We pick up the story
of the Saturday Afternoon broadcasts where we left off in our May 3, 2020 post,
“The Met: Looking Back in a Time of Pandemic."Since the middle of
March, during these months of closure in response to the urgency of social
distancing, the company has each day streamed, without charge to the
audience, Met performances from its video archive. This initiative born of
the current crisis can be counted a giant step in the long journey that began
inauspiciously on January 12, 1910 when, alas, the first two transmissions from
the old house on 39th Street and Broadway were doomed by an inadequate
apparatus. Olive Fremstad’s Tosca, Emmy Destinn’s Santuzza, and Enrico Caruso’s
Canio were barely audible to the handful of listeners who held telephone
receivers to their ears. Two decades would elapse before exigent general
manager Giulio Gatti-Casazza would allow himself to be persuaded that
microphones and amplifiers had met the fidelity demands of grand opera. Gatti’s
resistance was no doubt abetted by worry that the broadcasts would compromise in-house
receipts. In 1931 the Met began the project of inveigling itself into millions
of homes across the country, advancing the elusive ambition of naturalizing the
stubbornly European art form. The deal struck with NBC provided for the
transmission of twenty-four partial performances from the 39th
Street stage in 1931-32 and again 1932-33 at the then hefty fee of $120,000 per
year.
The first
nation-wide broadcast, the Christmas Day Hänsel und Gretel, was carried
by more than one hundred stations on both the Red and Blue (later ABC) NBC
networks and by shortwave around the world. The composer and critic Deems
Taylor narrated the action over the music, to the distress of many
listeners. Almost from the start, announcer Milton
Cross was the unmistakable voice of the Met. During his introduction and the
intermissions, in orotund tones and purple prose, he told the story of the
opera, described sets and costumes, and added his own enthusiastic observations
to the applause. Cross’s more than four-decade unbroken streak ended with his
death in 1975.
The radio audience
of the first broadcast season, 1931-32, heard only one complete opera, the
inaugural Hänsel und Gretel. Each of the remaining transmissions was
limited to an hour. Despite the time constraint, the offerings allowed for a
sampling of the company’s core repertoire, the annual Bohèmes, Traviatas
and Walküres, the belated Met premiere of Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra,
and occasional novelties such as Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sadko and Deems
Taylor’s own Peter Ibbetson. On the roster were many of the world’s preeminent
singers. Only scratchy fragments remain of the 1931-32 fare. We have therefore
chosen to recall the first broadcast season through commercial recordings made by
the very same artists in the very same roles they sang over the airways that year.
Georges Thill, the leading
French tenor of the interwar period, sang with the New York company from Spring
1931 to Spring 1932. In his 1930 recording of Faust’s address to Marguerite’s
dwelling, “Salut, demeure chaste et pure,” Thill deploys his signature sweet
timbre, pellucid diction, and refined style. Thanks to a technique rare among
his peers, he reaches the aria’s climax in a breathtaking high C taken in head
voice.
Beniamino Gigli, on
the other hand, was for most operaphiles the undisputed premier Italian
tenor of the interwar period. Here, at the opening of Act IV of La Bohème,
he is joined by the elegant baritone Giuseppe De Luca, a Met mainstay for two
decades. In the jocular first section of the duet Rodolfo and Marcello exchange
jabs about their lost lovers; in the lyrical second section, “O, Mimì, tu più
non torni,” they bemoan their loss.
In the 1920s and
early 1930s, Lucrezia Bori owned the title role of Verdi’s La Traviata. For
Met audiences, the soprano’s moving, very personal, sometimes eccentric reading
of the role defined Violetta. We hear Bori in a 1928 recording of “Ah, fors’è
lui” and “Sempre libera.”
The return of
Bellini’s Norma to the Met repertoire in 1927 was hailed as a landmark
in the performance history of the opera. [See our previous post https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/7211323416075256950/386443341138521218 Thunderous applause was showered on
Rosa Ponselle. And to this day, she is considered by many (including Maria
Callas, the Norma of her generation) the Druid priestess for the ages. Ponselle’s
1929 recording of “Casta diva” and its cabaletta, “Ah! bello a me ritorno,” is
a lesson in both phrasing and agility.
In 1940, nine years
after the first NBC transmission, Texaco took on the prestigious sponsorship of
Met broadcasts. Texaco’s sixty-three-year run remains the longest span of
corporate support in radio history. And for nearly ninety years, Met
broadcasts have generated a pool of opera consumers readily and repeatedly
tapped for often sorely needed revenue. Such was the case during the Depression
through the “Save the Met” campaign (once again see our post of early May). And
such we hope will be the case upon the Met’s reopening, announced recently for
New Year’s Eve 2020, when a faithful and grateful public will no doubt recall
the months and months of daily video streaming that helped it survive its
personal and cultural isolation.