We've forgotten about Cornell MacNeill. The huge voice comes even through the microphone and matches Pavarotti vocal velvet for velvet. At this point in his career MacNeill still sounds as though he could with this power for six hours. His Italian is... not great, much better than mine... but you can almost hear the Minnesota accent through it. And the acting, well... MacNeil was famously bad at it. That's not why you listen to MacNeil. You listen for a voice with more dynamics than John Coltrane and with better technique than the Cleveland Orchestra. If you listen to MacNeil without watching him act, you could swear he was a great actor.
None of those American baritones after Tibbett were great actors or Italian speakers, they were all amazing vocalists. The Baritone voice is so much more interesting than the tenor. It can never impress you with outward vocal gymnatics, it can only modulate itself inwardly and affect you with how it captures the pathos of characters. Verdi gave his tenors and sopranos their due, but his baritones did the heavy lifting. Mozart outright disliked the tenor voice and his main male characters are almost all baritones of various sorts.
It's an interesting thing about baritones - how can such bad stage actors be so charismatic in dramatic parts? What the MacNeils and Merrills do is not just singing, its acting purely with the voice. Their voices capture nuances their bodies don't. They're no worse actors than, say, Clint Eastwood or Kevin Costner. Just like movie stars act through photography, singers act through singing. The rules of drama do not apply to opera, and that's a mistake a lot of directors make today. Avant-garde opera direction is fine, long as it engages the text seriously, but the visual in opera is just the outward shell that lets the music express emotions tailored to specific situations. Opera happens on the level of the ear, not the eye, and that's why listening opera recording can be an enthralling experience and why I often put opera videos on my laptop while looking at something entirely unrelated. No opera production can possibly bowl you over as much as the production you see in your head, and no amount of visuals can ever replace the value of good opera singing, which has mostly grown scarcer with every generation (baroque aside...).
Levine's Met was one of music's oddest experiments: an attempt to revive traditional Italian opera on American soil, with fundamentally American values. Bigger productions in a bigger hall, singers with huge voices competing against a louder orchestra, immaculate vocal production (until the voices got ruined) in hugely intricate theatrical experiences rendered by bad actors who barely sounded as though they spoke the languages they sang. All the money you can imagine to give as many visual experiences values as you'd get from Andrew Lloyd Webber on Broadway. Meanwhile, hardly any 20th century, hardly any Americans, hardly even anything that wasn't already a piece of standard repertoire. It was an attempt to revive something that already ossified completely. Why make that superhuman effort at all?
It was never going to work. Real art grows organically out of its surroundings. You can't make great Italian cuisine in Washington DC by flying in tomatoes and cheese from Naples every day. That's just a luxury product, and the only people who can afford it are the people who would could afford to fly to Italy to have the real thing, where they'll have a much more meaningful experience. You have to use local ingredients and incorporate local influences that respond to life as its lived in your surroundings. While James Levine expended decades of effort to create an ersatz vision of La Scala, James Lapine worked with Stephen Sondheim to create the greatest dramas ever written in New York of any form at all.
New York is the most dynamic place in the history of the world. Millions of stories wait to be told on every streetcorner, and yet such is the money and influence of its wealthy that those with the influence to fund their telling can afford to ignore them. Transcendence only occurs in the meeting place of high and low, elite and popular, sublime and vulgar, smart and stupid. True sublimity only occurs in the interconnection of the disparate when the connection of completely unrelated matters become revealed, and your mind feels warped into new dimension. If it's become just a checklist of the already made to be appreciated for the thing in itself which you think you already understand, it's not art, it's just a game, the capacity for revelation is gone. Verdi understood this as well as anyone ever did, and his music is full of populist influences and intentions. There is something obscene about a conception of opera that is for the elite and respite from the political concerns of the day. Verdi would blow his tophat.
There's a lot more to say, much of which I've said already, but this seems a good place to stop.
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