I have sometimes been asked for a recommendation for the best recording of this opera or that. The answer came easily in a few cases, but much less so in most. The perfect offering is likely nonexistent, the definitive one at best rare, but there are happily some cases where that elusive goal seems achieved. One such case is the Victor de Sabata, La Scala recording of Tosca with Maria Callas, Giuseppe di Stefano and Tito Gobbi.
This 1953 production may be in mono, but the great Walter Legge produced and the sound is excellent. The imported version remastered by Warner Classics offers the best sound quality available. Those two great singing actors Callas and Gobbi inhabit their roles and their voices are in their prime. DeSabata’s intensity combines with these two forces of nature to produce drama so vivid that other versions pale in comparison. Add to this the beautiful sound of the impassioned young Di Stefano and you have a Tosca for the ages.
The operas of Mozart have fared well on vinyl and CD. His four most popular operas, Le Nozze Di Figaro, Don Giovanni, Cosi Fan Tutte and Die Zauberflote, are all available in several fine offerings. Excepting Don Giovanni, Irecommend the performances conducted by Karl Böhm. Böhm was the master Mozartean of his long era and his Mozart operas are generally superbly cast. But the major lure remains Böhm himself, with his special mastery of the Mozart style.
Indeed, in Mozart and Strauss, Böhm was peerless for decades. He also assembled fine casts for the three recommended efforts: Hermann Prey, Gundula Janowitz, Edith Mathis, Tatiana Troyanos and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau for the Nozze, while the Cosi boasts the ideal pairing of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Christa Ludwig as Fiordiligi and Dorabella. The men, Alfredo Kraus, Giuseppe Taddei and Walter Berry, are worthy of the company. Finally, Böhm’s Zauberflote is a delight, with Roberta Peters, Evelyn Lear, Franz Crass and the dream casting of the wonderful Fritz Wunderlich and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau as Tamino and Papageno.
Don Giovanni is a case apart. The quality of Böhm’s singers is not up to that of some of the competition. It is generally a case of the wrong voice for the role that undermines the Böhm enterprise. The classic Don Giovanni, also remastered by Warner Classic, is Carlo Maria Giulini’s. Giulini offers a somewhat more dramatic reading than usual of sections of the score, particularly those involving the Commendatore. The achievement is one of Giulini’s greatest, which is high praise indeed. Giulini’s cast is superb: Eberhard Wächter, Joan Sutherland, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Luigi Alva, Giuseppe Taddei and Gottlob Frick. Mozart has rarely been better served.
Like those of Mozart, the operas of Puccini have been well served on recordings. Considering the Puccini catalogue, it might seem well-nigh impossible to choose the “best” version, other than the Tosca, but happily that is not the case. True, some will choose a La Boheme or Madama Butterfly for a favorite singer in the cast. In the case of Boheme, if you must have Pavarotti, buy the von Karajan recording, which is a fine one. Otherwise, one might be well advised to investigate the superb performance conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham, with Victoria De LosAngeles at her winning best and the classic Rodolfo of Jussi Bjorling. These two sing like angels and Beecham, who knew Puccini and discussed Boheme with him, offers a sure and loving account of this most popular of operas. Robert Merrill gives strong support.
The situation with Madama Butterfly is a similar one. One interpretation stands out from the crowd and that is Sir John Barbirolli’s with Renata Scottoand Carlo Bergonzi, both at their best.They are joined by Rolando Panerai, who offers a Sharpless of considerably higher quality than one is likely to encounter in the opera house. Barbirolli may seem an unlikely choice for Butterfly, but it proves an inspired one, as his reading is superior to most and the equal of any. Scotto is at her most inspired dramatically and her voice has never sounded fresher, while Bergonzi is ideal.
The only other version of a Puccini opera which I can recommend above all others is of Turandot. For a generation of opera lovers, Birgit Nilsson and Franco Corelli were synonymous with the roles of Turandot and Calaf. They sang their parts like no one else and both remain irreplaceable in this opera. Nilsson and Corelli are well supported by the Liu of Renata Scotto and the Timur of Bonaldo Giaiotti, as well as by the excellent Ping, Pang and Pong of Guido Mazzini, Franco Ricciardi and Piero de Palma. Francesco Molinari-Pradelli ably conducts. But the main reason this remains my Turandot of choice is the two principals, who have just the right voices for this opera, something no other set can claim.
The operas of Verdi present more of a problem when it comes to choosing a “best” performance, due to the extreme number of excellent examples among the major works. Generally, it finally comes down to choosing a set based on one’s personal preferences for the artists involved. I, for example, must have Leontyne Price, the finest Verdi soprano to have recorded complete Verdi operas. For Il Trovatore (Mehta, or better still, von Karajan’s live performance from Salzburg), Un Ballo in Maschera (Leinsdorf), La Forza Del Destino (Schippers) and Aida (Solti). For me, these are close to definitive and the rest of the cast is, happily, first rate.
The one example of a Verdi opera which certainly stakes a claim for “definitive” status is von Karajan’s first Falstaff, with a fabulous cast led by that wonderful singing actor, Tito Gobbi. who is as amusing as Falstaff as he is menacing in Tosca and, a great vocal actor and an excellent singer.
However, Falstaff is an opera which thrives on its ensembles and von Karajan hasthe singers to provide this. Gobbi is joined by Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Nan Merriman, Fedora Barbieri, Anna Moffo, Luigi Alva and Rolando Panerai. Falstaff has never sounded better, and this, the first of two von Karajan recordings of this great score, is far superior to his second version. True, that second recording has digital sound, but Walter Legge’s production of the first recording is so excellent that this should not be a consideration. Falstaff has attracted greatconductors for other versions, but none has surpassed the magic von Karajan finds in Verdi’s final masterpiece.
We now come to the works of Wagner. In most cases, we find the same situation as we did with Verdi; there are simply too many excellent examples, in most cases, to find one which stands above the rest. The one exception is the first recording of the complete Der Ring Des Nibelungen, better known as the Ring Cycle. Producer John Culshaw and his expert team of engineers gave us a Ring that has remained unsurpassed.
Sir Georg Solti conducts the Vienna Philharmonic in these famous recordings, which feature the incomparable Brünnhilde of Birgit Nilsson. Solti came into his own as a Wagner conductor with these recordings, which established him as one of the world’s greatest interpreters of Wagner’s music. The expected power and intensity are there of course, but he is equally effective in quiet, reflective passages, finding poetry in the drama. The Vienna Philharmonic seems the ideal orchestra for Wagner.
The presence of Solti, Vienna and Nilsson would be enough to recommend these recordings, but the rest of the casting is also superior to that of other versions. Besides Nilsson, the singers include Wolfgang Windgassen, Hans Hotter, Gottlob Frick, Kirsten Flagstad (Das Rheingold only), Gustav Neidlinger (a superb Alberich) and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, to name only a few. To these ears, no other Ring recording comes close to matching the excellence of these superb performances, thoughmany will also want to own a second Die Walküre for the definitive Siegmund (no quotes this time) of Jon Vickers on the von Karajan recording.
Finally, we come to Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier. Interestingly, we find Herbert von Karajan competing withhimself for top honors here. Karajan recorded Der Rosenkavalier twice with the Vienna Philharmonic and both versions have much to recommend them. The second recording has digital sound and features Anna Tomowa-Sintow, Agnes Baltsa, Janet Perry and Kurt Moll, but for all the excellence of this version, it cannot match Karajan’s first recording, which features Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Christa Ludwig, Teresa Stich-Randall and Otto Edelmann, also with the Vienna Philharmonic. Schwarzkopf’s warm, wistful Marschallin is superb and Ludwig and Stich-Randall make some of the most ethereal sounds I have ever heard, particularly in the scene of the presentation of the rose and in the final trio and duet. Edelmann was famous for his Baron Ochs, and one can hear why, as his singing and vocal acting are very fine. Indeed, this whole quartet of soloists are all wonderfully characterful. The Vienna players have this music in their blood and they are the perfect orchestra for it. Despite the digital sound in Karajan’s second version, this is the set to own. Warner Classics again offers the sonically superior edition.
Regretfully, this brings me to the end of my survey. There are many favorite operas not mentioned here, but in each case, either there are too many competing versions to select a specific example, or I have not had the opportunity to hear enough of the recordings to make comparisons. These recordings have yielded riches of remarkable depth which will give discerning fans a solid base line to begin their own investigations.