In Memoriam: Renata Scotto (1934-2013)

 The vast repertoire of Renata Scotto encompassed 19^th century vocal music, from the Classical Cherubini to the Grand Opera of Meyerbeer, through the great bel canto composers, Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti. Although she often played Verdi’s Violetta, Gilda, Lady Macbeth, Luisa Miller, and Desdemona, Scotto was perhaps most renowned for her Puccini roles. On the concert or the operatic stage, and most often on both, she left her mark on nearly all his works, from Le Villi (Anna) to Turandot (Liù). From the mid-1960s through the early 1980s Scotto was one of most widely recorded operatic sopranos; approximately forty of her complete performances are available on commercial and pirated CDs and DVDs.

Following her 1952 debut in La Traviata, Scotto was engaged by the major Italian opera companies. Her breakthrough to international stardom occurred during the visit of La Scala to the 1957 Edinburgh Festival when she replaced Maria Callas in Bellini’s La Sonnambula. She first appeared in the U.S. as Mimi in Chicago in 1960 and five years later triumphed as Cio-Cio-San at the Met, the role with which more than two decades later she bade farewell to the company.  She had racked up more than 300 Met performances in New York and on tour. Fortunately for us, she can continue to be seen and heard streaming in the 1977 inaugural telecast of PBS Live from the Met, La Bohème, and eight other titles in the series. And after retiring from major lyric theatres in the 1990s, well into her sixties, she took on a new language, German, and new arduous roles, the Marschallin (Der Rosenkavalier), Kundry (Parsifal), and Klytemnestra (Elektra).

Scotto was often the object of harsh criticism. Some found her detailed phrasing overly fussy, her acting mannered, and “over the top.” Many criticized her for attempting parts that normally fell to rich-voiced dramatic sopranos—Bellini’s Norma, Ponchielli’s Gioconda, for instance. There is no denying that she was often unable to produce the requisite volume with beautiful, rounded tone. But for many there were sufficient compensations in her refined bel canto technique and her deep insight into the music and the text.

I have chosen three clips that illustrate Scotto’s command of the light-voiced lyric coloratura manner, the more assertive phrasing demanded by Verdi, and the searing intensity needed for Puccini.

At the close of Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’amore, in the heartfelt “Prendi, per me sei libero (Take this, I have bought back your freedom)” Adina at last confesses her love for Nemorino as she offers him proof that she has saved him from his reckless enlistment in the army. This clip is from a televised 1967 Florence performance conducted by Gianandrea Gavazzeni. Scotto’s mastery of messa di voce, the gradual crescendo and subsequent decrescendo of a single note, shapes the aria with the emotions the character is finally able to express. The Nemorino you see seated next to Adina is Carlo Bergonzi.

Scotto’s Gilda is captured on two commercial recordings. This clip is drawn from the version conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini. Here, in “Tutte le feste al tempio (Each holy day in church),” Gilda confesses to Rigoletto, her distraught father, that she fell in love with a handsome stranger, the Duke of Mantua disguised as a poor student, and was later kidnapped by the Duke’s courtiers.

As Scotto enacts Cio-Cio-San’s resolve to commit suicide and bids an agonized farewell to her little son, she summons the tragic stature of the abandoned wife determined to die with honor. This clip is drawn from a remarkable 1967 recording conducted by Sir John Barbirolli. At the very end you will hear the voice of Pinkerton {Carlo Bergonzi) calling out, all too late, the name of the Japanese wife he has betrayed.

YouTube offers a profusion of Scotto’s performances. Particularly recommended are her Violetta (La Traviata), Elena (I Vespri Siciliani), Cio-Cio-San (Madama Butterfly), and the DVD of her 1977 Mimì from the Live from the Met telecast.

The Lost Season, March 2021: Nabucco

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Unrelated to the pandemic, in fact more than a year before the rush to closure, the Met announced that its stage would be dark during all of February 2021. The winter month had proven to be particularly slow. In compensation, the season would be extended into June 2021. Covid rendered the matter moot for the moment. Plans for 2021-2022 adhere to the revised calendar. 

Despite the shutdown, the Met was again in the news in March 2021. The death of James Levine in Palm Springs on March 9 at the age of 77 was widely reported eight days later. The cause was pronounced to have been cardiopulmonary arrest with Parkinson’s Disease as a contributing factor. The many obituaries and articles surrounding Levine’s life and the long-brewing scandal that ended his illustrious forty-six-year career as the Met’s conductor, music and artistic director tell the story of the rise and fall of one of the most powerful and influential actors in the history of the company.

The orchestra Levine developed into one of the world’s most admired instrumental ensembles over his decades on 39^th Street and at Lincoln Center was, it too, in the news in March. Met musicians had been furloughed without pay since the previous April. A day after word of Levine’s death reached the readers of the New York Times, the musicians’ union agreed to come to the bargaining table in exchange for partial pay for its members for eight weeks while negotiations were in progress. That management would be demanding permanent cuts in orchestra salaries to help off-set the $150 million loss in earned revenue incurred since the start of the lock-down was made explicit at the outset. The offer had been on the table since December. The Met chorus had accepted a similar deal in February. In fact, the Met orchestra was the last of U.S. major ensembles to consent, however reluctantly, to partial pay. The cost to the orchestra had been high. Ten of its ninety-seven members had opted to retire during the pandemic, in stunning contrast to the two or three who would make their exit in a typical year. Many had felt obliged to leave New York City for less expensive communities near and far. A few had sold their instruments in order to pay their bills while on unemployment.  

The cancellations in March 2021 included a new production of Don Giovanni (Peter Mattei, Gerard Finley, Ailyn Pérez, Isabel Leonard), and revivals of Giulio Cesare (Iestyn Davies, Kristina Mkhitaryan), Lulu (Brenda Rae), Rusalka (Sonya Yoncheva, Piotr Beczala), and Nabucco (George Gagnidze, Anna Netrebko). We have chosen to highlight Nabucco, not heard at the Met since 2017.

Verdi himself dated his extraordinary trajectory as a composer not from his first opera but from his third, Nabucco, premiered in 1842 at La Scala. The title entered the Met repertoire relatively late, opening night 1960. General Manager Rudolf Bing’s predilection for Verdi had already accounted for the important revivals of the long-neglected Don Carlo in 1950 and Ernani in 1956, and the company premiere of Macbeth in 1959. This string of successes was interrupted by the tepid reception that befell Nabucco. The work failed to survive its first season. Four decades later, in 2001, with a spectacular scenic investiture and a competent array of principal singers, reviewers and public finally embraced Verdi’s early work; the projected 2021 revival would have been its sixth.

Under the stewardship of James Levine, whose Met career began towards the end of the Bing era, the company remained strongly committed to Verdi. Levine was on the podium for seventeen of the composer’s operas including the house premieres of three rarities, I Lombardi, Stiffelio, and I Vespri Siciliani. And it was Levine who led Nabucco’s popular new production in 2001. Here he conducts the orchestra and chorus in the beloved anthem “Va', pensiero, sull'ali dorate (Go, thoughts, on golden wings).” The Israelites, slaves in Babylon, mourn their lost homeland.

On learning that she was born a slave and not, as she had thought, the daughter of Nabucco, the king of Babylon, Abigaille vents her rage in the recitative of her Act II extended aria. In the lyrical section, “Anch'io dischiuso un giorno (I too once opened my heart),” she confesses her love for Ismaele, a Jewish nobleman enamored of Nabucco’s true daughter, Fenena. Finally, in the vehement cabaletta, "Salgo già del trono aurato (I already ascend the golden throne)," Abigaille’s anger once again erupts as she claims the crown of Babylon. In this concert performance, Julia Varady fearlessly navigates the extreme upper and lower ends of the soprano range and spins out the intervening legato phrases.

The ensemble that closes Act II of Nabucco, “S'appressan gl'istanti d’un ira fatale (The moment of direst wrath is fast approaching),” is among the most thrilling of the opera’s many concerted pieces. Presumed dead, Nabucco returns to reclaim his crown from Abigaille and to order the death of the Israelites. In this clip, drawn from a 1981 Verona performance, the principals are headed by Renato Bruson and Ghena Dimitrova. The Roman Arena is a fitting frame for this Biblical spectacle.

 

 

The Met in the Time of Pandemic: The Lost Season, June-September 2020, Aïda

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The summer of 2020 began with the disheartening announcement that the Met had cancelled the fall season. The company hoped to reopen on New Year’s Eve, a full seven months away. On September 23, the pandemic raging unabated, the administration had no choice but to cancel the spring 2021 season as well. The theater would be dark for another painful year.

 

Between June 1 and the end of September the Met continued to make news. Tragically, a second musician, assistant conductor Joel Revzen, had succumbed to the virus. His orchestra colleagues, furloughed since the end of March, had had to make major personal adjustments to compensate for the suspension of their $190K average salary. For its part, management anticipated a loss of revenue amounting to $100 million by the end of the year. And, to make matters worse, the Met was ineligible for the government loan program due to the magnitude of its payroll. 

 

The success of the daily streaming of titles from its archive and subsequent donations from thousands of grateful new contributors on lockdown led to the launching of a series of digital concerts at the nominal fee of $20 each. Unlike the earlier free recitals and the gala that were shot as amateur videos (see our post of April 16, 2012, https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/7211323416075256950/3307619185363703156), this new series, originating from sites proximate to the artists’ homes, was professionally recorded. The first of the seventy-five-minute performances featured Jonas Kaufmann, the Baroque library of a Bavarian abbey serving as background. He was followed by Renée Fleming, Anna Netrebko, and nine other Met stars in standard arias from the operatic repertoire.

On September 20, one day before the lost season of 2020-2021 had been scheduled to open with Giuseppe Verdi’s Aïda, a New York Times headline read, “The Met Opera Fired James Levine Citing Sexual Misconduct.” According to this report, the company, which had dismissed Levine in March 2018, settled with its former music director emeritus for $3.5 million. So ended what the Times called “one of the highest-profile, messiest feuds in the Met’s nearly 140-year history.”  

The night of September 21, 2020 would have have been the twelfth time Aïda opened a Met season. And in terms of titles most often programmed by the Met since its 1883 founding, Aïda ranks second after La Bohème. Verdi’s grandest opera was to have a new staging and a renowned cast: Anna Netrebko, Anita Rachvelishvili, Piotr Beczala, and Ludovic Tézier, conducted by Levine’s successor as music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin.

Here are the selections we have chosen for this post, three magnificent duets, all performed in the 1960s, one of opera’s most fabulous eras.

The first is the Amonasro/Aïda duet. The claims of patriotism, patriarchy, and paternity come together in the Act III confrontation between the Ethiopian king and his daughter. Amonasro evokes their home, accuses Aïda of disloyalty to fatherland and father and, after a struggle, exacts the promise to betray her beloved Radamès, leader of the Egyptian troops. In a commercial recording conducted by Herbert von Karajan, Renata Tebaldi and Cornell MacNeil are brilliant adversaries in this epic conflict between duty and love.

Amneris's great scene is Act IV, Scene 1. She pleads for the life of Radames with the unyielding high priest, Ramfis. The power and timbre of Belgian mezzo Rita Gorr are to the measure of the despairing Egyptian princess. In this commercial recording conducted by Georg Solti, Giorgio Tozzi is Ramfis.

In the opera’s final scene, Radamès has been condemned to death and Aïda joins him in the tomb that closes in on their last moments. In the love duet “O terra addio (Farewell, O Earth)” they look ahead to the Heaven that awaits them and back on the vale of tears they are leaving behind. In this excerpt, drawn from a live performance, both principals float ethereal high pianissimi. Verdi specialist Carlo Bergonzi was a frequent Met Radamès; Aïda is Leyla Gencer whose long international itinerary did not include a stop at the Metropolitan, alas. Their stock gestures, troublesome on video, would not have distracted the audience seated in the vast space of Verona’s Roman arena unduly. At the very end we see and hear mezzo Fiorenza Cossotto as Amneris.

 

Met Galas 2: Star Power, 1966/2017

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In our latest post, we sketched the Met careers of so many remarkable artists who participated in the 1966 gala--or might have, and evoked the names of their illustrious predecessors seated on the stage throughout the celebration. In the present post, we scroll back to the gala concert of this past May and contrast it with the gala produced half a century earlier. We are interested in presentation, repertoire, and roster above all. This comparison is telling in gauging the relative strength of the company’s brand then and now.

First, presentation. On the set of Tannhäuser’s Hall of Song, the 1966 gala arrayed thirty-one retired stars who answered a roll call, each taking a place on the stage to the cheers of the crowd. The history of the Metropolitan back to Giovanni Martinelli’s 1913 debut paraded before an audience attuned to the emotional pitch of the occasion. And as the honored guests made their entrances, a section of the chorus also seated on the stage rose in tribute: the sopranos for Elisabeth Rethberg and Marjorie Lawrence, the altos for Marian Anderson and Risë Stevens, the tenors for Martinelli and Richard Crooks, the basses for Alexander Kipnis, and so on in homage to these and many, many more beloved principals of the past. When Lotte Lehmann walked in, everyone stood.

By way of contrast, at the 2017 gala former stars whose performances had deeply touched the audience seated in the house were absent from the proceedings. Replacing the collective memory of treasured evenings embodied by the artists in full view, video clips of more than two dozen productions were seen in projections. The visuals served as backdrops for the live performers. And the music was interrupted by clips from interviews with luminaries such as Leontyne Price, James Levine, and Marc Chagall. This filmed material was an inescapable referent to Peter Gelb’s promotion of production, direction and design, and of his focus on the Met as a media platform. But it did little to foreground voice and interpretation, the stuff that draws fervent operagoing. The affective impact of the 1966 roll call was largely lost.

An intriguing parenthesis: On October 23, 1983, on the occasion of its 100^th birthday, the company threw itself a two-part gala, matinee and evening. In the very final segment, a phalanx of former Met stars constituted an onstage audience once again. What in the world could Zinka Milanov have been thinking as she sat just feet away from Price and Luciano Pavarotti, at their absolute best in the act 2 duet of Un Ballo in maschera? And what could Eleanor Steber have been feeling during Kiri Te Kanawa’s “Dove sono”? When the final curtain rose, the dozens and dozens of artists crammed on the stage struck a deeply moving tableau of the Met past and present.

In 1966, retired stars were visible on the stage from the beginning to the end of the concert; in 1983, their presence was invited only for the final segment of the evening show; and in 2017, they had no role at all, save for the fleeting images of a chosen few on the big screen.

With regard to programming, in large measure the 1966 and 2017 galas are similarly conceived. Undisputed chestnuts dominate both bills. The crucial expansions of the repertoire into the baroque, the Slavic, and the contemporary wings, championed by James Levine (see our book, Grand Opera: The Story of the Met), are only marginally present, testimony perhaps to the unflagging desire of a well-heeled public for the familiar hits of the operatic core.

And finally, if the metrics of star power in a given epoch are difficult to determine, the depth of any opera company’s principal asset, its roster, is not. Take, for example, the sopranos who participated in the 1966 gala. Eight had already or would one day be cast as Mimì in La Bohème, the title most frequently performed at the Met: Kirsten, Albanese, Tebaldi, Mary Curtis-Verna, Teresa Stratas, Steber, Caballé, Gabriella Tucci. Among the artists who sang in the 2017 concert only Kristine Opolais, Sonya Yoncheva, and Anna Netrebko had taken on this iconic role. And to date, only Netrebko has shown the box-office appeal of Licia Albanese, Renata Tebaldi, or Montserrat Caballé. There were eight Carmens onstage in 1966; in 2017, Elina Garanca was the sole artist to have sung Bizet’s eternal gypsy.

Many factors combine to explain the downward trend in attendance that has haunted Gelb’s Met. In 2015-2016, ticket sales fell to 66% of capacity. In the late 1990s, capacity was at 90%. During the final seasons at the Old Met, the “Sold Out” sign was a frequent disappointment to eager ticket seekers. Our close look at two galas separated by fifty years tells us that the decline in the number of bankable divas and divos bears a large share of responsibility for the company’s perilous fiscal straits.

But while the breadth and depth of the 1966 roster is a far cry from that available to the current Met management, the 2017 gala featured several stars who would have shone on any stage at any time. Here in concert and in commercial recordings are Joseph Calleja, Sonya Yoncheva, Elina Garanča, and Joyce DiDonato in the same arias they sang this past May.

Calleja, who has been with the company more than ten years, will be in the lustrous cast of Norma that opens the 2017-2018 season. The immediately recognizable quality of his vibrant timbre and the security of his range are displayed in Rodolfo’s “Che gelida manina.”

Sonya Yoncheva made her company debut as Gilda in 2013. Since then she has excelled in the lyric and spinto roles of Violetta, Desdemona, and Mimì.  In this “Mi chiamano Mimì” we hear her fresh and persuasive phrasing. La Bohème is one of three operas starring Yoncheva to be telecast “Live in HD” in 2017-2018. The others are Verdi’s Luisa Miller and Puccini’s Tosca.

Elina Garanča is familiar to the Met’s worldwide audiences from her performances in the “HD Live” telecasts of Carmen and Cenerentola. Her refined rendition of “Mon coeur s’ouvre à ta voix” is a riposte to the excess of many Dalilas.

Featured in next season’s new productions of Norma and Massenet’s Cendrillon is Joyce DiDonato. Here she delivers a stunning “Bel raggio lusinghier” from Rossini’s Semiramide. As always, the mezzo bends her bravura technique to her portrayal of the character.

Die Meistersinger: The Song’s the Thing

The Metropolitan will present Die Meistersinger in its “Live in HD” series this coming Saturday, December 13. The company’s only previous telecast of Wagner’s comedy dates from 2001. Available on DVD, it was conducted by James Levine, as it will be on Saturday; it will be seen in the same pictorial, traditionalist production, the work of Otto Schenk and Günther Schneider-Siemssen. The excellent 2001 cast featured James Morris, Ben Heppner, Karita Mattila, and Thomas Allen.

Meistersinger received its U.S. premiere at the Met in 1886 and has been a repertoire staple ever since. Apart from the very early and nearly never performed Das Liebesverbot, it is the composer’s only comedy. And except for Das Liebesverbot, it is his only work devoid of the supernatural. In 16^th-century, middle-class Nuremberg there are no gods and Valkyries, mermaids, dragons, love potions, or knights of the Holy Grail. In fact, the central character, Hans Sachs, is an historical figure, a cobbler and a poet. Both his shoemaking and his knowledge of verse are deeply embedded in the libretto.

Structured around a singing contest for which Sachs, a mastersinger, is a judge, Meistersinger focuses on the place of art in society through the character of one of the contestants, Walther von Stolzing. Walther progresses from undisciplined inspiration in Act I to the Act III completion of the Preislied, a prize love-song that both expresses his ardor and wins the approbation of the mastersingers and the populace. The opera reaches its climax in a crescendo of public acclaim for Hans Sachs, for his generosity, good sense, and, problematically for generations of listeners, for his defense of German art. Sachs’s warning against foreign influences (generally understood as French or Jewish) is a direct appeal to German nationalism. On the occasion of the opera’s first production at Glyndebourne in 2011, The Guardian noted, “Music from Meistersinger was chosen to accompany the inaugural celebrations of the Third Reich in 1933, it was used by Leni Riefenstahl in her propaganda films, it was conducted on film by Wilhelm Furtwängler to symbolize the greatness of Germany's war effort, and it was the only piece performed at Wagner's theatre in Bayreuth during the war years.”

The four clips that follow provide a sampler of Wagner at his most lyrical. When asked with whom he has studied poetry, Walther answers sweetly, the medieval minstrel Walther von der Vogelweide, whose verses inspired him. And what school instructed him? The birds of the forest. His answers come forth in the three stanzas of his song. Leo Slezak, a remarkable tenor who appeared at the Met between 1909 and 1913 in roles as diverse in their demands as Mozart’s Tamino and Wagner’s Tannhaüser, sings “Am stillen Herd (At the quiet hearth)” with an ease of address and a purity of timbre preserved in this 1905 recording.

Hans Sachs, too, is a poet of nature, but with a philosophical bent, as he repeatedly proves through the course of the opera. His Act III, scene 1 monologue, “Wahn! Wahn! (Madness, madness)” first reflects on the follies of human nature in its thirst for anger and strife. Sachs, who finds peace in contemplating his beloved Nuremberg, then evokes the fragrance of his elder-tree on Midsummer’s Eve. Friedrich Schorr, a phenomenal heroic baritone and perhaps the most renowned Sachs of the 20^th century, encompasses the piece’s power and tenderness.

The first scene of Act III ends with an ecstatic quintet whose harmonies are proof that the benevolent cobbler has intervened put things right: he has given youth its due, renouncing his claim to Eva, and has helped Walther complete the song that will win Eva’s hand; Sachs has also promoted his affable apprentice David to the rank of journeyman, thereby assuring his marriage to Eva’s nurse, Magdalene. All sing as if in a dream. Led by, and then capped by the floating lines of the soprano, the five voices intertwine in common joy. The recording here is from a 1935 Vienna performance conducted by Felix Weingartner. Lotte Lehmann is the Eva. When she sang the role soon after her 1934 Met debut, Lawrence Gilman threw aside critical restraint and wrote, "with her [first] words, [she] made one exclaim involuntarily to oneself, 'But this is the real thing.'"

  

The payoff at the opera’s conclusion is Walther’s prize song. In the previous scene, Wagner whets our appetite for the finished piece; Sachs makes helpful comments as the budding poet composes. The final version of the stanzas of the Preislied signals the triumph of love, of community, of art. Lauritz Melchior, unquestionably the greatest Wagner tenor of the 20^th century, an irreplaceable Tristan and Siegfried, never sang the less demanding Walther in his long Met career. But even at the age of sixty, soon after he left the company, the freshness of his voice and his infectious joy are manifest in this 1950 television rendition of the aria.

Mozart at the Met: Le Nozze di Figaro

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The Metropolitan opened its 2014-15 season last Monday evening, September 22, with a new production of Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro. (If you wish to read our review of the Met's new production of Le Nozze di Figaro, please use this link: http://www.ucpress.edu/blog/16876/le-nozze-di-figaro-at-the-met-september-2014/.)  This year’s program also shows a revival of Die Zauberflöte a little later in the fall and the revival of a recent production of Don Giovanni in February.  Cosi fan tutte, Idomeneo, La Clemenza di Tito, and Die Entführung aus dem Serail have all been presented within the last several years.

It was not always so. In fact, with the exception of Don Giovanni, on the calendar in the Met’s very first season, 1883-84, Mozart was heard only sporadically on 39^th Street until the 1940s. And even this, his most popular work, was absent for long stretches. It was only in 1929 that the ultimate libertine, having resumed his amorous pursuits along Broadway after a twenty-year interruption, would stray no more. As for Le Nozze di Figaro and Die Zauberflöte, they would enter the Met repertoire to stay in the 1940s.  In the early 1950s they were joined by Cosi fan tutte.  Die Entführung, returns now and then, as do Idomeneo and La Clemenza di Tito.

The role of conductors in the long Mozart wave, and the support lent by Edward Johnson, the Met general manager from 1935 to 1950, cannot be overstated.  Its champions were Bruno Walter and Fritz Busch, both anti-fascists, one Jewish, the other not.  Like so many of their cohort, they had fled European podiums and eventually made their way to the Metropolitan. As the first music director of Glyndebourne, Busch had spearheaded the Mozart revival that had begun abroad in the 1930s; Walter conducted sixty-four Mozart performances In New York between 1941 and 1959. The last of Mozart’s champions has been James Levine, the Met’s music director, who introduced Idomeneo and La Clemenza di Tito to the repertoire, and led the orchestra in this year’s gala opening.

The subject of today’s post, Le Nozze di Figaro, returned to the Met in 1940 after an absence of more than two decades. Since then, Nozze has received more Met performances than even such old favorites as Lohengrin and Faust. Reviewers of the 1940 production took issue with excessively broad stage direction, an awkward décor, and a first-night cast that seemed still at dress rehearsal level. But the importance of the occasion was uncontested and the audience had a wonderful time at what had until then been considered fare for the cognoscenti. Ezio Pinza as Figaro and Bidú Sayão as Susanna formed the nucleus of an ensemble that fixed the opera’s place in the repertoire.

In 1950, Cesare Siepi inherited Pinza's mantle as the Met's principal bass. He went on to amass an even greater total of Nozze Figaros than his illustrious precedessor. In a clip from an Austrian TV concert, we hear why Siepi's mellifluous basso cantante, sparkling diction, and panache became the gold standard for the rebellious valet. In the Act IV aria, “Aprite un po’ quegli occhi,” believing that his bride has betrayed him with the Count, his master, Figaro rants against the faithlessness of all women. 

Moments later, Susanna, pretending to pine for the Count, teases her beloved bridegroom in the aria “Deh vieni, non tardar.” Sayão’s wraps this seductive night music in her tangy soprano, her playful inflection of the text, and her impeccable legato. This is a studio recording made at the time of the 1940 Met performances.

Eleanor Steber did not take on the Countess until 1942, but for the remainder of the decade the role was essentially hers. She sang it more often than has any other Met soprano, before or since. She made a commercial recording of “Porgi, amor,” the Countess’s difficult entrance aria, in 1945, a moment in which her voice was in full bloom. Her seamless line, even articulation of fioritura, and silvery timbre identify her as an exemplary Mozart practitioner; she finds the rich, doleful tone to fill the music of the sad wife who implores Love to return her wandering husband to her.

Mildred Miller is the Met’s record-holding Cherubino. In the 1950s, she held a monopoly on the impetuous, love-sick youth. Alas, there is no commercial recording of Miller in the music. Runner-up in the Cherubino sweepstakes is Frederica von Stade whose warmth, subtle interpretation, and endearing personality are unforgettable. She took part in a wonderful 1980 Paris production that, happily for us, was captured on video. In her act II ballad, “Voi che sapete,” the randy page sings his heart out to the Countess and Susanna.

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