The Met’s All-Star La Bohème

 

 

La Bohème has racked up more performances at the Met than any other opera. Given nearly every season since 1900, it surpassed the previous champion, Aïda, long ago. Its current production, designed and staged by Franco Zeffirelli in 1981, is closing in on its six hundredth iteration. Zeffirelli’s aerial garret, two-level Parisian street scene, and snowy Act III win more applause than casts often headed by second tier singers. This post features highlights from the opera performed by Met stars of the past.

Claudia Muzio sang Mimì infrequently, and only at the beginning of her Met career. This recording of “Mi chiamano Mimì” was made in 1935, shortly before her premature death. Her attention to detail conjures up the presence of the man to whom she is describing herself. Like Bergonzi, she never exceeds the expressive dimensions set by Puccini.

The love duet that closes Act I, “O soave fanciulla,” catches Renata Tebaldi and Jussi Björling in peak form. The clip is from a 1956 telecast. Although Tebaldi and Björling co-starred at the Met but once (Tosca), they performed together live in concert and on several recordings. Rodolfo was the role of Björling’s Met debut in 1938; the second performance of Tebaldi’s first Met season (1954-1955) was as Mimì. Constrained by the TV camera, they win no acting awards, but, singing live, their gorgeous voices brilliantly portray the young lovers.

 

Rudolf Bing cast Ljuba Welitsch, his Salome and Aïda, in the secondary role of Musetta in order to discourage Patrice Munsel, his reigning soubrette, from taking on Mimì. He succeeded. Munsel wisely begged off, fearing the competition of the flamboyant Welitsch, although seven years later she ventured Mimì on the Met stage. Welitsch’s single Met Musetta (January 30, 1952) is remembered for her farcical overplaying—she rode Marcello piggy-back--and the beauty of her singing. Her 1949 recording of the famous waltz, conducted by none other than Josef Krips, is a lesson in how the aria should be delivered.

 Mimì was one of the roles Victoria de los Angeles sang most often at the Met. Her ineffably sweet timbre conveys, with utter simplicity, the sadness of Mimì’s Act III “addio” (a farewell albeit deferred) to Rodolfo. The clip is from the marvelous complete recording conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham.

 Rodolfo and Marcello lament their lost sweethearts at the start of Act IV. The duet of Beniamino Gigli and Giuseppe De Luca was a highlight of Bohème performances in the 1920s and 1930s. De Luca’s credentials include the creation of two Puccini roles, Sharpless in Madama Butterfly at La Scala in 1904 and the title role in Gianni Schicchi at the Met in 1918. Gigli sang Rodolfo often at the Met; his late-1930s complete recording of La Bohème was a best-seller.

P.S. Enrico Caruso and Nellie Melba were early exponents of La Bohème. In a tour performance in Los Angeles, Melba was the company’s first Mimì. Mary Garden commented that Melba’s high C at the end of the first act love duet was one of the most beautiful notes she had ever heard. Caruso still leads the list of Met tenors who have sung Rodolfo. This clip is from a recording made in 1907, less than a decade after the opera premiered in Turin.

 

 

La Forza del destino

The Metropolitan has mounted four productions of La Forza del destino and has presented the opera more than two hundred times, about as often as Fledermaus and Manon Lescaut. Late in entering the company’s repertoire, its 1918 premiere was notable for its stellar cast of Enrico Caruso, Giuseppe De Luca, José Mardones, and the debut, on any opera stage, of Rosa Ponselle. Rudolf Bing counted Forza among the notable Verdi revivals of his regime; opening night 1953 had Zinka Milanov, Richard Tucker, Leonard Warren, and Cesare Siepi. The remarkable décor designed by Eugene Berman was seen in fourteen out of thirty or so subsequent seasons. The 1996 edition of Verdi’s work, also decked out in traditional sets and costumes, fared much less well; it earned but one repetition more than a decade later.

 

It is doubtful if the 2024 Forza would be recognized by the artists who played Leonora, Alvaro, Carlo, and Padre Guardiano in the past. Mariusz Trelinski plants the narrative, based on a 19^th century Spanish melodrama, in a contemporary and post-Apocalyptic America, as he teases out the themes of Patriarchy and War.

This post recalls a few of the great singers who made Verdi’s brilliant, but sprawling and problematic La Forza del destino, such a frequent repertory item.

Leonora, the beleaguered heroine who seeks asylum and solitude after her beloved Alvaro accidentally kills her father, pleads for the help of the Virgin in her Act II aria “Madre, pietosa vergine.” Zinka Milanov, who holds the record for the most Leonoras at the Met, was at her peak for the 1953 revival. The depth, roundness, and power of her sound never prevents her from making a soft landing on the high notes. Her famous pianissimo is but one feature of this deeply felt rendition of the piece, drawn from a recital disk.

 

  Carlo Bengonzi, acknowledged as the consummate Verdi tenor of his generation, is heard here in a 1965 live performance. Bergonzi applies his warm timbre and scrupulous phrasing to the tragic Act III aria, “O, tu che in seno agli angeli.” Disconsolate, Alvaro evokes Leonora, whom he believes dead and among the angels.

The most familiar music in La Forza del destino is Leonora’s final aria, “Pace, pace, mio dio.” Alone in her hermitage, she declares her love for Alvaro, whom she, too, believes dead, and prays for peace. Her outburst in the final moments is a curse on those who dare invade her asylum. The clip is from a 1953 live performance of the opera from Florence, conducted by Dimitri Mitropoulos. Leonora is Renata Tebaldi who unstintingly deploys her lush voice in one of her favorite roles.

YouTube is a treasure trove of Forza excerpts; Rosa Ponselle, Beniamino Gigli, Eileen Farrell, Franco Corelli,  RichardTucker are highly recommended. Of particular interest are the Enrico Caruso/Giuseppe De Luca and Jussi Bjorling/Robert Merrill duets.

 

Mascagni’s L’Amico Fritz and Lodoletta: “commedia lirica” and “dramma lirico”

With Cavalleria rusticana (1890), his first opera and the liminal title of Italian verismo, Pietro Mascagni (1863-1945) was assured a place of privilege in operatic history. In a single act, the composer distilled the unbridled passion—and jealousy—of a woman betrayed. Revenge followed, and with it the offstage duel fatal to her guilty lover. So goes life in a Sicilian village in the late 19^th century as depicted in the libretto based on the Giovanni Verga novella (1883). That more than one reviewer credited the success of the piece to its high drama rankled the composer.

In response, Mascagni next chose “a simple libretto, something almost insubstantial, so that the opera will be judged entirely on its music.” Like Cavalleria, L’Amico Fritz (1891) has a rural setting, sylvan Alsace. But here, the similarity ends. In Fritz, a “commedia lirica,” the eponymous hero is a confirmed Jewish bachelor and wealthy landowner. David, the local rabbi, takes it upon himself to awaken his “friend’s” love for Suzel, the daughter of one of his tenants. The happy ending promises the couple an imminent wedding.

L'Amico Fritz enjoyed enormous acclaim at its Rome premiere, was soon conducted by none other than Gustav Mahler in Hamburg and was taken up quickly by other European companies. Yet the work failed at the Met in 1894. Since then, L’Amico Fritz has been heard a mere handful of times in New York, has survived on the margins of the core repertoire in Italy, and is only occasionally presented elsewhere. Perhaps, bent on an “insubstantial” plot so as to privilege his music, and as a rebuke to the critics of his first opera, Mascagni compromised the afterlife of his second.

If productions are rare, recordings of L’Amico Fritz are plentiful: we have at least ten editions on CD or DVD, some taken from live performances, two produced in the studio. The most popular excerpt, the Act II “Cherry Duet,” is on YouTube in a plethora of versions. Here, drawn from a 1969 complete studio recording, are Luciano Pavarotti and Mirella Freni at their peak. Fritz and Suzel, still hesitant to express their feelings for each other, sing instead the praises of music and Springtime.





Earlier, Suzel offers a bouquet of violets to Fritz along with her Act I “Son pochi fiori (Just a few flowers).” In a clip from a 1980 studio recording Leona Mitchell lends her rich, well-equalized timbre to both the aria’s dramatic opening and its expansive conclusion.








Between 1890 and 1935 Mascagni published fifteen operatic scores, many bearing labels that signal their diverse genres—lyric comedy, tragedy, drama, melodrama, idyll, among others. His 1917 “drama lirico,” Lodoletta, is based on Ouida’s 1874 novel, Two Little Wooden Shoes. The title character, a Dutch orphan, and Flammen, a French painter exiled in Holland, are chaste lovers. When Flammen is pardoned, Lodoletta follows him to Paris in Act III and, mistakenly thinking him unfaithful, dies in the snow on his doorstep.

Lodoletta, moderately successful at its Rome premiere, was greeted with even less enthusiasm elsewhere. The Met’s most bankable cast notwithstanding--Geraldine Farrar, Enrico Caruso, Pasquale Amato--the opera managed to string together very few repetitions in two seasons. A single aria, Lodoletta’s “Flammen, perdonami (Flammen, forgive me),” is familiar to contemporary operaphiles in the excellent renditions of Freni, Renata Tebaldi, Renata Scotto, and Renée Fleming.

And then there is Mafalda Favero. Favero and Jussi Björling made their Met debuts in a 1938 La Bohème. The tenor went on to a long career with the company; the soprano, detained in Italy by World War II, never again returned to the United States, alas. Favero’s 1941 recording of “Flammen, perdonami” is unforgettable. The exceptional clarity of her diction captures the crushing pathos of the dying Lodoletta.

Accessible on YouTube is a complete recording of L’Amico Fritz conducted by the composer and starring Ferruccio Tagliavini and Pia Tassinari. Roberto Alagna and Angela Gheorghiu are Fritz and Suzel in a more recent album. Strongly recommended is the “Cherry Duet” sung by Favero and Tito Schipa and also by Tagliavini and Magda Olivero.

Adriana Lecouvreur Redux

Every decade or so, the Metropolitan Opera revives Adriana Lecouvreur, the only title in Francesco Cilea’s oeuvre that can be said to figure, however marginally, in the contemporary repertoires of international opera companies. Adriana is back at the Met this season and was seen in cinemas “Live in HD” earlier this month.  Like the far better-known Giacomo Puccini, Cilea (born in 1866, died in 1950) was an adherent of Verismo, or more accurately of the “giovane scuola (the young school.  See our post of January 3, 2018, “What is Verismo?” https://operapost.blogspot.com/2018/01/what-is-verismo.html).  And like Floria Tosca, Adrienne Lecouvreur was a diva, though not a fictional 19^th-century Italian opera star but a historical 18^th-century French tragedienne.

Cilea began work on Adriana Lecouvreur in 1900 after the 1899 success of L’Arlesiana, the other of his compositions that continues to have some currency. Premiered at the Teatro Lirico of Milan, Adriana, together with L’Arlesiana starred the young Enrico Caruso who contributed to the success of both works. In 1907, Adriana opened the Metropolitan season with Caruso opposite the soprano Lina Cavalieri. A run of only three performances tells the story of the sorry reception Cilea’s work received in New York that year. The most authoritative New York reviewer deemed that Cavalieri “has neither beauty of voice nor excellence of song to recommend, but who can make pictures.” Following its initial fiasco, it took almost sixty years, and the persuasive powers of the reigning prima donna, Renata Tebaldi, for the opera to return to New York. Bad luck ensued once again: in vocal crisis, Tebaldi cancelled her last appearances.

In those sixty years, Adriana was very much alive in Italian theatres. And after 1950, Magda Olivero, who had come out of a nine-year retirement at the behest of Cilea himself, made the title role her own. We are fortunate to have a transcription of a 1959 Naples performance where she replaced an indisposed Tebaldi. Here is Adriana’s entrance aria, “Io son l’umile ancella (I am the humble handmaiden),” preceded by a few spoken lines from Racine’s tragedy, Bajazet, that the actress is about to perform on the stage of the Comédie Française. Adriana rehearses two deliveries, the second in a more emphatic style that better suits the text. There follows the aria in which Adriana explains to the assembled admirers that she is a mere servant of the author’s genius. Conductor Gianandrea Gavazzeni described the Olivero magic that brought the Naples audience to its feet, as it had and would so many others: “the shade and light of the vowels, the detached notes, the light legato, the true legato, the space between the words” (for more on Magda Olivero, see our posts of September 9, 2014, https://operapost.blogspot.com/2014/09/magda-olivero-1910-2014.html "Magda Olivero, 1910-2017 , and September 16 2014, “More Magda Olivero: Two Death Scenes” https://operapost.blogspot.com/2014/09/more-magda-olivero-two-death-scenes.html . 

Later in Act I, Maurizio arrives and declares his love for Adriana, praising her beauty in the short aria “La dolcissima effigie (The sweetest of semblances).” The passionate, devil-may-care tenor is Rolando Villazon; the aria is from a 2007 recital CD.

At the beginning of Act II we meet Adriana’s rival in love, the Principessa di Bouillon. She is unsure of Maurizio’s affections, anxious over their forthcoming tryst, and yet hopeful that the evening star will smile on their affair. In this 1955 video excerpt from Italian television, we see Fedora Barbieri, a leading exponent of the dramatic mezzo-soprano manner. Barbieri offers an object lesson in the explosive style apt for the agitated opening section, and the broad lyric effusion of the final lines.

In Act IV, Adriana meets her death by breathing the scent of flowers poisoned by the enraged Principessa. Tebaldi, in a recital disk made in the mid-1950s, gives an account of “Poveri fiori (Poor faded flowers)” that shows her in peak form, her honeyed timbre in service to the long, legato phrases and the subtlest changes of dynamics.

Post Script: If Adriana is Cilea’s gift to sopranos, the tenor lead of L’Arlesiana is his present to tenors. Federico, love-sick for the unnamed and unseen woman from Arles, envies his companion, the sleeping shepherd. He yearns for the oblivion that would allow him to forget the faithless object of his infatuation. In this 1928 recording, with great simplicity and palpable sincerity, Tito Schipa captures Federico’s despair in the unbearable heartbreak of the culminating phrase, “Mi fai tanto male. Ahimè! (You wound me so deeply. Dear God!).”