In Review: Met Stars Sing Verdi

In 2001, to commemorate the one-hundredth anniversary of the death of Giuseppe Verdi, the Metropolitan Opera Guild released a three-disc anthology of excerpts from seventeen of the composer's operas (plus the Requiem), drawn from recordings made over the course of the last century by many prominent artists who sang at the Met. As a culmination of our own observance of the "Verdi Year" over the past several issues of The Opera Quarterly, the following in-depth analysis of the performances assembled on this set of CDs (met 237) is something we are certain our readers will appreciate. —Ed.

 

ONE must not read the title of this intriguing anthology too quickly. It isn't "Great Met Verdi Singers Sing Verdi" or " . . . Sing the Verdi They Sang at the Met." No, "Met Stars Sing Verdi" means just what it says, that artists who were Metropolitan Opera stars (or at least sang leading roles with the company) are heard in this album of excerpts from the operas of Italy's greatest composer. Individual claims to expertise in that music vary widely among the chosen participants. Despite limitations on the available material (described below), there is a laudable inclusiveness where singers who were in fact the Met's greatest Verdians are concerned, which seems primarily to be a testament to the successive artists rosters that were the glory of RCA Victor for about the first six decades of the last century.

Big-voiced Verdians, those who could set the opera house vibrating with the sheer amplitude of their endowments, here include Grace Bumbry, Enrico Caruso, Franco Corelli, Cornell MacNeil, Giovanni Martinelli, Robert Merrill, Zinka Milanov, Ezio Pinza, Rosa Ponselle, Samuel Ramey, Giulietta Simionato, and Leonard Warren. The more lyric singers (some of whom were plenty dramatic enough in spirit and delivery though lacking the ultimate vocal avoirdupois) include Licia Albanese, Carlo Bergonzi, Jussi Björling, Plácido Domingo, Mirella Freni, Beniamino Gigli, Luciano Pavarotti, Leontyne Price, Elisabeth Rethberg, Richard Tucker, and Shirley Verrett.

Some featured artists possess decidedly non-Verdi voices, regardless of how many Violettas, Gildas, Nannettas, or Oscars they may have sung, or how skillfully (Erna Berger, Anna Moffo, Roberta Peters, Bidú Sayão, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Teresa Stich-Randall). Then there are those of appropriate vocal size and displacement for the master's characteristic music who were capable of providing memorable thrills and chills but just as often found themselves plagued by liabilities of color or stylistic grasp or by technical-control vagaries that, in witnessed live performances, produced negative results ranging from moderately exasperating to downright destructive of the music (Régine Crespin, Gwyneth Jones, Leonie Rysanek). Those who sang too much Verdi for their own good, surviving for a while in repertory too heavy by far because they were native speakers of Italian and had interesting artistic ideas, are represented by the likes of Giuseppe Di Stefano, Katia Ricciarelli, and Renata Scotto. José Carreras belongs in this category, too, though his peninsula was the Iberian and first tongue Spanish. The "indispensable idiosyncratics" club is cochaired by Maria Callas and three great Otellos: James McCracken, Jon Vickers, and Ramón Vinay, with Iagos Tito Gobbi and Lawrence Tibbett as sergeants-at-arms, the last two providing the kind of baritonal ballast unique to those who must make up in dramatic accent (frequently enough falling over into vocal bluster) and interpretative acumen what they lack in tonal effulgence and warmth.

Producer/programmer Paul Gruber has done yeoman work despite a major, inescapable disadvantage, one that aggravated him enough to have annotator Mary Jane Phillips-Matz (the master of concision, by the way) mention it in her notes ("A Word about the Recordings"). This is that only two of the great recorded-sound giants (BMG, hereafter referred to as RCA or Victor, and EMI, known in its operatic heyday as Angel Records) will still grant the Metropolitan Opera Guild permission to reproduce their products on its special label. The consequent loss of the...