Grand Opera: The Story of the Met Read Online Free

corpse”) and Henderson (“empty formulas . . . without a trace of dramatic characterization”). In fact, bel canto programming continued to be so spotty that partisan critical attacks were largely moot.
    The beginning of the turnabout came with the February 18, 1918, revival of I Puritani . Without explanation, the Bellini that Krehbiel had once pilloried was suddenly a model to be emulated: “If only the composers of Francesca da Rimini or Mârouf could exchange three-quarters of their orchestral mastery for a tithe of the lyric ecstasy which floods the operas of Bellini, the world of modern opera would take on a more hopeful aspect” (Tribune) . Krehbiel’s conversion aside, I Puritani served the critic’s present purpose: to bludgeon Riccardo Zandonai and Henri Rabaud, whose operas had had recent Met premieres. A week later, Krehbiel devoted an entire column to a summary of I Puritani notices, nearly all glowing ( Tribune, Feb. 24). When Olin Downes became principal music reviewer for the Times in 1924, bel canto found a true champion. He took the occasion of the January 18, 1926, production of Il Barbieredi Siviglia to celebrate Rossini. The next year, it was Bellini’s turn. Norma retained “a surprising amount of its formal strength, its beauty and eloquence” (Nov. 17, 1927). And he loved La Sonnambula: “The music unfolds one faultless melody after another, always appropriate in warmth or pathos or tenderness to the emotion of the text, yet never violating the shape of the formal musical speech” (March 16, 1932). By the mid-1930s, the bel canto operas most frequently revived at the Met, Lucia di Lammermoor, Il Barbiere di Siviglia, L’Elisir d’amore, Norma, and Don Pasquale, were no longer wanting for rehabilitation by the critical establishment. They had stood the test of time and belonged to the ages.
    It took another couple of decades for the neglected operas of Rossini, Donizetti, and Bellini to emerge from near oblivion. Their rediscovery turned on the confluence of two phenomena, a soprano, Maria Callas, and a technology, the long-playing record. In January 1949, soon after the start of her career, Callas stunned the Venetian public by following a run of Walküre Brünnhildes with her first Puritani Elviras. During these performances at La Fenice, a role unquestionably the property of the soprano leggero (a light, flexible soprano voice) was triumphantly reinvented by a soprano drammatico d’agilità (a soprano voice of both power and agility). Her recording of Bellini’s then unfamiliar opera was released on the heels of the familiar Lucia . Callas went on to breathe new musical and dramatic life into other works long in limbo as Italian theaters mounted rarities specifically for her, Rossini’s Il Turco in Italia and Armida, Donizetti’s Anna Bolena and Poliuto, and Bellini’s Il Pirata, all captured live or in the studio. The conservative Met trod more timorously than did venues abroad. During her all-too-brief string of twenty-three performances with the company, the only bel canto roles Callas sang were Norma, her calling card, and Lucia. The December 8, 1956, broadcast finds her in less than optimal form. Still, the poignancy of Lucia’s predicament explodes at the intersection of bel canto ornamentation and Callas’s incisive accents and diction. She brings the plangency of a “Lacrimosa” to the “Soffriva nel pianto” duet; for the “Mad Scene,” she summons despair and ecstasy at will. Many sopranos, mostly leggero like her predecessors, have followed Callas as Lucia at the Met; few have been deaf to her lessons. 19
    Least of all Joan Sutherland. And she had none of Callas’s instability in the upper register, none of the weakness of most coloratura s in the lower. Her 1961 Met debut as Lucia was front-page news ( Herald Tribune, Nov. 27). Twelve minutes of curtain calls saluted the “Mad Scene.” Alas, cameras and microphones were absent. Two months later,