The latest on “Opera as Opera”: Our shipping date for the second printing is December 4. Orders can be entered at any time. Meanwhile, we have received two more wonderful reviews, from Donald Vroon in the venerable American Record Guide and from Robert Matthew-Walker in the even more ancient Musical Opinion Quarterly (U.K.). The reception has been extraordinary, and we understand more is on the way!

Today, I promised some words about Nico Muhly’s “Marnie.” And indeed I have seen it. However, I’ve decided to postpone comment until I can wrap it up with Kaia Saariaho’s “Only the Sound Remains,” which is coming up shortly. But there’s plenty to chew over below.  

I once had a student from a small Orthodox community in Israel, who had come to New York to study. He was an interesting man from a culture I knew little about, so we learned from each other. Among the things I learned of from him was the continued life of an ancient prohibition against male  proximity to a singing woman. If he arrived at my studio while a lesson with a female student was still in progress, he would wait outside the door till the lesson ended. One day, after having assured several young women that “No, no, it’s not you, it’s him,” I asked him if he knew the original reasoning behind this rule. He answered with a grave sincerity: “The woman’s voice is very beautiful. If you heard it and were in the room with her, you might want to go to her before you are married.” I thanked him, and of course we continued to observe the rule.

In Act 2 of Karl (Karóly) Goldmark’s Die Königin von Saba (The Queen of Sheba), set in a lush garden at night, the eponymous Queen instructs her slave Astaroth to lure the love-dazed Assad with her singing. Astaroth obeys with a vocalise replete with Oriental-sounding intervals, long sustained notes, and ornaments. Assad responds with a short, beguiling aria, “Magische Töne.” It happens that for collectors of historical records, these are the two most notable of several fragments that kept The Queen of Sheba‘s aura alive over the past century. The vocalise (called the Lockruf) is most famous in the voicing of Selma Kurz (though an earlier version, by Elise Elizza, while lacking Kurz’s Guiness Book of World Records extended trill, would probably be almost as highly regarded had it been recorded later), and the latter in stunning interpretations by Leo Slezak and (in Italian) Enrico Caruso. And sure enough, poor Assad, though figuratively outside the studio door, soon finds himself—for the third time and counting—hopelessly enmeshed in the Queen’s on-again, off-again allurements. ^(I)We aren’t speaking here of plain old powerful attraction at first sight. We’re dealing with enslaving, all-enveloping, lost-to-the-world sexual intoxication that presents itself as the mother of all the games of tease, then play hard-to-get, that some girls learn at a remarkably early age. Poor Assad’s first encounter was up in Lebanon, whither he’d been dispatched by King Solomon on a diplomatic mission to the Queen, only to encounter an irresistibly beautiful woman plashing about near his mossy bank, as such are wont to do. As he approached her, she not only failed to repel him, but drew him into a fervent, inevitably wet embrace. And no sooner did Assad conclude—reluctantly, I’m sure—that escape was impossible than she vanished into the cedar-scented air.

The Met season now underway is giving us a good dose of late Puccini, which means two things, among others: the Puccini works that are less often performed than his perennial repertoire masterpieces, and the ones that had their world premieres here in New York, by the Met company in its old diggings down on the Southern edge of Times Square. First up has been La Fanciulla del West; Il Trittico is coming soon.

Musicians, critics, and singers of its principal roles admire and love Fanciulla, and in the 108 years since its premiere, particularly from the 1950s onward, it has found enough of a place to be considered “in the repertoire,” globally speaking, though never in a given company’s lineup for many seasons at a stretch. The current revival (of the 1991 Giancarlo Del Monaco/Michael Scott production) has Eva-Maria Westbroek, Jonas Kaufmann (at my performance) and Zelko Lucic in the leading roles, and Marco Armiliato on the podium. I’ll discuss it below, but since it is relatively uneventful—good enough to remind us of the piece’s strengths without being able to consistently compensate for its difficulties—it presents  a sensible opportunity first for consideration of some of the elements that can make Fanciulla go, or, somehow, not.

I think we need to start with David Belasco and theatrical realism. Many of Fanciulla‘s unusual—and, in performance, often problematic—aspects spring from Puccini’s engagement with them and their American milieu. Perhaps you don’t think of Belasco (if you think of him at all) as a representative of realism. Most of the plays he wrote and/or directed, and the kind of theatricalization he strove for, seem to us to belong to a world of extravagant melodramatic romanticization, and the exoticism of Puccini’s earlier Belasco adaptation, Madama Butterfly, often makes it seem like a part of that world. But seen in the light of his own theatrical time, Belasco was a fanatical realist, and like the smartest such, knew that the more extravagant or exotic the material, the more crucial a verisimilitude of detail is to a suspension of disbelief.^(I) And Puccini, as the presiding genius of the verismo era (if not always a verist himself, strictly speaking), was a realist, too, though an operatic one. In Belasco’s The Girl of the Golden West, Puccini met up with material that pushed him farther than ever before or after in search of something that could be defined as operatic realism.

Three short bulletins on “Opera as Opera”: 1) Owing to a logjam at the printer, the shipping date for the second printing has been postponed to December 4. My apologies for the delay, but that’s still in good time for Christmas. The first printing’s quick sale blindsided my most optimistic calculations. 

2) The distribution center has “discovered” a very few copies of the first printing still in stock, so if you hurry you may be able to get an order filled without the irksome wait.

3) The November issue of Opera brings us another wonderful, substantial review of the book, this one by Stephen Hastings, a critic of high standing and long experience. Give it a look. To the subject of the day: 

My high school years were spent at a traditional New England prep school, a little world unto itself. The ways of that world were already changing—the study of Latin or Greek, for instance, had just been nudged from required-course status to that of recommended language option. But the curriculum was still of pre-Ivy League classical design, and its Protestant evangelical origins (the school was founded by one of the late 19th century’s revivalist stars, D. L. Moody) were still alive as matters of daily practice. Boys and girls had dedicated campuses, with the Connecticut River and a few extra miles between them. The school had an immense dining hall, plausibly reputed to be the largest unsupported indoor space in the Northeast. The noonday meal was Announcement Time. A chime would be struck, the hall would fall silent, and a designated student or faculty spokesman would step forward on a platform with the news of the day: extracurricular club meeting times, school sports team results, social event schedules, academic competition results (the Debating Forum, the Declamation Contest, The Time Current Events Contest, etc.), the occasional disciplinary crackdown. And these announcements, of course, were launched into the room from 16- and 17-year-old throats in unassisted oratorical tone, as was all such speech, whether in the classroom, the chapel, the assembly hall, or auditorium.

A few years ago, I returned to the campus for my class’s 60th reunion. Strolling one of the paths overlooking the City on a Hill greensward, I ran into a classmate who asked what I’d planned for the day’s 5:00 p.m. time slot. When I answered in the neutral, he urged me to attend a concert by the current a cappella group. “They’re really good!”, he said. So at the appointed hour, my wife and I made our way down the hill to the new performing arts building. It stood roughly in place of the two former main classroom buildings, red-brick piles from the time of the school’s founding, one a sciences lab, the other called (à propos) Recitation Hall. In my student days, “a cappella” meant a select group of guys with nice voices and good intonation within the choir, ready for an unaccompanied early church-music selection or the occasional solo turn in an anthem. For these kids, though, it meant close harmony in selections drawn mostly from pop and folk genres. They sang with pleasing tone, good balance, and an ingenuous sincerity. They stayed on pitch.Their presentation was impeccably democratic: at the end of each selection, a different member of the group would announce the next one. Everyone got a turn.

ANNOUNCEMENT NO. 1: Last reminder: Next Friday, Sept. 28, I will be appearing in the Marc Scorca Auditorium at Opera America, 330 Seventh Ave., NYC, to speak and read from my book, “Opera as Opera,” converse about related subjects with Mr. Scorca, and conduct some Q & A. There will be books for sale (sorry, can’t do credit cards), and these will be the only books available for a few weeks, because . . .

ANNOUNCEMENT NO. 2: The initial print run of “Opera as Opera” is SOLD OUT! The pace of sales was much faster than projected. A second printing is scheduled , but owing to a very heavy schedule at the printer’s, books will not be ready to ship till around November 1. We will of course post the exact shipping date as soon as it’s firm. You can still pre-order for this second printing, and be sure of a copy being reserved for you.

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In my last post, I wrote about some of the principles of Epic Theatre, transmitted to us  principally via the plays of Bertolt Brecht and by the copious theoretical literature about them  by the author himself and by followers, critics, and scholars. Being engaged here with opera, I was interested primarily in the way that some of these principles, especially that of a Separation of Elements, continue to exercise influence on that artform, and in the strange fact that this influence has been more on the production of operas quite incompatible with those principles than in the creation of new operas of Epic character. And I noted that Brecht published his formulation in its most direct and succinct form in relation not to one of his plays, but to the opera The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, which he and composer Kurt Weill premiered in 1930. ^(I)

Since Brecht was the most important German playwright of his time and a highly regarded poet as well, and since (like Stanislavski, but unlike, say, Reinhardt or even Meyerhold) he wrote out at length his theories on theatre, acting, and music, his ideas have always been before us, and in definitive form. But he was not the only artist writing on the new directions for theatre and opera (and, eventually, on Mahagonny itself) in the aesthetic maelstrom of Weimar Germany. Weill was no mean essayist in his own right, and between 1925 (before his first meeting with Brecht) and 1929 he turned out over a hundred articles for Der Deutsche Rundfunk (the magazine of the then-new German broadcasting system) and other journals. These, however, were never gathered in book form, and simply dropped from sight after the ascension of the Nazis. Since the 1950s, musicologists and other scholars have worked to restore to Weill his independence of thought and to correct the common impression that in the Weill/Brecht collaboration, Brecht did everything but write down the notes. (An overview of Weill’s musical thinking at this time, and translations of some of his articles, can be found in Kim Kowalke’s Kurt Weill in Europe.) With respect to Mahagonny: as Brecht himself rather glumly concluded, it’s an opera, and, brilliant and convention-defying as Brecht’s libretto for it is, in an opera the music is the final determinant of viability.

REMINDER: Friday, Sept. 28, at 7:30 in the Marc Scorca Auditorium of Opera America, 330 Seventh Avenue, New York City, I’ll be reading from “Opera as Opera,” conversing with Marc Scorca himself about aspects of the book and the operatic scene, and following with a Q & A session. I hope to see many New York area readers and devotees then!

 In the mid-1950s, I worked for a couple of years as a secretary (or “male secretary,” as it was customarily named) in the travel trade, for Thomas Cook & Son. Those were the twilight years of the “Cook’s Tour” company as the more or less royally designated booker for the imperium on which the sun never set. The office atmosphere was neo-Dickensian, with pay scale to match, and my position next-to-bottom rung. But there were some nice end-of-week parties, at which the Basic Black dresses, bow ties, seersucker suits and ice-cream jackets created a sort of penniless glamour—or, for reasons about to become clear, what I might call Threepenny Glamour.

At these parties, music was always playing—monophonic LPs, or—in some instances still—78s, on whatever console or low-hi-fi component rig the evening’s host/ess could afford. This being a travel-bum crowd, the repertoire was predominantly from across the pond. Charles Trenet,  Germaine Montero, and Bea Lillie were big. But more often than not, prime playing time was given to Noel Coward (The Las Vegas Album) and Lotte Lenya (the Berlin Theatre Songs album). They were not taken as mere background music (there was Mantovani for that). Folks stopped chatting, gathered round, and followed. They knew the words, they knew the tunes. Newcomers were initiated, and soon joined in the unison choruses at the payoff lines of “In a Bar on the Piccola Marina,” “I’ll Follow My Secret Heart,” “Mad Dogs and Englishmen,” or of “Surabaya Johnny,” the “Alabama Song,” or “Pirate Jenny.” Coward had for some years been in somewhat the same condition as the Empire itself, but was now revived for one more go-round by his brilliant nightclub appearances. Lenya carried the guidon for a culture that actually bore the same time stamp as Coward’s, but was to us by way of discovery, old/new, rebellious/decadent. Coward singing Coward and Lenya singing Weill may seem a very odd pairing. But they had in common inimitable personalities, a mastery of cabaret craft, and a tone of world-weariness that suggested past excitements now faded, old wisdoms that were slipping away.

One of the three distinct Weills, Weill the Third, had already been known to us. That was the Weill of the American musicals and the hit songs they birthed (“September Song,” “Speak Low,” and others); of Down in the Valley, the brief American-style Schuloper that wedded an operatic parable to the folk-music movement of the time; and of Street Scene, Weill’s operatic adaptation of Elmer Rice’s play, with lyrics by Langston Hughes, that ran on Broadway for 148 performances. But now Lenya, the composer’s widow, carried the torch for Weill the Second, first via the hit production of The Threepenny Opera at the Theatre de Lys and its cast album, then with the above-noted LP, and then, at least for us in New York, through a long series of performance events: I recall a Weill evening at the Lewisohn Stadium concerts, with Threepenny in its Blitzstein translation; a full-blown concert performance in German at Carnegie Hall that brought us Ludwig Donath and Polyna Stoska as the Peachums^(I); and The Seven Deadly Sins at the New York City Ballet, with Balanchine the choreographer, as he had been at the work’s premiere (Paris, 1933). The New York City Opera staged Threepenny, in German, rather ponderously and in too large a theatre, with Martha Schlamme as Jenny and Kurt Kasznar as Macheath. And along the way, there were the superb complete original-language recordings on Columbia (Philips) of Die Dreigroschenoper and a work previously unknown to most of us except through one of its numbers, the aforementioned “Alabama Song”—Der Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (“The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny”). All this was very much driven by the stardom of Lenya, and enabled by the presence of the same emigré generation that also formed a core audience for the big-business years of Lieder singing here.

The main subject of today’s post is the adaptation of Carmen made by Oscar Hammerstein II in 1943 for an all-black cast, as revived by the Classic Stage Company here in New York for a run that has just ended. ^(I)First, though, I can’t resist bringing you a brief coda to the discussion of keyboard continuo playing we’ve had running over the last three posts (q.v.). Piano maven Gregor Benko called our conversation to the attention of his friend and colleague Frank Cooper, a retired professor, harpsichord collector, and expert in “harpsichordiana.” Prof. Cooper comments as follows:

“Missing from this highly informed exchange is the instrument itself which was used in all Italian opera houses and is depicted in the pits of some other countries—the thinly constructed Italian harpsichords made from cedar, with no lids to aim their product. Voiced properly, they radiate sound instantly, brightly, with pronounced ictus and rapid decay. Hence, they impart bite to the rhythmic impulse of the ensemble, give the pitches clearly, and thus are maximally utilitarian. They invite ornamentation to keep the sound alive—thus helping pitches to aid the singers who, in Baroque and Classical operas, sang from close to the lip of the stage and straight at the audience. Second best are early Flemish and German types; least best, the ubiquitous 18th Century French models with their suave sophistication. Now they do get lost as continuo instruments in pits. Chances overall for clarity come from so-called ‘authentic’ instrument ensembles for obvious reasons. Leather-plectra-ed Pleyels, Neuperts, Sperrhakes and their like in the once-modern vein were virtually inaudible without amplification against modern instrumental ensembles.”

To which Will Crutchfield responded:

“Every word [of Prof. Cooper’s commentary] is exactly right. He is talking about harpsichords, and describing, in much more specific detail, the types I was referring to in my very first answer about Don Giovanni. [At the Purchase performances of Mayr’s Medea and Rossini’s Tancredi] we were playing not a harpsichord but a piano, a replica of I can’t recall what original—I think it’s Viennese and circa 1800. We call such things fortepianos today. But that’s an arbitrary term to make a useful modern distinction. “Pianoforte” and “fortepiano” were synonymous alternatives at the time, and since the world settled on the former, the latter was revived when people wanted simply to describe an early version of the thing. The relevant point is that it can play either forte or piano depending on the physical force applied by the player, which is exactly what a harpsichord doesn’t do. On harpsichord the player creates more volume by throwing stops and playing a greater quantity of notes.

“‘Fortepianos’ also vary in strength. Ours wouldn’t be loud enough for playing any version of a concerto, but is very well suited to recit and continuo playing, and playing whatever in a living room.”

SAVE THE DATE!—For all who are in the New York City area: On Friday, Sept. 28, at 7:30 PM, I will be reading from my book, Opera as Opera/The State of the Art, in Marc Scorca Hall at the HQ of Opera America, 330 Seventh Avenue, NYC. The reading will be followed by a conversation with Marc Scorca, OA’s longtime CEO, and then by a Q & A session. This will be an evening that should interest all professionals and devotees alike. I will of course be posting reminders—but enter this in your event calendar now!

And now to the subjects at hand. You may recall that in my Don Giovanni articles (June 22 and July 6), one of the topics that reared its head was the function of the keyboard instrument. I took special note of the recitativo secco accompaniments as rendered on a modern piano in old Metropolitan Opera and Salzburg Festival performances under Bruno Walter (with the maestro himself, I am told, tickling the ivories), and the much more perfunctory ones, by an unidentified player, on the 1936 Glyndebourne Festival recording under Fritz Busch. And I contrasted this with the latterday performance-practice employment of any of several keyboard instruments (plus, in many cases, a low-string continuo instrument), and in particular the highly elaborated uses—sometimes participatory, sometimes ornamental—of the fortepiano in the Musica Aeterna recording led by Teodor Currentzis.

Among the reader responses to these posts was a particularly edifying one from Will Crutchfield, who has rare expertise in these matters, and my exchanges with him were extended by my attendance at a performance of Mayr’s Medea in Corinto by his Teatro Nuovo company (a bit on that  below). In his first commentary, Will picked up on three points contained in my posts. The first was my observation that the harpsichord requires amplification from the orchestra pits of our large theatres. I had based this on experience: at several performances of operas requiring continuo at the Met or the NY State (now Koch) Theatre, I had made my suspicious way down to the edge of the pit at intermission to eyeball the situation (once, this necessitated taking the elevator down four levels from the  Met Balcony), and on every one of those occasions, there was the microphone, its little water-moccasin head a-grin, set up alongside the keyboard. I know many operaphiles will say “Who cares, so long as the balance is right?”, and pragmatically speaking they would be on solid ground. But the amplification of any performance element in music written for acoustical instruments gets my slippery-slope goat. In any case, here’s what Will said:

“First, harpsichord does not need miking, even in a big theater, if it is a strong instrument with appropriate registrations available, favorably placed for acoustics, and played by someone who really knows how to get sound out of it.

“Also, we really have no idea whether Mozart’s operas were done with plucked instruments or what we now call ‘fortepianos,’ because the noun used in rosters and pay-sheets was almost always ‘cembalo,’ which is generic—it describes a function, not an instrument. Given the transitions in progress at the time, probably mostly hammers, not quills, by the time of the Da Ponte operas. (But meanwhile people did not necessarily rush to throw out an instrument that was holding up—Beethoven’s cello sonatas were published as for ‘pianoforte or harpsichord.’)”

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There’s nothing to really argue over here; good information, and I have no “alternative facts” to hand. I’d only note with respect to miking that I guess I’m still waiting for all those “ifs” to fall into place. (I can always go back to my in-your-face Wanda Landowska-with-RCA-engineer recordings.) And as I timidly noted in Don Giovanni, Part 1, and without plugging for a re-retrenchment, the modern piano requires none of the “ifs” except the strong player. Surely that’s the reason it came into use? That, and as with all the other arguable, but broadly accepted, improvements in orchestral instruments throughout the 19th Century, the fact that many people listened and said “Oh, that’s a more beautiful tone”?

As I noted at the end of Don Giovanni 2 (July 6), I’ve been getting questions and comments  from obviously well-informed readers that call for further elaboration or clarification. This happens especially when I write about vocal technique, and it reached peak intensity when I wrote about two ascendant stars, Jonas Kaufmann and Anna Netrebko (see the post of May 25). Some of these responses come from readers who are knowledgeable about singing and singers but are not  voice professionals, and aren’t necessarily familiar with the lingua franca of singers and pedagogues—among whom, I should note, there is by no means universal agreement on the interpretation of many terms. Others come from readers who are professionally involved with voice, but are either confused by or in disagreement with my way of talking about what we’re all hearing—either they hear differently, or they hear as I do but differ with my analysis. And finally, there can be puzzlement over my sometimes idiosyncratic syntax, or with neologisms I invent when I think there is no standard word, or only an imprecise word, for what I mean. So today I will address some of these questions, and will append a little glossary of my own usages. Some of these last I have so far avoided here. But I use them in Opera as Opera, and will be referencing them in posts from time to time.

It is one of my ambitions to direct more readers’ attention to what I call functional hearing, to how voices are put together and how they work, and to the causative relationship of vocal function to vocal aesthetics. That would lead to a richer understanding, to less misapplied enthusiasm, greater appreciation of true expertise, and more informed discussion and argumentation about singing—all, it seems to me, desirable for the health of our artform. So I’m grateful for questioning that pushes me to be as clear as possible on the subject. The first series of inquiries comes from a credentialed correspondent I’ll call Reader One. He has handily put some of the terms in bold face. I’ve edited a bit. Since he quotes directly from the Kaufmann/Netrebko post, I suggest reference to that for context.

1) Q: ” . . . the fundamental, structural parts of technique, not the pretty artifacts” (pretty artifacts–would these be coloratura, trills etc.?).

A: Yes, exactly. But I intend the term to extend to almost everything we call “effects”—even the messa di voce, for instance, and particularly the diminuendo phase of it, or the suspended pp high note, which, especially in early Romantic writing, have become signature interpretive gestures, to the point of tedium in voices of no great presence or timbral interest to begin with. They are all legitimate technical accomplishments, but what one has to keep in mind is that they can sometimes be executed by voices that are actually quite out of balance, seriously constricted, or incompletely developed, and are not always as indicative of “good technique” as they may seem. Firm, even tone, with undistorted vowels and no noticeable weaknesses up and down the range, is a better indicator than flashy, sexy gestures, no matter the voice type.

In Part 1 (June 22, q.v.), I wrote about two representations of Don Giovanni—the video of the 2011 La Scala production and the 1942 Metropolitan Opera broadcast (audio only)—musing the while on the very different operatic worlds they evoke, on the eye-dominant vs. ear-dominant routes they take into the receptor’s sensorium, and on my own experience of coming to love and revere this work, as contrasted with that of a young person of the Here and Now. Today, I’ll be reporting my responses to another Now-and-Then pairing, one that seems to offer a more logical comparison of audio-only like with like but which, partly for that very reason, has provided an even more graphic illustration of shape-shiftings in the operatic universe. In both these examples, the work gains admittance by ear, where it summons mind’s-eye visions of the drama’s progress. Or, perhaps, not.

I append this last phrase because of an observation made by Teodor Currentzis, the maestro  of the Now half of today’s pairing. In a conversation with a well-versed, strangely anonymous interlocutor (himself?) that is included in the bound package, at one point he says first that he believes Don Giovanni has been less well conducted on records than the other Mozart operas, and then that it is “a difficult opera even to listen to on a recording.”  When Alter Ego asks why, Currentzis answers (and I think I must give him some room here): “Because the listener is so drawn into this captivating plot that it’s very difficult to follow the action of the music itself. It almost is overly theatrical . . . And while we are drawn into the drama, we miss all the musical detail. Don Giovanni is a monumental piece, but it is full of exquisite detail and orchestral colours.” Reading this, I think: “Currentzis is obviously a terrifically smart fellow, and truly devoted to his mission. In his dialogue with Alter Ego, he says many insightful, though eminently arguable, things. But I find myself wondering if he thinks that in this or any opera, the aesthetic should be brought forward at the expense of the dramatic? And whence does he believe the music comes—exquisite detail and orchestral colors included—if not from the telling of the story?” I also reflect that I have never found Don Giovanni at all difficult to listen to on a recording, where it is my favorite Mozart opera, just as it is in the theatre.

But, not to play point-scoring games with an absent opponent, I tell myself that what he must mean is that recording is the ideal medium with which to focus our attention on things we often miss, and that he has a particular view of what those might be. Surely he can’t mean that we shouldn’t become involved in the story, but rather that the story will emerge in different guise if our attention is re-directed in accordance with what he’s hearing. To do this, he fashions a performance that seeks to draw us in close up, so that the ear must lean in with unbroken concentration, rather as ours did to track the suspense of radio serials in the AM-only, monophonic days of yore. And as then, the times we can kick back and relax, receive the performance without straining,  are when the theme music or the commercial jingle comes up strong—which is to say, when the orchestra asserts itself. But for longish stretches here, it’s as if, even as the Lone Ranger and Tonto are exchanging key plot-and-situation points sotto voce (“S-s-s-h—he’s behind that rock, over there”), the William Tell overture keeps on playing. And we do love the William Tell overture, but what was that he said?

The latest on “Opera as Opera”: We are promised a shipping date of July 16. Full info on ordering, including pre-orders, will be posted here and on the “Opera as Opera” page of my website within a few days. 

I recently laid out a pocketful of change for the DVDs of the Dec., 2011 performance of Don Giovanni at La Scala. I intended it mostly as catch-up listening/viewing on Anna Netrebko, in connection with my reactions to her Tosca (see my post of May 25), but didn’t get around to it. I also hadn’t listened yet to an older purchase, the Naxos Immortal Performances CD restoration of the March, 1942 broadcast of D.G. from the Metropolitan, the LPs of which I’d first heard upon their first release on Eddie Smith’s Golden Age of Opera label in the late ’50s, and had referred to periodically ever since. And I decided that, with D.G. on the mind, I would indulge a curiosity about the 2016 studio version emanating from the P. I. Tchaikovsky Opera and Ballet Theatre of Perm, the final installment of that company’s recorded Mozart/Da Ponte cycle.

Knowing that, whatever they might contain, the 2010s representations would give views of the work radically different from that of the Met in the 1940s, I thought about the experience of a young person coming to this Top Ten opera now in contrast with my own early familiarization with it, conditioned by Met performances similar to the 1942 airing and by the only complete recording then in existence, a studio version on 23 78-rpm discs in three volumes, based on the 1936 Glyndebourne Festival production. And having learned by now that my style of thinking and writing is insufficiently Hemingwayesque to explore these examples in a single post, I’ve decided on a two-part article, with the Met and La Scala up for consideration today, Glyndebourne and Perm two weeks hence. It’ll be a trip, I’m sure, but possibly a trip without a destination, because that is in the nature of the times.

The Met performance is conducted by Bruno Walter and stars Ezio Pinza—a collaboration quite worth a few words of its own. They were close in many ways. They first worked together at the 1934 Salzburg Festival, Walter already long established as one of Europe’s most important symphonic and operatic conductors, and Pinza as the Metropolitan’s leading basso. (It had been for him, in fact, that Gatti-Casazza, burned at the box office by previous Mozart projects, had restored Don Giovanni to the repertory in 1929 after a 21-year absence. And it was because of Pinza’s vocal and personal magnetism that the Don—and later Figaro—became for many years the property of basses and bass-baritones, rather than of baritones.) Walter worked with Pinza to reconfigure his portrayal of the Don, nudging him toward the the embodiment of “a magnetic rogue,” rather than a ” conquering male.” ^(I) After the big success of the 1934 production, D.G. stayed in the Salzburg repertory, with Walter always the conductor and Pinza the Don, except for one season, when Mariano Stabile took the role. (A recording of the 1937 revival survives, though barely; we may take a sideways glance at it, too.) In Bruno Walter, Pinza felt he had found a conductor worthy of the respect he had held for Toscanini—”but neither distant nor harsh”. Moreover, Pinza and Walter’s younger daughter, Greta, both in much-deteriorated marriages, fell in love and appeared headed for a marriage of their own, very much with Walter’s blessing. Then Greta was shot by her husband in a murder/suicide. The bond between conductor and his could-have-been son-in-law remained strong till Pinza’s death in 1957.