February 2007 saw the slightly artificial celebration of the European Day of Opera. This was in fact the 400th anniversary of the first performance of Monteverdi’s Orfeo, the first opera which is still regularly performed. Orfeo is not the earliest opera, nor is it the earliest surviving opera, but it is certainly the finest among the first; the masterpiece of the new genre that emerges so swiftly at the turn of the 17th century. If the pretext for this commemorative day is a little unhistorical, it is nevertheless good to have a new resource to raise the profile of opera.
In Spain, the national newspapers have taken this anniversary to heart, and this has produced a spate of CD and DVD offers in the newsagents, converting them into improvised music shops. The initial CD offer of “El País” was La traviata in the 1952 Maria Callas recording, for only one Euro! The following week brought a double offer in the same paper – more expensive, but still a bargain at less than ten Euros – Carmen and Fidelio. The presentation of the operas is attractive: hardback book format with artwork, an ongoing historical essay, synopsis, libretto with Spanish translation, an introduction to the opera, and notes on the performers and the recording.
Before I go much further, I better confess that I am not fond of historical recordings. I do not systematically collect them, and these three recordings are all old: the most recent, Fidelio from Covent Garden with Klemperer, dates from 1962. The 1954 Carmen, by an engaging coincidence, was recorded in Vienna while I was finishing the first day of my life, on the other side of the planet, in South America!
Three listening sessions have not changed my feelings about older recordings. In the first place, there is the question of sound. Of course, no recording technique fully captures the real effect of performance, but modern digital recordings give far fuller and more truthful sound recreation. For me, the monaural sound that I found so wonderful and convincing when I started listening to recorded music in the late 1950s is now very difficult to take. Another problem with these recordings is that they are live performances. ‘Live recording’ is a silly term in itself, since dead musicians do not play or sing, but there seems to be no alternative. ‘Performances recorded in the presence of an audience’ is too long for everyday use. However, importantly, it draws attention to the audience, and unless it is a particularly quiet audience, untroubled by chest problems or enthusiasm, it becomes difficult to listen repeatedly to coughs, bravoes and applause.
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Live historical recordings raise some further personal bêtes noirs. Why, for instance, do audiences commonly applaud during orchestral music, as they do on the Klemperer Fidelio? Is this part of Beethoven’s work less important? And why do opera fans so seldom notice what are unacceptable orchestral standards? Of my three operas, only Fidelio (from Covent Garden) has a really nice orchestral sound. The RAI Turin Symphony Orchestra in La traviata offers playing that regional youth orchestras nowadays would be fairly ashamed of, and the Vienna Carmen (the Vienna Symphony Orchestra under Karajan) is the ugliest of the collection, with scratchy string tone and brass like plumbing, though the very dry recording is partly responsible. Curiously, the distinguished Spanish critic, Arturo Reverter, carps at the Royal Opera House orchestra’s occasional slips while in the other introductory essays the playing is either discreetly excused, or even praised!
The choice of La traviata and Carmen raises some particularly irritating historical performance practices. La traviatais not a particularly long opera, so it is hard to see why in the past cuts were thought necessary. Paradoxically, Carmen was actually longer in the past than nowadays, with Ernest Guiraud’s additional recitatives which smartened the piece up for promotion from the Opéra Comique. For me, they all but destroy the work’s balance, but they became a fixture in this opera and I usually skip them in listening. Karajan uses them here, and I have heard them in two of the four productions that I have seen. Act Four does not suffer from Guiraud, since Bizet left no dialogue for the Paris Conservatoire’s repair man, but there is the alarming intromission of a chunk of his L’Arlesienne, a common addition, then. Incidentally, this is especially dislocating if you are listening to the opera in Spain, as you find your ears suddenly jolted from nearby Andalusia to distant Provence. La traviata and Carmen are among best loved operas in the repertoire, and deservedly so. It is therefore almost impossible to see why good singers and conductors in the past felt that it was acceptable to shorten the first when it includes some of the finest and most poignant music Verdi wrote, while the second was treated as a musical schoolbag for all sorts of oddments.
Despite the opportunity to hear Simionato, Callas, Jurinac and Hotter, my new recordings are unlikely to become personal favourites. (I ought to have included Nicolai Gedda’s José in the list of the distinguished but I cannot share Mr Reverter’s enthusiasm: Gedda has tuning problems in ‘Dragon d’Alcala’ and his timing in ‘La fleur que tu m’avais jeteé’ is not accurate.) I shall keep the recordings as archive material, but their effect so far has been to send me gratefully back to more coherent and realistic modern performances.
Richard Pairaudeau
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