cut and with midlevel Italian singers, but certainly dedicated and accomplished enough to give us an idea of the work’s effect. And one year after that, I encountered another, later, opera seria (in form, if not in tone), Paisiello’s Il Re Teodoro in Venezia, as staged by Boris Goldovsky at Tanglewood with a cast that included Sherrill Milnes and Justino Diaz.

Taken as a fourteen-month slice of a young devotee’s experience of pre-Mozartean opera—two “Young Artist” productions and a no-stars recording—there would be nothing very remarkable in any of this today. But at the end of the 1950s, the operas of Handel, along with the opera seria in general, to say nothing of the Neapolitan opera buffa, the French tragédie or comédie lyrique, and anything else we categorize as The Baroque in opera, was very much the province of specialists of scholarly bent—and even they had not experienced much of it in performance, live or recorded. We knew that there had been a Handel performance revival movement in Germany, initiated at Göttingen in 1920 by Oskar Hagen (father of the noted American actress and acting teacher Uta Hagen) that had made some headway, and that in England the Handel Opera Society was finding good critical and popular response for a few of that master’s works.

We had also learned something about Handel’s operas from books like Edward J. Dent’s Opera or Paul Henry Lang’s Music in Western Civilization, or by dipping into Burney; and we knew the some fifteen or twenty arias from his operas and oratorios that had been recorded by great singers and were regularly programmed in the opening groups of vocal recitals; and we had a notion of The Handel Sound from some of his instrumental music and sacred choral pieces. And—ça va sans dire—Messiah. But with respect to the operas, things were pretty much as I describe them in Opera as Opera (see “Ombra mai fu and The Modern Mezzo,” pp. 305 ff.). This extensive body of work by one of history’s most important composers was only beginning to stir from its 200-year coma. You don’t have to rely on my subjective testimony on this. A few glances at credentialed contemporaneous accounts of the situation will settle the matter. And in these accounts you will also find—even among the most enthusiastic champions of the operatic Handel and of The Baroque as a whole—some serious doubt as to the 20th-Century theatrical viability of any of these repertoires. ^(I) At the very least, the champions note, a great deal of work would need to be done in terms of performance practice and audience orientation to discover how to make these operas play.

As I promised at the end of my last post (see Siegfried at the Met, 5/24/19), I am entering here some observations on the singing of the roles of Siegfried and Brünnhilde, as exemplified by the artists on the live historical recordings I selected to give us perspective on the current standard.

Siegfried: In terms of the basic qualifications for the part—strength, brilliance, and steadiness of tone; alacrity of vocal movement; guidance of the musical line and control of dynamics and coloristic shading; physical presence and temperamental ebullience; and, let’s not forget, sheer stamina—Lauritz Melchior is by a wide margin the best Siegfried of Siegfried of whom we have direct evidence. In certain aspects of style, musicianship (especially with regard to rhythm and tempo), and interpretive choice, it is possible to advocate for another tenor on a note-by-note, phrase-by-phrase basis. But those aspects, while worthy of consideration, are of far less importance than the pre-requisites cited, especially with a role in which the latter are met by so few.

Readers of my three-part report on Marston’s release of the complete Chaliapin recordings may have found it a stretch to find me drawing some specific technical parallels between these two exemplars, one a Russian bass, the other a Danish tenor, navigating quite different bodies of work. I’ll come to that in a moment. There are other similarities between the two. Both were large, powerfully built men, high-energy extroverts, given to physical pursuits not of the gym-and-personal-trainer variety (Melchior was a devoted huntsman). Both spent the later years of their lives and careers separated by political circumstance from their roots, and found their active operatic repertoires, initially varied and inclusive, narrowed to a few roles in which they were rightly deemed supreme. While Melchior had the early advantage of an upbringing in an educated, musical household in the highly civilized surroundings of Copenhagen, both ended formal education early and found their artistic footing under mentors and patrons. Both became popular, with their personalities and artistic standing points of ready recognition in the broader culture. We don’t think of Melchior as the paradigm of modern singingacting, as we do Chaliapin, but he was a major stage presence and an interpreter of great intensity, even  subtlety.

The technical similarity has to do with the treatment of two or three half-steps—let’s even bring it down to the pitches of E-natural and F above middle C, Chaliapin’s high notes and Melchior’s passing notes into the upper range. I observed that on these pitches at full voice, Chaliapin sang with a “gathered” adjustment, with all his energy concentrated into a precise position, “closed” but not “covered,” resulting in a tone possessed of a brilliance and ring unique among basses, which he could on occasion “open out,” but never to the point of becoming “spread” or shouty. And we find Melchior treating these same pitches in the same manner, adopting what he called a “narrow” point of attack, from which he could expand when needed.^(I)  This “narrow” positioning enabled him to find a pocket of resonantal ring that informed the entire range of the voice, and to avoid the distention of the open “a” that we hear in Set Svanholm (the Siegfried of both the Furtwängler/La Scala and Stiedry/Met performances) and Wolfgang Windgassen (of Keilberth/Bayreuth), from which it is difficult to re-focus for the high notes.

Two items of recent Opera as Opera news: First, the video of my April 15 conversation with Dean Fred Bronstein of The Peabody Institute in Peabody’s Dean’s Symposium series, in which we discuss some of the book’s themes relative to opera’s professional and educational future, is now up and running. Video and audio quality is excellent. Here is the link, which will also be posted on my media page. This series has had other distinguished guests, whose conversations are available in the archive, that I’m sure many readers will also be interested in. And second: Opera as Opera has chalked up another important review, by Mike Ashman in The Gramophone, the English-speaking world’s oldest record magazine. He of course has his own perspective and reservations, but his well-written review is in the main supportive, and ends with a strong recommendation. This brings to four the number of positive reviews the book has received in UK, following Stephen Hastings in Opera, Robert Matthew-Walker in Musical Opinion Quarterly, and Nils-Goeran Olve in The Record Collector, in addition to the fine thought piece by Richard Fairman in The Financial Times—excellent penetration for a book of this sort. 

I devoted my last post to exploration of the name character of this opera—troublesome as he is for many—and how he came to be fashioned as he is, at least on paper. And I mentioned that the cast of this season’s Met revival seemed promising, which is one way of saying that by contemporary standards it looked good—also on paper. I’m sure that when you read little expressions like “at least on paper” or “by contemporary standards,” you are hearing a cautionary, faint-praise tone. If so, your hearing is accurate enough. But before getting to some serious qualifications about performance and production and the relevance of standards other than contemporary, let me stipulate first that the male side of this cast gave a great deal of pleasure, and second that these roles are hard—hard to sing, hard to act on the two planes (call them the “real-life” and the “archetypal” planes) that must always be present, and hard to fuse into the singingacting unit that Wagner sought and that all dedicated performers have pursued for a century and a half or so; and further that the orchestral demands, particularly with regard to the dramatic involvement Wagner wanted from his “bandsmen,” are equally challenging. The two tenor parts are, in both their opportunities and their difficulties, extreme, and while Brünnhilde has but a single scene, there is contained within it just about every task that can be set to a dramatic soprano.

To begin with the gladder tidings (I report on the performance of May 2), and to work our way from the lesser to the greater demands—which, as chance would have it, is from the bottom up, Fachwise:

Fafner: This was Dmitri Belosselskiy. He was a solid Wurm in last season’s Luisa Miller, and he was solid here, too, which is to say that his voice had the appropriate density of color and sufficient size, that he sang steadily and on pitch, and that he hit the staging marks of the production’s dying-dragon concept (see below).

Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen has blown through town once more, for the last time (we are promised) in the production conceived and directed by Robert Lepage. Of that, I had previously seen just the Götterdämmerung, and that only through the good offices of a friend who happened to have a spare and affordable ticket. This negligence had nothing to do with negative anticipation of Lepage’s efforts. Reports about it had been universally condemnatory, but I fear no production, and have learned many times over that the general opinion isn’t necessarily my own. Besides, for me it is performance, not production, that is the key, and it was the prospect of a work I love deeply, and with whose performance potential I am acquainted, falling so far short of that potential as to be only a distant echo of itself, that kept me from entering the Ringnut sweepstakes first time around. As it transpired, Fabio Luisi led a solid orchestral rendering of Götterdämmerung, which (as  with any of the Ring operas) provides considerable reward in itself; and Deborah Voigt, although clearly intended for Gutrune rather than Brünnhilde, at least made an energetic stab at the latter. Apart from that there were only those distant echoes, and I thought that yes, the production’s a clunker, but that isn’t the real problem at all.

This time the announced singers, on the basis of my limited acquaintance with them, seemed more promising. So I decided I’d try to see Siegfried, the least-performed segment of the Ring. Not easy to do, but I did eventually ransom two seats for one of the three performances, looking forward to hearing the music live once more and, perhaps, arguing the opera’s case. There are a number of reasons for the relative unpopularity of Siegfried, and we’ll encounter them as we proceed, but I think the main one is simplicity itself: many people don’t like the protagonist, Siegfried of Siegfried. I’ve seen the mere mention of the name induce cringes of revulsion from confirmed opera lovers, and recall as culturally informed an observer as Michael Feingold (the valuable longtime theatre critic of The Village Voice, among other things) writing that though he liked Wagner’s music, he couldn’t get close to the Ring because of the nature of this character. Since I think this is an unnecessary obstacle, I am devoting this first of two installments on Siegfried to exploration of the eponymous hero. I could as well write about Brünnhilde, whose evolution is in the end more determinative than Siegfried’s; or Wotan, whose rise and fall governs the story for over half the cycle’s length; or even Alberich, the principal antagonist, whose potent resistance carries through directly into Götterdämmerung, and indirectly to the very end in the person of his fearsome son, Hagen. But though these characters can sometimes give rise to parodistic amusement, they don’t induce repugnance. So it’s Siegfried himself who will be the focus here. I’ll discuss how everything turned out for all concerned in this season’s revival in the next post.

In this final installment of my consideration of Feodor Chaliapin’s collected recordings, I will be focusing primarily on the excerpts from live performances in London in the years 1926, ’27,  and ’28. This means that except for the studio recordings considered in relation to those events, I will be passing over many remarkable sides. These are for the most part remakes of songs and arias he had already recorded, in many cases more than once. I’m not going to generalize about them, except to say that though Chaliapin’s interpretations of most of these pieces did undergo some change, his voice aged very little in quality and technical reach till his final years, which means that the presence of the electrical recording process alone makes them desirable in pure listening-pleasure terms. Some of my old favorites, like the Death Scene from Dargomyzhsky’s Rusalka or the magical mystery tour of the Rubinstein “Persian Song No. 9,” will, sadly, not receive discussion. But in the case of this prodigy of singingacting, I think the recordings that catch him doing that in the only place it can really happen, the theatre, must take pride of place.

The first of these occasions, the 1926 Covent Garden Mefistofele, received some attention in Part Two. The second yields the grouping of three monologues from what we would now call a “semi-staged” performance of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Mozart and Salieri, a chamber opera setting of one of three mini-dramas by Pushkin, each of which treats of one of the original sins. (The other two, The Stone Guest and The Covetous Knight, were set operatically by Dargomyzhsky and Rachmaninov, respectively.) The performance took place in the Royal Albert Hall on October 11, 1927, with the LSO under Lawrence Collingwood. This is an ingenious little piece, a witty commentary on envy predicated on the long-debunked legend of Salieri as Mozart’s murderer by poison. But at least for a non-Russian-speaking audience (and a connoisseur audience, at that), it justifies itself only in the presence of an extraordinary “actor who sings.” It’s set quite directly on the Pushkin text as Rimsky imagined it being declaimed by a great actor, and in fact he wrote out the entire vocal line before filling in any accompaniment, which for Rimsky is quite spare. So it will not satisfy lyrical cravings. Chaliapin “created” the role of Salieri (Mamontov’s Private Opera, 1898), with the reputedly remarkable character tenor and director Vasily Shkafer (frequently Chaliapin’s Shuisky) as Mozart. In these monologues, Chaliapin is obviously at the peak of what we might call his emotional/elocutionary/realism mode. But I would advise anyone approaching this material for the first time to 1) have at hand a complete libretto and/or a copy of Pushkin’s playlet, and 2) to familiarize him- or herself with the work via a complete recording (there have been several, but you won’t go wrong with the venerable Bolshoi version under Samuel Samosud, with two great artists, Mark Reizen and Ivan Kozlovsky, as the eponymous composers). Otherwise, these excerpts of what is essentially accompanied recitative, with nothing of the role of Mozart, the episode of the old fiddler, the offstage choral fragment from Mozart’s Requiem, etc., will have difficulty standing on their own, and the sudden flood of emotional pulsation in the orchestral peroration at the end (we pick up slight hints in sound of Chaliapin’s pantomime) will seem almost arbitrary.

As those of you on my blog announcement list know, I’ve been forced (well, not forced, but I don’t want to cheat the material) to postpone Chaliapin, Phenomenon: Part Three for one week. It will appear next Friday, Apr. 26. In our guise as publisher of Opera as Opera, we’ve had to cope with the bankruptcy of our long-established printer, a change of distributor (with no interruption to orders, fortunately), and associated issues—a drain on time and energy. More happily, I spent a couple of highly enjoyable and stimulating days to take part in a symposium hosted by Dean Fred Bronstein down at Peabody Institute, and to work a bit with some of the very talented students in the Opera Theatre class there. The symposium conversation was live-streamed, and will join the video archive of this ongoing series. I’m told it will take a couple of weeks to edit the video, but I will post a link to it on my media page and announce it here when it’s ready.

There were several interesting responses to my Samson et Dalila post of two weeks ago:

The first comes from David Stein, regarding the Samson highlights record with Risë Stevens, Jan Peerce, and the NBC Symphony conducted by Leopold Stokowski, originally an RCA Victor LP and now available on a Cala CD. I had noted that on the LP, Robert Merrill (as the High Priest) appeared only in the Act 3 “Gloire à Dagon” duet. But Mr. Stein informs us that on the simultaneously released 45-rpm version, the Act 2 scene between the High Priest and Dalila, beginning at “La victoire facile,” was included, and is on the Cala re-issue as well. That would make the CD, in any case recommendable for preservation of the exciting performance of the Bacchanale, even more desirable. Merrill was no great French stylist, but he did sing this part in the early ’50s, and one will surely not often hear it so handsomely vocalized.

While I’m at it—and since Chaliapin as Boris Godunov is coming up—I might mention also Stokowski’s disc of Boris extracts from the early ’50s. This is rather like some of the “symphonic synthesis” versions of operas (particularly Wagner’s) that Stokowski loved to cobble up, except that Boris’ big solo scenes are sung by Nicola Rossi-Lemeni, with incidental contributions from a couple of other singers. Rossi-Lemeni was a formidable singing-actor talent whose fine bass voice turned woolly all too soon. But this recording, done at the time of his San Francisco Opera debut in this role, caught him at his best, and is comparable to the splendid Filippo he sings on the Cetra Don Carlo. No, it isn’t Stokowski with the NBC, but the San Francisco Opera orchestra and chorus sound quite fine, and it is Stoki doing Rimsky. I have this performance on a Dell’Arte LP re-issue of the RCA Victor original, and I see from the old Myers & Hill Record Ratings that it, too, was issued in 45-rpm format—so perhaps some additional material lurks there. This, too, is available on Cala in its Stokowski Society series.