Where The Aida Survey Is So Far

  Tucker's Law of Musical Performance: Verdi's Aida--78-88 years

This is not a consumer review, this is a kind of attempt, through the history of Aida performance on record, to make a pocket history of Italian opera in a long period when Italian opera doesn't matter through. 

Aida was premiered in Cairo in 1871. If we are to believe the Molajoli/Sabajno recordings, it took a lifetime as it always does to fully acclimate to the demands of a great work of art. Aida is one of the three or four most iconic operas ever written, but it does not play itself like Verdi's Big Three (Rig/Trov/Trav) which can be played by any ol' small opera company in reduced forces and still make its impact.

Aida is big, Aida is decadent, and it needs the greatness of a great orchestra, a great conductor, giant voices in a giant hall with giant sets. The Golden Age of opera had to be over by the time Aida ascended to the top of opera's pantheon. But is there a recording out there which portrays decadence without becoming decadent itself?

My answer is that there was a particular moment in the 50s when Aida was taken seriously. I forget who said it but some Broadway composer said that musical theater circles back every 80 years, and to me, 80 years is roughly the time it takes for performers to be worthy of the greatest classical works: to understood and master them.

So in that sense, Aida is not a work of the 1870s, it is a work of the 1950s. So many performers around that time truly seemed to understand Aida, not as melodrama or exhibition, and not as just another comfortable night at the opera, but as a great work of art: gripping and challenging. Artists started coming to terms with it in the most serious way: Toscanini of course, but also Gui, Alberto Erede, Antonino Votto, and even John Barbirolli. Well known singers like Maria Callas and Lyonie Rysanek, and unknowns like Catarina Mancini and Mario Filipeschi, and serious artists like Antonietta Stella and Giulietta Simoniatto. There were complacent recordings in that era too, but the greatest achieved something that went beyond mere opera and became the great art that is always there in Verdi for those willing to find it. But by 1959-60 it was all over: the Solti and Karajan recordings were released, Aida truly went international and while certain artists got it, they swam against the current. Aida became a high decible, high production blockbuster, and those who understood it had to revive old traditions and reject the new ones. 

de Sabata/Cigna: Apollo to Dionysus Meter: 9

Panizza/Cigna: Apollo to Dionysus Meter: 10

Beecham/Caniglia: Apollo to Dionysus Meter: 8

The first essential recording of Aida, to me at least, is Victor de Sabata leading La Scala in 1937 Berlin. It's not deep, it's not art, it's not even complete--some of my favorite scenes are missing, but as an exhibition, it is magnificent: de Sabata, La Scala, Gina Cigna, Beniamino Gigli and Ebe Stignani. Is it a serious examination of Aida? Well... is Aida a serious work of art? It is great opera as great opera gets, but... um... the jury is out.... The same goes in the same year in New York. Gina Cigna somehow sings in both Berlin and at the Metropolitan in 1937. In New York she was partnered with the more 'heroic tenor' Giovanni Martinelli and Bruna Castagna, along with Ettore Panizza, the one conductor who played Verdi with even less subtlety than de Sabata. And if that isn't enough, you've got Gigli and Stignani two years later in London with Maria Caniglia, a slightly more lyric 'spinto' than Cigna's trumpet tones under Thomas Beecham, the world's greatest podium entertainer. The sound of all three is atrocious, but all three are glorious. They're more than art or entertainment, they're part of the history of the world: documents of how the grandest opera inflamed the world. Opera may be a thing of the past, but so long as opera can put on loud and lavish entertainments like Aida, it can offer the world things musical theater and movies cannot possibly match.

How's it done? Singers with technique so secure that they seem able to do anything at all: so secure that you can maintain the vocal line through all histrionics, hold notes out forever loud and soft, sing over the world's loudest orchestras (which may have been about half as loud back then...), phrase in such a way that the back of the hall hears the nuances as well as the front, float notes like velvet on air or hurl them out like a poisoned arrow. You hear great singers inspiring each other and if the conductor's great, he gets the orchestra to inspire the singers too. Electric sparks fly that could incinerate whole city blocks. You have conductors who follow them everywhere through whatever odd twists and turns they do in interpretations so outsize that they sometimes take twice as much time to get through a phrase as lesser stars did twenty years previously.  Just listen to the effects Beniamino Gigli constantly strains for: half his lines start a split second early with words like 'uh-NUUUU-MEN' as a way of catching your attention. Toscanini would throw him out of the theater, and in a work of elegant proportions like Traviata or Rigoletto, that's the height of vulgarity. But Aida? Well, it's pretty much in keeping with the whole thing's spirit. 

When you hear the Greek inevitability of Toscanini, the infinite colors of elderly Riccardo Muti, the nuance of Vittorio Gui, the perfect balance of Alberto Erede, the heart and soul of John Barbirolli, and when you hear the absolute miracles of texture Karajan works in his second recording (more on that anon), who can possibly doubt the artistic seriousness of this? But then you hear so much vocal grandstanding, so much conducting grandstanding, and you realize that this exhibitionism is built into the work at its pyramidal foundation. Some performances take Aida as a dare to make the work so larger than life that you can't even hear the peaks. Yet that said, there is enormous pleasure in high notes and orchestral fireworks and lavish sets just as there is in movie explosions and sex scenes. It's exhibition, but exhibition can be awesome.

But because there is so much exhibitionism, there is also so much complacency. Other performances sound so tired of Aida that they sound like just another runthrough by people who are as tired of hearing the piece as I often am.

How many recordings really do something like justice to the piece? Well, a lot if you want to hear opera as opera. I get somewhat impatient with that kind of exhibitionism as I get older.

Solti/Price: Apollo to Dionysus Meter: Breaks the scale 

The greatest vocalism? As far as I'm concerned, there's only one choice, and it's not the one people usually say. The greatest vocalism is Leontyne Price, Jon Vickers, Rita Gorr, Robert Merrill--four stars in the flush of youth in fantastic sound, under an all-too fired up Georg Solti. Unfortunately, the problem is the inexperience of it. Solti is still 49. It's not the loudness... ... ok it is the loudness, but not just that. Solti had just became a star, and he became a star because he was willing to amp up the fireworks to a level that more tasteful, more cultured maestri knew better than to do. Solti was a great opera conductor, and in more genial operas like Cosi, Zauberflote, Carmen, Onegin, he could be the epitome of magnificence, but then you get 'Grand Solti', the Solti we remember, and he was a voice wrecker: amping up the noise of his orchestra for excitement's sake while knowing that he risked blowing out the voices of his singers. We have been on this track ever since. like in his famous Wagner, he never quite mastered pacing in those years, and in between the fireworks of awesome excitement comes quiet parts that drain the blood from mosquitos.

Toscanini/Nelli: Apollo to Dionysus Meter: 3 1/2

If you want well-paced excitement, well... there's only once place to go: Toscanini, Toscanini, Toscanini. Nobody understood Verdi at the fundament like Toscanini did: every detail in 1949 was etched perfectly in hieroglyphs, with Robert Shaw's chorus and a magnificent handpicked orchestra of American musicians for NBC. The only problem? The singers. I doubt any star singer in America would put up with Toscanini's bullshit, his dictatorial mien, his legendary temper, or apparently his cheapness (apparently that was a thing...). Now, nobody generates more bullshit than singers, but Toscanini deliberately chose the most white bread singers, including a young and very nervous Richard Tucker (no relation) and his "pupil" Herva Nelli. But at least they could sing their parts: you also have to put up with the Amneris of one Eva Gustafsson, who sounds a bit like Julia Child.

Callas/De Fabritiis: Apollo to Dionysus Meter: 10

There is, of course, the famous live Callas in 1951 Mexico City where she tosses off a high E-Flat at the end of the Triumphal March. One youtuber called it the most famous opera recording ever... I never even heard of this recording until the era of youtube... It's certainly a high voltage affair--everybody keeps up with Callas: Mario del Monaco, Oriala Dominguez, Giuseppe Taddei, and Oliviero de Fabritiis lights a fire under a Latin orchestra that seemed to need no extra fire. The sound is quite bad, but that recording is great opera. It is not, however, great art. It's a shapeless mass that takes wing in the moment of the performance and relates no moment of the performance to the moment that came before or comes after. Great artistry had to wait for Callas to find a partner worthy of her.

Gui/Mancini: Apollo to Dionysus Meter: 6 1/2

But then things really start to cook. 1951 also hears such august legends of opera history as Caterina Mancini and Mario FIlippeschi assuming the principals. Unknowns they may be, but they are magnificent, as are better known singers like Giulietta Simoniato and Rolando Panerai, with RAI Roma under the watchful eye of the great Vittorio Gui, who would easily be the leading conductor of any country that didn't have Toscanini and de Sabata--but at this point I prefer Gui to them both. The vast majority of the time the tempi stays in the ballpark of Verdi's metronome markings, and yet within that framework Gui seems to set a new pace every fifteen seconds. The orchestra isn't great, but it's Verdi in Rome, do you really think they don't know how to play it? The only problem is the sound, which sounds as though it keeps the all important orchestra in the opera house next door to the opera house where it's playing. It is such a shame: this is probably the greatest conducting we have ever heard of Aida, and yet you can barely hear the orchestra.

Erede/Tebaldi: Apollo to Dionysus Meter: 5

But the next year comes a recording overseen by Alberto Erede, one of those maestri di capella whom we took for granted, who on their average days made the trains run on time, and on the great days provided a level of involvement and inspiration that was never inhibited by a lack of knowledge about the idiom. All one can say is that this is greatness. Is Erede as great as Gui or Toscanini? Of course not. Erede was a maestro di capella, Vittorio Gui is one of the most underrated conductors of the 20th century. Erede cannot possibly hope to generate the fireworks of a star conductor and orchestra in the Triumphal March, but for once it seems like a solemn ancient triumph, not a state fair. But Erede was nobody's fool, once an assistant to Fritz Busch in Dresden. He's not as literal as Toscanini, not as supple as Gui, not as trusted by singers as Serafin, but he combines the best of all three (along with a magnificent octave up rewrite of the brass in the triumphal march scene); always in the ballpark of the score without being a slave to it, and here you can hear the damn orchestra! Just to give an example of how great Erede is: in Act 1 Scene II, my favorite scene, every time the male chorus ansewrs the Priestess's 'Possente' the chorus is just a little bit slower than the time before. Furthermore, we get to hear Tebaldi and del Monaco in embryo, two of the great voices of all time, young and hungry, ready to give absolutely everything. Even Tebaldi provides emotional involvement, and occasionally you can even hear a quiet note from del Monaco! The now seasoned Ebe Stignani is a little past her prime, but she keeps up with these young lions the way she once kept up with Gigli and Cigna.

Callas/Barbirolli: Apollo to Dionysus Meter: 8

And then there's the greatest romantic reading. Not the greatest Aida, certainly not the greatest sounding Aida, far from the most perfect, but romanticism at its best: John Barbirolli in an actual honest to god opera broadcast: twenty years after he swore off opera after making his bones (batons) there, here he is, showing what the fuss was over fifteen years before he returned to opera when he was already past it. Barbirolli and Callas, who would have ever thought? Giulietta Simoniato next to them, luxury casting in the basses with Michael Langdon and Giulio Neri, and no less than a 26 year old Joan Sutherland singing the priestess. The only unfortunate presence is entirely too German sounding Kurt Baum sounding like he wandered over from a production of the Merry Widow. I love Barbirolli the way I love Gigli: everything's over the top and I couldn't care less. He never misses a chance to start a rallentando five bars early, to linger on a recitative like it's already a love duet, but unlike certain more mummified conductors, at least he speeds up as much as he slows down. This is romanticism as it should be done: what comes out exhibitionist when done by de Sabata and Muti sounds like emotion itself under Glorious John. Known as the great accompanist of his time, he's the perfect partner for Callas, not just supporting her but encouraging her every dramatic instinct. I don't know if it's at all appropriate for Aida, it feels like Callas is singing Tosca, but her intensity is positively feral. For those who believe opera is mere melodrama, she schools us all here as everywhere else. Even if she doesn't have a Radames to match, she is so absorbing here that she needs no Radames at all.

So let's pause for a second: why, in my perception, is the Barbirolli/Callas so much closer to the spirit than other ultra-romantic performances from the late thirties? The answer is that one approach feels like an arena event, and one feels sacred. One feels as though it's meant to excite, one feels as though it's meant to move. What feels hammy at the old Met is felt at Covent Garden. What feels attacked in Berlin feels inhabited in London. What feels like a party fifteen years earlier at 30s CG feels like a rite of the soul in 50s CG.

And then, over the course of one year, you have three very good but extremely imperfect recordings that take the work very seriously:

Serafin/Callas: Apollo to Dionysus Meter: 4

Maria Callas, Fedora Barbieri and a more mature Richard Tucker at La Scala under the ever-reliable Tulio Serafin. Callas is... not Aida. Some people will go for Callas in anything the same way some people will go for Olivier or Streep in anything. I am not one of them: mature women like Tosca and Violetta, sure, but ingenues like Aida and Gilda? Fuck no... Even when Callas was in her twenties she sounded 47 and had the romantic appeal of a lady in the Trump cabinet. Nevertheless, what makes Callas Callas is that even when she is utterly unsuited to the role, she finds things in it nobody else does. 'Actorly' it may be, but every line reading has intention and nuance and character: even if it gives the impression of a 60 year old Meryl Streep playing Juliet, it's still a wonderful performance of its type. Everybody else takes a back seat to the Callas show: only Tito Gobbi has a fighting chance to get the spotlight off her. Everything else is rather... mid?

Kubelik/Rysanek: Apollo to Dionysus Meter: 6

Still better than them both is my dear Rafael Kubelik, conducting the Vienna Opera with singers like Lyonie Ryzanek, Hans Hopf, Jean Madeira, George London... are we sure this is Aida and not a Wagner opera?... and sure enough, it's in German. But for what it is, it's absolutely glorious. If you can imagine Italian vowels amid all that vocalism, magnificently played and paced, put those brutal German consonants out of your mind.

Karajan/Tebaldi: Apollo to Dionysus Meter: 2

But then we start getting to decadence like that Solti recording, and also the first by that other voice wrecker: Herbert von Karajan: frankly the worse voice wrecker. More on that anon again. In 1959, Karajan is barely fifty, and he doesn't have many ideas about Aida yet. This is more a 'record' than it is a performance or an interpretation. It is clear, at least to me, that Karajan is not in charge here. The producer is: the once famous John Culshaw, who in his lifetime had a power that exceeded even Karajan's. Culshaw wanted an artificial soundstage, and Karajan, always intrigued by recording technology, provided everything Culshaw wanted. The result was that Karajan had a brand to manufacture rather than ideas. It is all very Karajanish: polished and so imposing in loud moments it sounds sculpted from marble, but the many intriguing ideas of Karajan's twenty-years-later remake are not here. In its place we have bombast: inflated tempi, inflated orchestral sound, inflated singer mic placements, inflated dynamic contrasts that leave you turning the volume dial up and down. In Renata Tebaldi, the world's greatest singer and worst actress, Karajan had the perfect Aida for his conception and the perfect Amanasro in Cornell MacNeill (must be a family thing...). Poor Carlo Bergonzi and Giulietta Simoniato thought they were recording Verdi but are stuck in an entombed monument. Simoniato was so good, so complex, so caught between ferocity and tenderness that in the beginning of Act IV, she briefly warms Karajan up, but otherwise this Verdi has more Wagner in it than Solti's Ring.

Mehta/Apollo to Dionysus Meter: Something this shallow breaks the scale. 

The next stage of decadence is 1965, when we get Birgit Nilsson as Aida: Wagner's trumpet herself, along with the most dangerous tenor of them all: Franco Corelli, who as always holds nothing back and whose electricity threatens to obscure even the largest voice and loudest orchestra, and that's what he gets. The Rome Opera Orchestra plays like the world's loudest orchestra when mic'd this closely, and they are inflamed by Zubin Mehta at all of 29, and still with us at 90. As always with Mehta, the sound defines thrills and passion and lushness, and there is nary a detail to be found. Nary an orchestral crescendo, nary a rubato, nary even a piano; all taken at the safest possible tempos at every moment to convey Mehta's massive mass. Even then, Mehta was a master of short cuts. The Act III prelude seems to be the one time he glances at the metronome, and it's one of the few markings that doesn't work--no violin section can ever coordinate those spiccatos evenly at that speed: and you realize Mehta takes it at the recommended speed because he has no desire to savor the delicacy and the langor. This recording announces it is unapologetic spectacle from the first 'guerra'. Visceral excitement everywhere, punching with as much force and speed as George Foreman. It is Aida the carnival, and this party rages. It's a great recording, it's also absolutely shameless. It is left to Grace Bumbry to keep up with these cyclones, and she acquits herself pretty well, but no mic can hide just how much more powerful those other two voices are. Bumbry is the only person here trying to find any seriousness. 

Muti/Caballe: Apollo to Dionysus Meter: 8 1/2

Then there is that even more magnificent 1974 recording of Muti and Caballe. Magnificent of its type that is... Muti is absolutely ferocious in that Al Pacino way where everything is senselessly hammed in a manner that is more about the performer than the work, but nobody can deny the absolute charisma of it. The triumph scene is an absolute carnival: you can practically sea the roller coasters and cotton candy, but my god does he get the grandeur here: only Muti and Levine approach Toscanini in this all-crucial scene. Everything about this reading is melodramatic, but Aida is melodramatic. Furthermore, Muti at 33 did not yet have the cache to rein in interventionist singers like Caballe and Cosotto: so the scenes between them become a melodramatic campfest of hellcats. Caballe does not miss a chance for the kind of portamento and pitch losing accent that would drive Muti crazy, while Cosotto spits her accents out like a snake does her venom: dots are doubled all over the place. You can even hear the imperturbable Piero Cappucilli straining his voice to match Muti's knife-wielder energy. This is much more about the fireworks than Verdi. Some dynamics and accents are respected, but Muti conducts as though he's never heard of a metronome and with all kinds of interpolated rubatos that you'd only find elsewhere in the types of de Sabata and Panizza performances he spent a career railing against. And yet, unlike Solti, this is a performance by a conductor who knows his Verdi so well that he knows just how much romanticism this approach needs. We would wait for Muti to match his professed seriousness with substance for another thirty years. This is greatness, but it is definitely decadence. 

Chailly/Urmana: Apollo to Dionysus Meter: breaks the scale. 

And then there is Riccardo Chailly's pass at it. Chailly, unlike Muti, didn't need time to evolve. He was always a cold fish, but his musical values were bedrock from the moment he appeared on the scene in his early 20s, as was his utter intolerance for opera's bullshit. Not since Toscanini has there been a conductor who is such a stickler for the urtext. How he gets singers to comply with him is a mystery no one will ever solve, but as with every other piece, there has never been an Aida this thought through. Unlike in, say, Mahler, which has been thought through so many ways that another new approach can elicit groans, Verdi needs this sort of cleaning up badly. No one in recorded history, among those who got good sound at least, has considered so much how crucial certain orchestral lines are and just how they should balance against the voice. Some of the tempos are right on the metronome clicks, others are too slow as has become Chailly's latter-day mein in opera, and Chailly occasionally hews to tradition in manners he never would ten years earlier like slowing up for Aida's first stage entrance or at Amneris's cries of "Ah Vieni" at the beginning of Act II. As ever with Chailly, it is not the complacent slowness of Perlea or the mummified slowness of young Karajan. It is a means to get utter linear clarity and nuanced detailing. You might not like the aesthetic: I vastly prefer Chailly's mien here to what he does in most of the Germans, but even in when you don't like Chailly, he is a maestro among maestri, and this is one of the few truly great performances in the years after Aida's golden age. This isn't melodrama, it's not even romanticism, we hear, finally, Aida's full pyramid from just about all its sides: form, color, line, vocalism, characterization, spectacle, pacing and that indefinable pagan spirituality. Neither melodrama nor complacency here. It would have been nice to get this level of sound and orchestral playing with the singers of fifty years earlier, but finally, hear this, and you basically hear what Aida is.  

And yes... this is the famous production which Alagna left in a huff after getting boo'd after the first aria. Listening to how well he does here, I don't blame him. He is not as subtle as his female co-stars, and is not acting up their storm, but he is acquiting himself as a Radames whose singing is pretty close to magnificent in a century that doesn't have magnificent Radameses. On the other hand, the gods blessed this recording with two absolutely fabulous female leads: great singing actresses with powerful voices and a minimum of warble. Their Act II duet is absolutely electric: dramatic, colorful, characterized in three dimensions. You can hear both the smiles and the insincerity in Ildiko Komlosi's voice just before she erupts in rage. Violetta Urmana suffers as a truly great prima donna does, only to occasionally erupt in joy rather than rage. The only problem is Carlo Guelfi's Amanasro, whose vocal insuitability he conceals by snarling: not the worst solution... This performance, truly, is something to behold. 

Muti/Netrebko: Apollo to Dionysus Meter: 5

But then there is Muti's Salzburg performance in 2017. Forty-three years after the recording, only one bona-fide star in Anna Netrebko (is there more than one bona-fide star in any production anymore?), and otherwise the best Verdi singers you can find in 2017, who a very far cry from what they were in 1974. This is such a different Muti. It's far from perfect: the ego is still there, the departures from the score are all over the place. Muti still contorts Verdi in manners opposite from what he professes whenever it suits him, and yet the knowledge, the affection, the ability to find the right color, or tinta, the perfect Italian sound (sfumato--to use an art term) he gets from the Vienna Philharmonic, it's a miracle unseen in this piece since the days of Toscanini and Gui (his teacher). Perfection is not on the menu, nor supposed to be. Chailly is perfection, old Muti is infinity. He has all Karajan's ability to find the exact right color and balance the instrumental lines against the singers so that the orchestra becomes a participant rather than just an accompanist: but unlike Karajan, the orchestra never dominates. Muti may be the dictator, but he does not demand complete stardom here. This is the sort of late-in-life mastery we only get from conductors who've devoted their life to this music: the way we get that extraordinary aliveness from so many Brucknerians late in life: Blomstedt, Haitink, Wand, Skrowaczewski, Giulini, Jochum, Karajan... this is Muti in Verdi. Even the instruments sound like voices. 

Essential: * means especially so

de Sabata/Cigna '37 for its incredible visceral energy

Panizza/Cigna '37 for its incredible extravagance

Toscanini/Nelli '49 for an idea that is perfect, even if not more *

Gui/Mancini '51 for a near platonic ideal of a performance, if only we heard the orchestra better **

Erede/Tebaldi '52 to show precisely what impact Aida could make when the world knew this opera better than ever before or since. ***

Callas/Barbirolli '53 for a plumbing into Aida's soul *

Kubelik/Rysanek '55 for a ceaselessly warm chamber approach 

Varviso/Nilsson '64 for the most underrated conductor to stand in the opera pit

Mehta/Nilsson '65 for pure spectacle and visceral thrills

Muti/Caballe '74 for pure melodrama 

Levine/Price '84 for Price's last ever opera performance, for the most promising young maestro since 1950 who never delivered, and for a lifetime's experience from a singing actress who for thirty years, WAS Aida 

Chailly/Urmana 2004 for everything Aida is. ***

Muti/Netrebko 2017 for a revival of Verdian style from a master who has learned from this music his whole life. **

I don't want to condescend to Verdi, I've spent too much of my life doing that already, but the populism is part of what's great about him. If people want to say that Verdi is as great as Mozart and Beethoven, they have to play him as seriously as they play Mozart and Beethoven: and how much of Verdi's appeal does that shore?

Other people would disagree with me, but I think Aida is of a different variety from his greatest operas. It was written to be a grand summation of Verdi's career, but Verdi was mining his more populist side in Aida, not the side of great art which he found in Otello, Falstaff, Boccanegra and Boito. In Verdi's greatest operas, he starts with the story and creates music to set the story: that's how we get Rigoletto and Traviata and Otello and Falstaff. But in Don Carlo, one cannot help sensing that he began with the setting, and even moreso in Aida. Everyone talks about how great and dramatic Act III is, but after O Patria Mia I find Act III weak sauce. I feel as though Verdi is just moving through the gears of what an opera is supposed to do before he gets to the next amazing tableauxes in Act IV. Think of Amanasro's music where he disavows Aida. It's basically the Monterone music in Rigoletto.

The right conductor never got there: Karajan II and Gui got close, so of course did Toscanini in his way, and we might wish in this piece for masters as great as Mitropoulos, Fricsay, Giulini, Carlos Kleiber (either Kleiber really...), Franco Ferrara, but I think the truly right conductor for this piece was Guido Cantelli: a conductor with Toscanini's austere inevitability but without his rigidity: a Toscanini who could lower the temperature to warmth, the conductor James Levine threatened to become and never did. This is the recording we're missing and oh the tragedy. In my mind, I hear great singing actors like Franco Corelli, Giulietta Simoniatto, Shirley Verrett late in her career when she switched to soprano, all under the disciplining hand of Guido Cantelli leading the Philharmonia in a performance that's loud when it should be loud, quiet when it should be quiet, and formally perfect. The spectacle gets its entire due, but it stays in proportion so it never crowds out the intimacy. Cantelli would stick to Verdi's tempi like Toscanini, he bends the rhythm no more than 5 or 10 clicks for singers like Gui; he observes the accents without overdoing them the way Muti does in every bar, and he would have all the weight of sound Abbado lacks. 

And yet there is so much about Aida that is art at the top of Parnassus. I don't think it's the usual scenes people say. It's not the triumphal march, and it's not even really the tomb scene (except for the offstage choruses). It's the preparations for battle before Ritorna Vincitor, it's the ritual in praise of P'tah, or the offstage judgement scene. Aida is almost unique among Verdi in how it strives for ceremonial sublimity. You can feel it in the Triumphal March if it's not played as a carnival (good luck...), but even outside the Triumph scene, Aida requires a great chorus. A few Verdi operas require a great chorus, particularly among the early operas, but only Don Carlo requires a chorus to create something that seems anywhere close to this large: as though the scene is set of an entire civilization. As far as 'choral epics' go, it's up there with Boris and Les Troyens, and like in those epics, the chorus is what gives the scenes their vividness. I sometimes feel as though Aida is great in exact proportion to how much he gives the chorus to do, but in order to hear the greatness of Aida's most famous scene, you need an ascetic of the Toscanini/Chailly variety who rein tempos to absolute steadiness so that it doesn't feel like just 'elephants on parade.'

I Am Nothing: 88ish%

  On the holiest night of the year, the chorus intones the Kol Nidre when we tell God we won't keep our promises, then the Barchu when we bow to the Lord and bless Him to the world forever, then the Shema when we proclaim the Lord is One, , then the Eighteen blessings and the Vidui which is so holy we say it as we die, then the Selichot where we stretch the confessions of the Vidui to ten minutes, then the Piyyutim when we chant Byzantine poetry in acrostic, then the plead for forgiveness to our Father and King that is the Avinu Malkeinu, and finally the Aleinu and Mourner's Kaddish. 

Aleinu is the common prayer which we say multiple times a day. But on the High Holidays the Aleinu is so holy that the clergy don't just bow down, they bow to the floor. 

Here at Odessa's Greycer Choral Shul, the prayer is considered so important that the Rabbi exclaims every year before the Holy Ark and God "Forgive me Lord, I am nothing." Then the Cantor declares "Forgive me Lord, I am nothing." 

I became shamesh in 1849 of Odessa's Greycer Choral Shul, and in my first year as a shul clergy, I bowed down and exclaimed "Forgive me Lord, I am nothing!" And I heard the Rabbi whisper to the cantor: 

"Nu? Look who's nothing."  

I have been sexton of the Great Choral Synagogue for forty-eight years and survived three rabbis, four cantors. Every Shamesh of my generation has died off, and all Odessa's wondered when I'd retire for twenty years. Every day I awake at four in the morning, five-thirty in the winter, two-thirty at the beginning of the summer, have a breakfast of tea and a hard-boiled egg, start walk to the shul twenty minutes after I get up. It's half a Russian mile. As a young man it took thirty minutes, now it takes eighty. I never slip. When I get there I sneak a piece of cake from shabbos. Every day I sweep the entire floor: the shul floor, the women's balcony, the offices of the Rabbi, Cantor and Board members, the chapel, the hallway, coat closets and outhouses; then I mop them and change the water in every room. Twice before a wedding. That makes it just in time for the morning service. Some tired schnook slips twice a year, I get yelled at by the board, then everybody goes back to work. In the early days I would cry, and every time they would give me a raise. Around 1870 I stopped crying and since then nobody's changed my salary. Every year I spend less and less money, but all my time is spent at shul, so I have no time to spend it on.

Every weekday I lead the morning prayers, the afternoon and evening. I learn the weekly Torah portions and read the fragments every Monday and Thursday. In the early years members did it for me, but now hardly anybody knows the Hebrew and nobody's willing to put in the work, so I read it for them. In the evenings after gymnasium I teach the students their torah portions. Nu? Some of them are very nice, some of them are very smart, some of them are idyots and horrible. I yell at most of them and klap a few on the head: some fall asleep, some make faces, some try to change the subject, some don't practice; but some are interested, I kvell over them but by the time they're sixteen they don't say hello. 

The two breaks I have during the week is the eighteen blessings: the Shmoneh Esrei, and Rabbi's sermon, and nu? Every rabbi's the same. Every cantor's the same. They used to make me plotz with excitement, especially the chorus of yinglach: some I tutored for their bar mitzvahs. Some became cantors themselves, or at least went to chazzan school, I even hear some of them became opera singers, but with that chorus, even the schmegegge cantors seem like they belong up there at the Bolshoi. But nu, what do they do now you didn't hear fifty years ago? Both the rabbis and cantors have their one chance a week to be a macher and shaker, and nu they use every minute of it. Shouting and shraying, spitting and shpaying. Every rabbi slouches but they grow a foot on the bimah. Every cantor skips services during the week and on the Bimah becomes Odessa's most righteous tzaddik. On that bimah, the biggest nebbish turns into a golem. I go outside, nu? No shulgoer's there, and I have my two cigarettes a week and for a while hour I hear the Rabbi here, there and everywhere. I go back in and nobody smells the cigarette because nu they all go out and smoke cigarettes while I'm layning. 

Outside there are two groups. The Yiddsher schnorrers who get off work at the factory's night shift. They eat pork and trink, and the goyisher coachmen to the rich machers who go to shul by carriage. They eat pork and trink too, but they never talk to the Yids. You hear their kibbitzing, it's always the same in both groups: what they would do with the money of the Yiddisher machers in shul, whistling at the maydlach who walk by, kvetching about the wives, kvetching about the boss, kvetching about the children, kvetching about the hurs who make them sick. When somebody has money they sit at the table of the deli. They play cards and eat sausage. 

But nu? I can't hear them anymore. I can't even hear the Rebbe. This year, one week I start not hearing the Rebbe. Instead I hear a yingele who would make a Rabbi sound like he sounds on Tuesday. 

I know this boy. It's Yevno Zhabotinsky's boy: Volf. "Volodya" when I knew him--I can even remember when he was called "Vovka." Great student, arrogant little pischer. He'd show up, pick fights with me about religion for forty-five minutes, then layn the Torah perfectly the last fifteen. I could have let him go months before his Bar Mitzvah knowing he'd learn the whole thing, but I didn't like him so nu I made him come in every week. These days, half the smart boys in Odessa pick fights about religion with me. Zhabotinsky was the smartest. Not the smartest of the last few years, the smartest I ever taught. Some rabbi he'd be but nu he wants to be a golem all week long. 

He probably got up as early as me just to study every day, but nu? What does he study? Just like all these secular Jews it doesn't matter. They go without god and suddenly it's all this thing, that thing; this cause, that cause. All this thing they call 'literature' and math and history. Nu? Whatever they learn they always use it to turn the world upside down, everything plotzes on its head and everything's gonna be destroyed. 

This is what that Haskalah thing fights for: that German chazerai invades the heads of Odessa's kinder and turns them from Jews to dybbuks. Nu? We have it better here than anywhere else in the history of Judaism: in Odessa, in Warsaw, maybe even in New York, and what do we do with it? We use it to stop being Jews. And not just stop being Jews: we provoke the goyim too! Be atheists! Be socialists! Be capitalists! Be communists! Workers of the world unite! Throw away your talises! Eat pork! Make all the money! Maybe I should retire to a shtetl. At least there we mind our own business. 

Every week he's out there now during the Shmoneh Esrei, and what does he preach about? All this Zionist drek about how we have to move to Palestine to make a new Jewish state in the middle of a desert. It's the usual drek about how all the Russian nobles are farkakteh thieves, the goyim are farkakteh murderers, God's a liar who doesn't keep his promises and Jews are sheep who don't fight back. So we fight back by fleeing halfway across the world? The message isn't there is no God, the message isn't even make all the gelt. It's move to the desert and parch yourself to death! Nu? There's no people there! Why? Cuz nobody wants to live there! Everybody wants to live in Odessa: so many people wanna live here nobody can get an apartment! 

Everybody remembers Yevno Zhabotinsky the wheat trader: never went to shul but gave half his money here and half his money for the society for menschlechkeit so the homeless schlemiels don't freeze or starve. Nu? I hadn't seen Yevno in thirty years (back then he was Yussl) but anybody who gives money like that is either a greycer mensch or does shreklech things with his wheat. 

Sawf-kal-sawf he dies. Nu? All his money given away and Vovka doesn't have a kopek for school. He and his mother and sister come every day for a free dinner and tea. We saw the Mameh wrap the cookies in the babushka every day and didn't say anything. Vovka is apparently the best gymnasium student in Odessa, from the time he's eight every Jew knows about this illui. But nu he never comes to Hebrew school, he never comes to services. Apparently he's always in the greycer library and reads everything in it but he barely speaks Yiddish or Hebrew. When I gave him lessons at twelve he quoted all these goyisher philosophers, from memory in Latin and Italian! Just to tell me Hashem doesn't exist!

And all that Latin and Italian he quoted is in his Russian as he shreks to the crowd. He writes everything down, not a word planned, but he always looks like he's looking at the paper and the Yids at the same time.  

And nu? This yinger trombenik writes the most beautiful Russian I ever heard! And he yells it out for 50 minutes every week with such passion! Oy, a second Shakespeare this one! About how all the Jews will be in Israel free of pogroms, free of murder, free of fargevaltigung. Kinder able to grow up secure and happy, old people cared for and honored as mensches after a lifetime of tsuris. By the end of it I'm ready to move to Israel for about a minute and a half, then the rabbi finishes and I have go in to read the Torah and make sure no alteh macher drops it. Then I go back out for when the Cantor does the eighteen blessings. 

Nu? Two weeks ago an Arabber starts going in front of the greycer shul selling his fruit, and some fruit he gives away, probably starting to rot. This week that Vovka's especially mad. He works up a greycer ruach about the Jews he hates. Nu? Would you believe it? The boy isn't just obnoxious, he's a real antisemite! He can't get through a farkakteh sentence without another kvetch about how Jews are this, Jews are that: just lambs, just superstitious, just a pack of dogs everything their noblemen owners tell them to do. Nu? If he's such an antisemite what's he care how we are and what we're doing? 

Some weeks they listen. Some weeks they just eat their pork: usually the weeks they can buy sausage. This week there's no pork at all and he's got them listening. He's not even looking at them. Nu maybe he's a little nervous, but he's still shouting: all the hand motions, high voice, pretending to be banging on something, right fingers raised in the air. 

Nu. He starts saying something a little dangerous. I picked up the paper he dropped, most of it's not this khutzpadik but here's what the nudnik said: 

"...Ergo we must not be Jewish but Hebraus! Citizens not of God but blood! Colonizers who take what is ours as right! Who do not deign to pollute our blood with the genus of others! And we must do it before others incur the sanguine land of our blood!" 

We may speak in the sonorous tones of Tolstoy and Pushkin, but through our veins courses the blood of David and Joshua that stood with robust fortitude among the spilled blood of Amalek and Canaan!  Who can build his body into the salubrious chests of Goliath so he may sling his rocks not against a large opponent but against the world in total!" 

Nu, seriously! I talked to him when I tutored, he was a wit in a cruel way. The Rabbi says he picked up an article of his, some fancy French word for it, and he plotzed from laughing. He showed it to me... kind of funny? I don't know much about this American poet he likes and I don't have time to read those Yiddish poets everybody kibbitzes about, but where's the vitz here? 

Apparently he translated the Mayufes into Russian, but I've spoken to him, he can barely get out a sentence of Hebrew but I heard him talk to a professor at his Bar Mitzvah in Latin that flew out of his moyl twenty words a second.

"But today's Jews... the Jew of today. Today's Russians are more correct about us than our Jews! Today's Yid is little more than that word of shuddering horribilis: a Zhid! Deformed, morbid, rude, grubby, lacking in basic norms of respect and protocol, always trampled upon, despised, disrespected and deserving nothing less! Accepting the blows of the world's fate with grovelling obseqium!" 

It was that moment that all the Jews threw the rotting fruit at brave Zhabotinsky all at once. And when they were done with that they went up to the Arabber's cart and pelted Volodya with fresh fruit. It probably hurt but Volf kept going...

"Today's Russian is a homo barbarus: a vulgar, ferocious, illepidous rabble of rustics to whom we hope to pledge our assimilation. We play at trying to be their friends, but we are at war with them! Spiritual war! Material war! Such is their barbarism that they will certainly come to a fatum most horrible, and until we have a land of our own we must work toward their destruction." 

And the goyisher coachmen threw fruit at him too.

Nu, one hit him on the glasses and they broke. Poor Zhabotinsky had blood issuing from his eye. He dropped his paper, he looked like he was going to fall down the stairs. He had to leave to wipe the blood from his face.

But one of the Jews clapped. One of the Jews who pelted a fruit right between his eyes. 

Just then I realized I was late for the Torah service. Everybody in the synagogue was glaring at me and whispering. I thought I heard 'alter kocker', 'naar', 'stupid schlob' but nu who knows what I'm hearing at my age? 

I finish the Torah service, I go back out to smoke my second papiros and who do I see? It's not Volodya Zhabotinsky, it's the only boychik I can't stand more than him, that manipulative schmuck Lyov Bronshteyn. 

The elters at shul just assumed to call him Leybl. He didn't correct them. He was never a pupil of mine, he just came in every morning for a couple months last year, davened shacharis, once even lead it, kibbitzed to the young people in Russian and answered the alter mensches in Yiddish that was perfect except for a strong Kherson accent. It sounded a little komisch but really he convinced us he was one of us. 

After the first month he even started coming to the dawf yaymi study before the service. Everybody else was half asleep on their Talmud but within ten minutes he was lecturing us all for the whole hour in Yiddish about the succession struggle between Rabban Gamliel and Rabbi Yehoshua-ben-Khanania and everybody was wide awake. I remember another week when he talked about Rabbi Yehoshua's dispute with Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Eliezer's excommunication. You'd think the elters would hate being interrupted, but they thrilled to this bokher. He didn't dress like a bokher but they thought they were in the presence of the next Savran Rebbe. Not even the Rabbi minded! Soon we all were coming just to hear what Leybl had to say, he was always in the Rabbi's office and all the fathers were talking about introducing Laybl to their tochters, but all the daughters got bashful around a bokher that handsome. 

Weird things started small of course: He'd just bring up "Why is Hashem referred to as Adonai sometimes and Elohim others?" he'd cite Rashi and Genesis Rabba, even Midrash Tanhuma. But he didn't say Adoshem or Elokim, he said the real names, but everything comes from Heaven so nobody batted an eye. 

Then he'd bring up the two different versions of the Ten Commandments in Shmot, and he explained it with Rashi and ibn-Ezra citing the pronouns of each, but then he said 'None of these pronouns make sense!' No one in there had ever heard someone question Rashi. You could hear a pin drop, but a wise person sees far ahead and nobody had ever met anyone as wise as Leybl. 

Then one day he brought up that there's differing views on what happens after we die: Daniel says that there's judgement and resurrection, but Iyov and Kohelet say that afterward there's nothing and he says 'They both can't be right.' 

Finally Moshe Krik says "Please, forgive me Leybl." 

And Leybl said: "Please, all my best friends call me Lyov, and you all are my guter freints." 

Maybe I'm wrong but maybe it's not our job to question Hashem? 

And suddenly Laybl was not Laybl: "Not question the ways of Hashem? What are we doing here layning the Talmud if we're not questioning his ways?" 

"I just thought..." 

"Even in Menachot, God brings Moses into the future to see Rabbi Akiva's teaching and questions why God could let such a great sage be murdered so horribly!" 

"But Reb Laybl," 

"Lyov, please..." 

"We're not being murdered." 

"I will answer your questions but you need to be silent for a moment!" Laybl even banged on the table for emphasis. 

And from that moment of banging like a teapot, I knew Lyov Bronshteyn was no Jew. He wasn't even an Apikeyres, he was in this synagogue to lure us away from Torah. 

He didn't seem to lure any of the Dawf Yaymi students away, but he did lure a daughter. Chava Eikhbaum, daughter of Mischa Eikhbaum, one of the richest machers in Odessa. I caught them in the synagogue balcony. I won't say what he was doing but in fifty years I have never done such a thing to my wife. I told the Rabbi. He told me he didn't believe me. I told him that if he didn't do something about it, I would tell Mischa. As he didn't want a scandal, he reported his favorite congregant to the police as a potential subversive, and Lyov would know better than to come back to the Greycer Choral Synagogue. 

But there he was, and he wasn't with Chava Eikhbaum, he was with Golda Pinsker! Daughter of another macher in the Greycer Shul! 

I Am Nothing: First Three Quarters

 On the holiest night of the year, the chorus intones the Kol Nidre when we tell God we won't keep our promises, then the Barchu when we bow to the Lord and bless Him to the world forever, then the Shema when we proclaim the Lord is One, , then the Eighteen blessings and the Vidui which is so holy we say it as we die, then the Selichot where we stretch the confessions of the Vidui to ten minutes, then the Piyyutim when we chant Byzantine poetry in acrostic, then the plead for forgiveness to our Father and King that is the Avinu Malkeinu, and finally the Aleinu and Mourner's Kaddish. 

Aleinu is the common prayer which we say multiple times a day. But on the High Holidays the Aleinu is so holy that the clergy don't just bow down, they bow to the floor. 

Here at Odessa's Greycer Choral Shul, the prayer is considered so important that the Rabbi exclaims every year before the Holy Ark and God "Forgive me Lord, I am nothing." Then the Cantor declares "Forgive me Lord, I am nothing." 

I became shamesh in 1849 of Odessa's Greycer Choral Shul, and in my first year as a shul clergy, I bowed down and exclaimed "Forgive me Lord, I am nothing!" And I heard the Rabbi whisper to the cantor: 

"Nu? Look who's nothing."  

I have been sexton of the Great Choral Synagogue for forty-eight years and survived three rabbis, four cantors. Every Shamesh of my generation has died off, and all Odessa's wondered when I'd retire for twenty years. Every day I awake at four in the morning, five-thirty in the winter, two-thirty at the beginning of the summer, have a breakfast of tea and a hard-boiled egg, start walk to the shul twenty minutes after I get up. It's half a Russian mile. As a young man it took thirty minutes, now it takes eighty. I never slip. When I get there I sneak a piece of cake from shabbos. Every day I sweep the entire floor: the shul floor, the women's balcony, the offices of the Rabbi, Cantor and Board members, the chapel, the hallway, coat closets and outhouses; then I mop them and change the water in every room. Twice before a wedding. That makes it just in time for the morning service. Some tired schnook slips twice a year, I get yelled at by the board, then everybody goes back to work. In the early days I would cry, and every time they would give me a raise. Around 1870 I stopped crying and since then nobody's changed my salary. Every year I spend less and less money, but all my time is spent at shul, so I have no time to spend it on.

Every weekday I lead the morning prayers, the afternoon and evening. I learn the weekly Torah portions and read the fragments every Monday and Thursday. In the early years members did it for me, but now hardly anybody knows the Hebrew and nobody's willing to put in the work, so I read it for them. In the evenings after gymnasium I teach the students their torah portions. Nu? Some of them are very nice, some of them are very smart, some of them are idyots and horrible. I yell at most of them and klap a few on the head: some fall asleep, some make faces, some try to change the subject, some don't practice; but some are interested, I kvell over them but by the time they're sixteen they don't say hello. 

The two breaks I have during the week is the eighteen blessings: the Shmoneh Esrei, and Rabbi's sermon, and nu? Every rabbi's the same. Every cantor's the same. They used to make me plotz with excitement, especially the chorus of yinglach: some I tutored for their bar mitzvahs. Some became cantors themselves, or at least went to chazzan school, I even hear some of them became opera singers, but with that chorus, even the schmegegge cantors seem like they belong up there at the Bolshoi. But nu, what do they do now you didn't hear fifty years ago? Both the rabbis and cantors have their one chance a week to be a macher and shaker, and nu they use every minute of it. Shouting and shraying, spitting and shpaying. Every rabbi slouches but they grow a foot on the bimah. Every cantor skips services during the week and on the Bimah becomes Odessa's most righteous tzaddik. On that bimah, the biggest nebbish turns into a golem. I go outside, nu? No shulgoer's there, and I have my two cigarettes a week and I hear the Rabbi here, there and everywhere. I go back in and nobody smells the cigarette because nu they all go out and smoke cigarettes while I'm layning. 

Outside there are two groups. The Yiddsher schnorrers who get off work at the factory's night shift. They eat pork and trink, and the goyisher coachmen to the rich machers who go to shul by carriage. They eat pork and trink too, but they never talk to the Yids. You hear their kibbitzing, it's always the same in both groups: what they would do with the money of the Yiddisher machers in shul, whistling at the maydlach who walk by, kvetching about the wives, kvetching about the boss, kvetching about the children, kvetching about the hurs who make them sick. When somebody has money they sit at the table of the deli. They play cards and eat sausage. 

But nu? I can't hear them anymore. I can't even hear the Rebbe. This year, one week I start not hearing the Rebbe. Instead I hear a yingele who would make a Rabbi sound like he sounds on Tuesday. 

I know this boy. It's Yevno Jabotinsky's boy: Volf. Volodya when I knew him--I even remember when he was called Vovka. Great student, arrogant little pischer. He'd show up, pick fights with me about religion for forty-five minutes, then layn the Torah perfectly the last fifteen. I could have let him go months before his Bar Mitzvah knowing he'd learn the whole thing, but I didn't like him so nu I made him come in every week. These days, half the smart boys in Odessa pick fights about religion with me. Jabotinsky was the smartest. Not the smartest of the last few years, the smartest I ever taught. Some rabbi he'd be but nu he wants to be a golem all week long. 

He probably got up as early as me just to study every day, but nu? What does he study? Just like all these secular Jews it doesn't matter. They go without god and suddenly it's all this thing, that thing; this cause, that cause. All this thing they call 'literature' and math and history. Nu? Whatever they learn always use it to turn the world upside down, everything plotzes on its head and everything's gonna be destroyed. 

This is what that Haskalah thing fights for: that German chazerai invades the heads of Odessa's kinder and turns them from Jews to dybbuks. Nu? We have it better here than anywhere else in the history of Judaism: in Odessa, in Warsaw, maybe even in New York, and what do we do with it? We use it to stop being Jews. And not just stop being Jews: we provoke the goyim too! Be atheists! Be socialists! Be capitalists! Be communists! Workers of the world unite! Throw away your talises! Eat pork! Make all the money! Maybe I should retire to a shtetl. At least there we mind our own business. 

Every week he's out there now during the Shmoneh Esrei, and what does he preach about? All this Zionist drek about how we have to move to Palestine to make a new Jewish state in the middle of a desert. It's the usual drek about how all the Russian nobles are farkakteh thieves, the goyim are farkakteh murderers, God's a liar who doesn't keep his promises and Jews are sheep who don't fight back. So we fight back by fleeing halfway across the world? The message isn't there is no God, the message isn't even make all the gelt. It's move to the desert and parch yourself to death. Nu? There's no people there! Why? Cuz nobody wants to live there! Everybody wants to live in Odessa: so many people wanna live here nobody can get an apartment! 

Everybody remembers Yevno Jabotinsky the wheat trader: never went to shul but gave half his money here and half his money for the society for menschlechkeit so the homeless schlemiels don't freeze or starve. Nu? I hadn't seen Yevno in thirty years (back then he was Yussl) but anybody who gives money like that is either a greycer mensch or does shreklech things with his wheat. 

Sawf-kal-sawf he dies. Nu? All his money given away and Vovka doesn't have a kopek for school. He and his mother and sister come every day for a free dinner and tea. We saw the Mameh wrap the cookies in the babushka every day and didn't say anything. Vovka is apparently the best gymnasium student in Odessa, from the time he's eight every Jew knows about this illui. But nu he never comes to Hebrew school, he never comes to services. Apparently he's always in the greycer library and reads everything in it but he barely speaks Yiddish or Hebrew. When I gave him lessons at twelve he quoted all these goyisher philosophers, from memory in Latin and Italian! Just to tell me Hashem doesn't exist!

And all that Latin and Italian and more he quoted is in his Russian as he speaks. He writes everything down, not a word planned, but he always looks like he's looking at the paper and the Yids at the same time.  

And nu? This yinger trombenik writes the most beautiful Russian I ever heard! And he yells it out for 50 minutes every week with such passion! Oy, a second Shakespeare this one! About how all the Jews will be in Israel free of pogroms, free of murder, free of fargevaltigung. Kinder able to grow up secure and happy, old people cared for and honored as mensches after a lifetime of tsuris. By the end of it I'm ready to move to Israel for about a minute and a half, then the rabbi finishes and I have go in to read the Torah and make sure no alteh macher drops it. Then I go back out for when the Cantor does the eighteen blessings. 

Nu? Two weeks ago an Arabber starts going in front of the greycer shul selling his fruit, and some fruit he gives away, probably starting to rot. This week that Vovka's especially mad. He works up a greycer ruach about the Jews he hates. Nu? Would you believe it? The boy isn't just obnoxious, he's a real antisemite! He can't get through a farkakteh sentence without another kvetch about how Jews are this, Jews are that: just lambs, just superstitious, just a pack of dogs everything their noblemen owners tell them to do. Nu? If he's such an antisemite what's he care how we are and what we're doing? 

Some weeks they listen. Some weeks they just eat their pork: usually the weeks they can buy sausage. This week there's no pork at all and he's got them listening. He's not even looking at them. Nu maybe he's a little nervous, but he's still shouting: all the hand motions, high voice, pretending to be banging on something, right fingers raised in the air. 

Nu. He starts saying something a little dangerous. I picked up the paper he dropped, here's what the  nudnik said: 

"...Ergo we must not be Jewish but Hebraus! Citizens not of God but blood! Colonizers who take what is ours as right! Who do not deign to pollute our blood with the genus of others! And we must do it before others incur the sanguine land of our blood! 

We may speak in the sonorous tones of Tolstoy and Pushkin, but through our veins courses the blood of David and Joshua that stood with robust fortitude among the spilled blood of Amalek and Canaan!  Who can build his body into the salubrious chests of Goliath so he may sling his rocks not against a large opponent but against the world in total!

But today's Jews... the Jew of today. Today's Russians are more correct about us than our Jews! Today's Yid is little more than that word of shuddering horribilis: a Zhid! Deformed, morbid, rude, grubby, lacking in basic norms of respect and protocol, always trampled upon, despised, disrespected and deserving nothing less! Accepting the blows of the world's fate with grovelling obseqium!" 

It was that moment that all the Jews threw the rotting fruit at brave Jabotinsky all at once. And when they were done with that they went up to the Arabber's carriage and pelted Volodya with fresh fruit. It probably hurt badly. Volf kept going...

"Today's Russian is a homo barbarus: a vulgar, ferocious, illepidous rabble of rustics to whom we hope to pledge our assimilation. We play at trying to be their friends, but we are at war with them! Spiritual war! Material war! Such is their barbarism that they will certainly come to a fatum most horrible, and until we have a land of our own we must work toward their destruction." 

And the goyisher coachmen threw fruit at him too at him.

Nu, one hit him on the glasses and they broke. Poor Jabotinsky had blood issuing from his eye. He dropped his paper, he looked like he was going to fall down the stairs. He had to leave to wipe the blood from his face.

But one of the Jews clapped. One of the Jews who pelted a fruit right between his eyes. 

Just then I realized I was late for the Torah service. Everybody in the synagogue was glaring at me and whispering. I thought I heard 'alter kocker', 'naar', 'stupid schlob' but nu who knows what I'm hearing at my age? 

I finish the Torah service and who do I see? It's not Vovka Jabotinsky, it's the only boychik I can't stand more than him, that manipulative schmuck Lev Bronstein. 

---------------

Then he starts giving the speech all over again in Yiddish. This I want to see, so I move closer to hear him.

And then I fall down the stairs. 

I Am Nothing: A Bit of Revision

 On the holiest night of the year, the chorus intones the Kol Nidre when we tell God we won't keep our promises, then the Barchu when we bow to the Lord and bless Him to the world forever, then the Shema when we proclaim the Lord is One, , then the Eighteen blessings and the Vidui which is so holy we say it as we die, then the Selichot where we stretch the confessions of the Vidui to ten minutes, then the Piyyutim when we chant Byzantine poetry in acrostic, then the plead for forgiveness to our Father and King that is the Avinu Malkeinu, and finally the Aleinu and Mourner's Kaddish. 

Aleinu is the common prayer which we say multiple times a day. But on the High Holidays the Aleinu is so holy that the clergy don't just bow down, they bow to the floor. 

Here at Odessa's Greycer Choral Shul, the prayer is considered so important that the Rabbi exclaims every year before the Holy Ark and God "Forgive me Lord, I am nothing." Then the Cantor declares "Forgive me Lord, I am nothing." 

I became shamesh in 1849 of Odessa's Greycer Choral Shul, and in my first year as a shul clergy, I bowed down and exclaimed "Forgive me Lord, I am nothing!" And I heard the Rabbi whisper to the cantor: 

"Nu? Look who's nothing."  

I have been sexton of the Great Choral Synagogue for forty-eight years and survived three rabbis, four cantors. Every Shamesh of my generation has died off, and all Odessa's wondered when I'd retire for twenty years. Every day I awake at four in the morning, five-thirty in the winter, two-thirty at the beginning of the summer, have a breakfast of tea and a hard-boiled egg, start walk to the shul twenty minutes after I get up. It's half a Russian mile. As a young man it took thirty minutes, now it takes eighty. I never slip. When I get there I sneak a piece of cake from shabbos. Every day I sweep the entire floor: the shul floor, the women's balcony, the offices of the Rabbi, Cantor and Board members, the chapel, the hallway, coat closets and outhouses; then I mop them and change the water in every room. Twice before a wedding. That makes it just in time for the morning service. Some tired schnook slips twice a year, I get yelled at by the board, then everybody goes back to work. In the early days I would cry, and every time they would give me a raise. Around 1870 I stopped crying and since then nobody's changed my salary. Every year I spend less and less money, but all my time is spent at shul, so I have no time to spend it on.

Every weekday I lead the morning prayers, the afternoon and evening. I learn the weekly Torah portions and read the fragments every Monday and Thursday. In the early years members did it for me, but now hardly anybody knows the Hebrew and nobody's willing to put in the work, so I read it for them. In the evenings after gymnasium I teach the students their torah portions. Nu? Some of them are very nice, some of them are very smart, some of them are idyots and horrible. I yell at most of them and klap a few on the head: some fall asleep, some make faces, some try to change the subject, some don't practice; but some are interested, I kvell over them but by the time they're sixteen they don't say hello. 

The two breaks I have during the week is the eighteen blessings: the Shmoneh Esrei, and Rabbi's sermon, and nu? Every rabbi's the same. Every cantor's the same. They used to make me plotz with excitement, especially the chorus of yinglach: some I tutored for their bar mitzvahs. Some became cantors themselves, or at least went to chazzan school, I even hear some of them became opera singers, but with that chorus, even the schmegegge cantors seem like they belong up there at the Bolshoi. But nu, what do they do now you didn't hear fifty years ago? Both the rabbis and cantors have their one chance a week to be a macher and shaker, and nu they use every minute of it. Shouting and shraying, spitting and shpaying. Every rabbi slouches but they grow a foot on the bimah. Every cantor skips services during the week and on the Bimah becomes Odessa's most righteous tzaddik. On that bimah, the biggest nebbish turns into a golem. I go outside, nu? No shulgoer's there, and I have my two cigarettes a week and I hear the Rabbi here, there and everywhere. I go back in and nobody smells the cigarette because nu they all go out and smoke cigarettes while I'm layning. 

Outside there are two groups. The Yiddsher schnorrers who get off work at the factory's night shift. They eat pork and trink, and the goyisher coachmen to the rich machers who go to shul by carriage. They eat pork and trink too, but they never talk to the Yids. You hear their kibbitzing, it's always the same in both groups: what they would do with the money of the Yiddisher machers in shul, whistling at the maydlach who walk by, kvetching about the wives, kvetching about the boss, kvetching about the children, kvetching about the hurs who make them sick. When somebody has money they sit at the table of the deli. They play cards and eat sausage. 

But nu? I can't hear them anymore. I can't even hear the Rebbe. This year, one week I start not hearing the Rebbe. Instead I hear a yingele who would make a Rabbi sound like he sounds on Tuesday. 

I know this boy. It's Yevno Jabotinsky's boy: Volf. Volodya when I knew him--I even remember when he was called Vovka. Great student, arrogant little pischer. He'd show up, pick fights with me about religion for forty-five minutes, then layn the Torah perfectly the last fifteen. I could have let him go months before his Bar Mitzvah knowing he'd learn the whole thing without my help, but I didn't like him so nu I made him come in every week. These days, half the smart boys in Odessa pick fights about religion with me. Jabotinsky was the smartest. Not the smartest of the last few years, the smartest I ever taught. Some rabbi he'd be but nu he wants to be a golem all week long. 

Of course he's from a rich family that pay for his books and nebbisher tutors just like me in every subject. He probably got up as early as me just to study, but nu? What does he study? Just like all these secular Jews it doesn't matter. They go without god and suddenly it's all this thing, that thing; this cause, that cause. All this thing they call 'literature' and math and history. Nu? Whatever they learn always use it to turn the world upside down, everything plotzes on its head and everything's gonna be destroyed. 

This is what that Haskalah thing fights for: that German chazerai invades the heads of Odessa's kinder and turns them from Jews to dybbuks. Nu? We have it better here than anywhere else in the history of Judaism: in Odessa, in Warsaw, maybe even in New York, and what do we do with it? We use it to stop being Jews. And not just stop being Jews: we provoke the goyim too! Be atheists! Be socialists! Be capitalists! Be communists! Workers of the world unite! Throw away your talises! Eat pork! Make all the money! Maybe I should retire to a shtetl. At least there we mind our own business. 

Every week he's out there now during the Shmoneh Esrei, and what does he preach about? All this Zionist drek about how we have to move to Palestine to make a new Jewish state in the middle of a desert. It's the usual drek about how all the Russian nobles are farkakteh thieves, the goyim are farkakteh murderers, God's a liar who doesn't keep his promises and Jews are sheep who don't fight back. So we fight back by fleeing halfway across the world? The message isn't there is no God, the message isn't even make all the gelt. It's move to the desert and parch yourself to death. Nu? There's no people there! Why? Cuz nobody wants to live there! Everybody wants to live in Odessa: so many people wanna live here nobody can get an apartment! 

Everybody remembers Yevno Jabotinsky the wheat trader: never went to shul but gave half his money here and half his money for the society for menschlechkeit so the homeless schlemiels don't freeze or starve. Nu? I hadn't seen Yevno in thirty years (back then he was Yussl) but anybody who gives money like that is either a greycer mensch or does shreklech things with his wheat. 

Sawf-kal-sawf he dies. Nu? All his money given away and Vovka doesn't have a kopek for school. He and his mother and sister come every day for a free dinner and tea. We saw the Mameh wrap the cookies in the babushka every day and didn't say anything. Vovka is apparently the best gymnasium student in Odessa, from the time he's eight every Jew knows about this illui. But nu he never comes to Hebrew school, he never comes to services. Apparently he's always in the greycer library and reads everything in it but he barely speaks Yiddish or Hebrew. When I gave him lessons at twelve he quoted all these goyisher philosophers, from memory in Latin and Italian! Just to tell me Hashem doesn't exist. 

And all that Latin and Italian and more he quoted is in his Russian as he spea, s. He writes everything down, not a word planned, but he always looks like he's looking at the paper and the Yids at the same time.  

And nu? This yinger trombenik writes the most beautiful Russian I ever heard! And he yells it out for 50 minutes every week with such passion! Oy, a second Shakespeare this one! About how all the Jews will be in Israel free of pogroms, free of murder, free of fargevaltigung. Kinder able to grow up secure and happy, old people cared for and honored as mensches after a lifetime of tsuris By the end of it I'm ready to move to Israel for about a minute and a half, then the rabbi finishes and I have go in to read the Torah and make sure no alteh macher drops it. Then I go back out for when the Cantor does the eighteen blessings. 

Nu? Two weeks ago an Arabber starts going in front of the greycer shul selling his fruit, and some fruit he gives away, probably starting to rot. This week that Vovka's especially mad. He works up a greycer ruach about the Jews he hates. Nu? Would you believe it? The boy isn't just obnoxious, he's a real antisemite! He can't get through a farkakteh sentence without another kvetch about how Jews are this, Jews are that: just lambs, just superstitious, just a pack of dogs everything their noblemen owners tell them to do. Nu? If he's such an antisemite what's he care how we are and what we're doing? 

Some weeks they listen. Some weeks they just eat their pork: usually the weeks they can buy sausage. This week there's no pork at all and he's got them listening. He's not even looking at them. Nu maybe he's a little nervous, but he's still shouting: all the hand motions, high voice, pretending to be banging on something, right fingers raised in the air. 

Nu. He starts saying something a little dangerous, lemme see if I remember what he said: 

First he glares at them as though he's gonna throw it back or get into a fight, then he smiles and his eyes turn into slits. Then he finishes his speech. The whole text. Pages turning. Three people stay in front of him. All three clap, including one who threw the fruit at him. 

I Am Nothing - 2/3rdsish

 On the holiest night of the year, the chorus intones the Kol Nidre when we tell God we won't keep our promises, then the Barchu when we bow to the Lord and bless Him to the world forever, then the Shema when we proclaim the Lord is One, , then the Eighteen blessings and the Vidui which is so holy we say it as we die, then the Selichot where we stretch the confessions of the Vidui to ten minutes, then the Piyyutim when we chant Byzantine poetry in acrostic, then the plead for forgiveness to our Father and King that is the Avinu Malkeinu, and finally the Aleinu and Mourner's Kaddish. 

Aleinu is the common prayer which we say multiple times a day. But on the High Holidays the Aleinu is so holy that the clergy don't just bow down, they bow to the floor. 

Here at Odessa's Greycer Choral Shul, the prayer is considered so important that the Rabbi exclaims every year before the Holy Ark and God "Forgive me Lord, I am nothing." Then the Cantor declares "Forgive me Lord, I am nothing." 

I became shamesh in 1849 of Odessa's Greycer Choral Shul, and in my first year as a shul clergy, I bowed down and exclaimed "Forgive me Lord, I am nothing!" And I heard the Rabbi whisper to the cantor: 

"Nu? Look who's nothing."  

I have been sexton of the Great Choral Synagogue for forty-eight years and survived three rabbis, four cantors. Every Shamesh of my generation has died off, and all Odessa's wondered when I'd retire for twenty years. Every day I awake at four in the morning, five-thirty in the winter, two-thirty at the beginning of the summer, have a breakfast of tea and a hard-boiled egg, start walk to the shul twenty minutes after I get up. It's half a Russian mile. As a young man it took thirty minutes, now it takes eighty. I never slip. When I get there I sneak a piece of cake from shabbos. Every day I sweep the entire floor: the shul floor, the women's balcony, the offices of the Rabbi, Cantor and Board members, the chapel, the hallway, coat closets and outhouses; then I mop them and change the water in every room. Twice before a wedding. That makes it just in time for the morning service. Some tired schnook slips twice a year, I get yelled at by the board, then everybody goes back to work. In the early days I would cry, and every time they would give me a raise. Around 1870 I stopped crying and since then nobody's changed my salary. Every year I spend less and less money, but all my time is spent at shul, so I have no time to spend it on.

Every weekday I lead the morning prayers, the afternoon and evening. I learn the weekly Torah portions and read the fragments every Monday and Thursday. In the early years members did it for me, but now hardly anybody knows the Hebrew and nobody's willing to put in the work, so I read it for them. In the evenings after gymnasium I teach the students their torah portions. Nu? Some of them are very nice, some of them are very smart, some of them are idyots and horrible. I yell at most of them and klap a few on the head: some fall asleep, some make faces, some try to change the subject, some don't practice; but some are interested, I kvell over them but by the time they're sixteen they don't say hello. 

The two breaks I have during the week is the eighteen blessings: the Shmoneh Esrei, and Rabbi's sermon, and nu? Every rabbi's the same. Every cantor's the same. They used to make me plotz with excitement, especially the chorus of yinglach: some of whom I tutored for their bar mitzvahs. Some became cantors themselves, or at least went to chazzan school, I hear some of them became opera singers, but with that chorus, even the schmegegge cantors seem up there like they belong at the Bolshoi. But nu, what do they do now you didn't hear fifty years ago? Both the rabbis and cantors have their one chance a week to be a macher and shaker, and nu they use every minute of it. Shouting and shraying, spitting and shpaying. Every rabbi slouches but they grow a foot on the bimah. Every cantor skips services during the week and on the Bimah becomes Odessa's most righteous tzaddik. On that bimah, the biggest nebbish turns into a golem. I go outside, nu? No shulgoer's there, and I have my two cigarettes a week and I hear the Rabbi here, there and everywhere. I go back in and nobody smells the cigarette because nu they all go out and smoke cigarettes while I'm layning. 

Outside there are two groups. The Yiddsher schnorrers who get off work at the factory's night shift. They eat pork and trink, and the goyisher coachmen to the rich machers who go to shul by carriage. They eat pork and trink too, but they never talk to the Yids. You hear their kibbitzing, it's always the same in both groups: what they would do with the money of the Yiddisher machers in shul, whistling at the maydlach who walk by, kvetching about the wives, kvetching about the boss, kvetching about the children, kvetching about the hurs who make them sick. When somebody has money they sit at the table of the deli. They play cards and eat sausage. 

But nu? I can't hear them anymore. I can't even hear the Rebbe. This year, one week I start not hearing the Rebbe. Instead I hear a yingele who would make a Rabbi sound like he sounds on Tuesday. 

I know this boy. It's Yevno Jabotinsky's boy: Volf. Volodya when I knew him--I even remember when he was called Vovka. Great student, arrogant little pischer. He'd show up, pick fights with me about religion for forty-five minutes, then layn the Torah perfectly the last five. I could have let him go months before his Bar Mitzvah knowing he'd learn the whole thing without my help, but I didn't like him so nu I made him come in every week. These days, half the smart boys in Odessa pick fights about religion with me. Jabotinsky was the smartest. Not the smartest of the last few years, the smartest I ever taught. Some rabbi he'd be but nu he wants to be a golem all week long. 

Of course he's from a rich family that pay for his books and nebbisher tutors just like me in every subject. He probably got up as early as me just to study, but nu? What does he study? Just like all these secular Jews it doesn't matter. They go without god and suddenly it's all this thing, that thing; this cause, that cause. All this thing they call 'literature' and math and history. Nu? It doesn't matter, whatever they learn always use it to turn the world upside down and everything plotzes on its head. 

This is what that Haskalah thing fights for: that German chazerai that invades the heads of Odessa's kinder and turns them from Jews to dybbuks. Nu? We have it better here than anywhere else in the history of Judaism: in Odessa, in Warsaw, maybe even in New York, and what do we do with it? We use it to stop being Jews. And not just stop being Jews: we provoke the goyim too! Be atheists! Be socialists! Be capitalists! Be communists! Workers of the world unite! Throw away your talises! Eat pork! Make all the money! Maybe I should retire to a shtetl. At least there we mind our own business. 

Every week he's out there now during the Shmoneh Esrei, and what does he preach about? All this Zionist drek about how we have to move to Palestine to make a new Jewish state in the middle of a desert. It's the usual drek about how all the Russian nobles are farkakteh thieves, the goyim are farkakteh murderers, God's a liar who doesn't keep his promises and Jews are sheep who don't fight back. So we fight back by fleeing halfway across the world? The message isn't there is no God, the message isn't even make all the gelt. It's move to the desert and parch yourself to death. Nu? There's no people there! Why? Cuz nobody wants to live there! Everybody wants to live in Odessa: nobody can get an apartment because so many people want to live here! 

Everybody knows Yevno Jabotinsky the wheat trader: never goes to shul but gives half his money here and half his money for the society for menschlechkeit so the homeless schlemiels don't freeze or starve. Nu? I haven't seen Yevno in thirty years (back then he was Yussl) but anybody who gives money like that is either a greycer mensch or does shreklech things with his wheat. 

I Am Nothing - Beginning

On the holiest night of the year, the chorus intones the Kol Nidre when we tell God we won't keep our promises, then the Barchu when we bow to the Lord and bless Him to the world forever, then the Shema when we proclaim the Lord is One, , then the Eighteen blessings and the Vidui which is so holy we say it as we die, then the Selichot where we stretch the confessions of the Vidui to ten minutes, then the Piyyutim when we chant Byzantine poetry in acrostic, then the plead for forgiveness to our Father and King that is the Avinu Malkeinu, and finally the Aleinu and Mourner's Kaddish. 

Aleinu is the common prayer which we say multiple times a day. But on the High Holidays the Aleinu is so holy that the clergy don't just bow down, they bow to the floor. 

Here at Odessa's Greycer Choral Shul, the prayer is considered so important that the Rabbi exclaims every year before the Holy Ark and God "Forgive me Lord, I am nothing." Then the Cantor declares "Forgive me Lord, I am nothing." 

I became shamesh in 1849 of Odessa's Greycer Choral Shul, and in my first year as a shul clergy, I bowed down and exclaimed "Forgive me Lord, I am nothing!" And I heard the Rabbi whisper to the cantor: 

"Nu? Look who's nothing."  

I have been sexton of the Great Choral Synagogue for forty-eight years and survived three rabbis, four cantors. Every Shamesh of my generation has died off, and all Odessa's wondered when I'd retire for twenty years. Every day I awake at four in the morning, five-thirty in the winter, two-thirty at the beginning of the summer, have a breakfast of tea and a hard-boiled egg, start walk to the shul twenty minutes after I get up. It's half a Russian mile. As a young man it took thirty minutes, now it takes eighty. I never slip. When I get there I sneak a piece of cake from shabbos. Every day I sweep the entire floor: the shul floor, the women's balcony, the offices of the Rabbi, Cantor and Board members, the chapel, the hallway, coat closets and outhouses; then I mop them and change the water in every room. Twice before a wedding. That makes it just in time for the morning service. Some tired schnook slips twice a year, I get yelled at by the board, then everybody goes back to work. In the early days I would cry, and every time they would give me a raise. Around 1870 I stopped crying and since then nobody's changed my salary. Every year I spend less and less money, but all my time is spent at shul, so I have no time to spend it on.

Every weekday I lead the morning prayers, the afternoon and evening. I learn the weekly Torah portions and read the fragments every Monday and Thursday. In the early years members did it for me, but now hardly anybody knows the Hebrew and nobody's willing to put in the work, so I read it for them. In the evenings after gymnasium I teach the students their torah portions. Nu? Some of them are very nice, some of them are very smart, some of them are idyots and horrible. I yell at most of them and klap a few on the head: some fall asleep, some make faces, some try to change the subject, some don't practice; but some are interested, I kvell over them but by the time they're sixteen they don't say hello. 

The two breaks I have during the week is the eithteen blessings: the Shmoneh Esrei, and Rabbi's sermon, and nu? Every rabbi's the same. Every cantor's the same. They used to make me plotz with excitement, especially the chorus of yinglach: some of whom I tutored for their bar mitzvahs. Some became cantors themselves, or at least went to chazzan school, I hear some of them became opera singers, but with that chorus, even the schmegegge cantors seem up there like they belong at the Bolshoi. But nu, what do they do now you didn't hear fifty years ago? Both the rabbis and cantors have their one chance a week to be a macher and shaker, and nu they use every minute of it. Shouting and shraying, spitting and shpaying. Every rabbi slouches but they grow a foot on the bimah. Every cantor skips services during the week and on the Bimah becomes Odessa's most righteous tzaddik. On that bimah, the biggest nebbish turns into a golem. I go outside, nu? No shulgoer's there, and I have my two cigarettes a week and I hear the Rabbi here, there and everywhere. I go back in and nobody smells the cigarette because nu they all go out and smoke cigarettes while I'm layning. 

Outside there are two groups. The Yiddsher schnorrers who get off work at the factory's night shift. They eat pork and trink, and the goyisher coachmen to the rich machers who go to shul by carriage. They eat pork and trink too, but they never talk to the Yids. You hear their kibbitzing, it's always the same in both groups: what they would do with the money of the Yiddisher machers in shul, whistling at the maydlach who walk by, kvetching about the wives, kvetching about the boss, kvetching about the children, kvetching about the hurs who make them sick. When somebody has money they sit at the table of the deli. They play cards and eat sausage. 

But nu? I can't hear them anymore. I can't even hear the Rebbe. This year, one week I start not hearing the Rebbe. Instead I hear a yingele who would make a Rabbi sound like he sounds on Tuesday. 

Aida Survey Fragment: Hopefully Will Finish Sooner

 Tucker's Law of Musical Performance: Verdi's Aida--78-88 years

This is not a consumer review, this is a kind of attempt, through the history of Aida performance on record, to make a pocket history of Italian opera in a long period when Italian opera doesn't matter through. 

Aida was premiered in Cairo in 1871. If we are to believe the Molajoli/Sabajno recordings, it took a lifetime as it always does to fully acclimate to the demands of a great work of art. Aida is one of the three or four most iconic operas ever written, but it does not play itself like Verdi's Big Three (Rig/Trov/Trav) which can be played by any ol' small opera company in reduced forces and still make its impact.

Aida is big, Aida is decadent, and it needs the greatness of a great orchestra, a great conductor, giant voices in a giant hall with giant sets. The Golden Age of opera had to be over by the time Aida ascended to the top of opera's pantheon. But is there a recording out there which portrays decadence without becoming decadent itself?

My answer is that there was a particular moment in the 50s when Aida was taken seriously. I forget who said it but some Broadway composer said that musical theater circles back every 80 years, and to me, 80 years is roughly the time it takes for performers to be worthy of the greatest classical works: to understood and master them.

So in that sense, Aida is not a work of the 1870s, it is a work of the 1950s. So many performers around that time truly seemed to understand Aida, not as melodrama or exhibition, and not as just another comfortable night at the opera, but as a great work of art: gripping and challenging. Artists started coming to terms with it in the most serious way: Toscanini of course, but also Gui, Alberto Erede, Antonino Votto, and even John Barbirolli. Well known singers like Maria Callas and Lyonie Rysanek, and unknowns like Catarina Mancini and Mario Filipeschi, and serious artists like Antonietta Stella and Giulietta Simoniatto. There were complacent recordings in that era too, but the greatest achieved something that went beyond mere opera and became the great art that is always there in Verdi for those willing to find it. But by 1959-60 it was all over: the Solti and Karajan recordings were released, Aida truly went international and while certain artists got it, they swam against the current. Aida became a high decible, high production blockbuster, and those who understood it had to revive old traditions and reject the new ones. 

de Sabata/Cigna: Apollo to Dionysus Meter: 9

Panizza/Cigna: Apollo to Dionysus Meter: 10

Beecham/Caniglia: Apollo to Dionysus Meter: 8

The first essential recording of Aida, to me at least, is Victor de Sabata leading La Scala in 1937 Berlin. It's not deep, it's not art, it's not even complete--some of my favorite scenes are missing, but as an exhibition, it is magnificent: de Sabata, La Scala, Gina Cigna, Beniamino Gigli and Ebe Stignani. Is it a serious examination of Aida? Well... is Aida a serious work of art? It is great opera as great opera gets, but... um... the jury is out.... The same goes in the same year in New York. Gina Cigna somehow sings in both Berlin and at the Metropolitan in 1937. In New York she was partnered with the more 'heroic tenor' Giovanni Martinelli and Bruna Castagna, along with Ettore Panizza, the one conductor who played Verdi with even less subtlety than de Sabata. And if that isn't enough, you've got Gigli and Stignani two years later in London with Maria Caniglia, a slightly more lyric 'spinto' than Cigna's trumpet tones under Thomas Beecham, the world's greatest podium entertainer. The sound of all three is atrocious, but all three are glorious. They're more than art or entertainment, they're part of the history of the world: documents of how the grandest opera inflamed the world. Opera may be a thing of the past, but so long as opera can put on loud and lavish entertainments like Aida, it can offer the world things musical theater and movies cannot possibly match.

How's it done? Singers with technique so secure that they seem able to do anything at all: so secure that you can maintain the vocal line through all histrionics, hold notes out forever loud and soft, sing over the world's loudest orchestras (which may have been about half as loud back then...), phrase in such a way that the back of the hall hears the nuances as well as the front, float notes like velvet on air or hurl them out like a poisoned arrow. You hear great singers inspiring each other and if the conductor's great, he gets the orchestra to inspire the singers too. Electric sparks fly that could incinerate whole city blocks. You have conductors who follow them everywhere through whatever odd twists and turns they do in interpretations so outsize that they sometimes take twice as much time to get through a phrase as lesser stars did twenty years previously.  Just listen to the effects Beniamino Gigli constantly strains for: half his lines start a split second early with words like 'uh-NUUUU-MEN' as a way of catching your attention. Toscanini would throw him out of the theater, and in a work of elegant proportions like Traviata or Rigoletto, that's the height of vulgarity. But Aida? Well, it's pretty much in keeping with the whole thing's spirit. 

When you hear the Greek inevitability of Toscanini, the infinite colors of elderly Riccardo Muti, the nuance of Vittorio Gui, the perfect balance of Alberto Erede, the heart and soul of John Barbirolli, and when you hear the absolute miracles of texture Karajan works in his second recording (more on that anon), who can possibly doubt the artistic seriousness of this? But then you hear so much vocal grandstanding, so much conducting grandstanding, and you realize that this exhibitionism is built into the work at its pyramidal foundation. Some performances take Aida as a dare to make the work so larger than life that you can't even hear the peaks. Yet that said, there is enormous pleasure in high notes and orchestral fireworks and lavish sets just as there is in movie explosions and sex scenes. It's exhibition, but exhibition can be awesome.

But because there is so much exhibitionism, there is also so much complacency. Other performances sound so tired of Aida that they sound like just another runthrough by people who are as tired of hearing the piece as I often am.

How many recordings really do something like justice to the piece? Well, a lot if you want to hear opera as opera. I get somewhat impatient with that kind of exhibitionism as I get older.

Solti/Price: Apollo to Dionysus Meter: Breaks the scale 

The greatest vocalism? As far as I'm concerned, there's only one choice, and it's not the one people usually say. The greatest vocalism is Leontyne Price, Jon Vickers, Rita Gorr, Robert Merrill--four stars in the flush of youth in fantastic sound, under an all-too fired up Georg Solti. Unfortunately, the problem is the inexperience of it. Solti is still 49. It's not the loudness... ... ok it is the loudness, but not just that. Solti had just became a star, and he became a star because he was willing to amp up the fireworks to a level that more tasteful, more cultured maestri knew better than to do. Solti was a great opera conductor, and in more genial operas like Cosi, Zauberflote, Carmen, Onegin, he could be the epitome of magnificence, but then you get 'Grand Solti', the Solti we remember, and he was a voice wrecker: amping up the noise of his orchestra for excitement's sake while knowing that he risked blowing out the voices of his singers. We have been on this track ever since. like in his famous Wagner, he never quite mastered pacing in those years, and in between the fireworks of awesome excitement comes quiet parts that drain the blood from mosquitos.

Toscanini/Nelli: Apollo to Dionysus Meter: 3 1/2

If you want well-paced excitement, well... there's only once place to go: Toscanini, Toscanini, Toscanini. Nobody understood Verdi at the fundament like Toscanini did: every detail in 1949 was etched perfectly in hieroglyphs, with Robert Shaw's chorus and a magnificent handpicked orchestra of American musicians for NBC. The only problem? The singers. I doubt any star singer in America would put up with Toscanini's bullshit, his dictatorial mien, his legendary temper, or apparently his cheapness (apparently that was a thing...). Now, nobody generates more bullshit than singers, but Toscanini deliberately chose the most white bread singers, including a young and very nervous Richard Tucker (no relation) and his "pupil" Herva Nelli. But at least they could sing their parts: you also have to put up with the Amneris of one Eva Gustafsson, who sounds a bit like Julia Child.

Callas/De Fabritiis: Apollo to Dionysus Meter: 10

There is, of course, the famous live Callas in 1951 Mexico City where she tosses off a high E-Flat at the end of the Triumphal March. One youtuber called it the most famous opera recording ever... I never even heard of this recording until the era of youtube... It's certainly a high voltage affair--everybody keeps up with Callas: Mario del Monaco, Oriala Dominguez, Giuseppe Taddei, and Oliviero de Fabritiis lights a fire under a Latin orchestra that seemed to need no extra fire. The sound is quite bad, but that recording is great opera. It is not, however, great art. It's a shapeless mass that takes wing in the moment of the performance and relates no moment of the performance to the moment that came before or comes after. Great artistry had to wait for Callas to find a partner worthy of her.

Gui/Mancini: Apollo to Dionysus Meter: 6 1/2

But then things really start to cook. 1951 also hears such august legends of opera history as Caterina Mancini and Mario FIlippeschi assuming the principals. Unknowns they may be, but they are magnificent, as are better known singers like Giulietta Simoniato and Rolando Panerai, with RAI Roma under the watchful eye of the great Vittorio Gui, who would easily be the leading conductor of any country that didn't have Toscanini and de Sabata--but at this point I prefer Gui to them both. The vast majority of the time the tempi stays in the ballpark of Verdi's metronome markings, and yet within that framework Gui seems to set a new pace every fifteen seconds. The orchestra isn't great, but it's Verdi in Rome, do you really think they don't know how to play it? The only problem is the sound, which sounds as though it keeps the all important orchestra in the opera house next door to the opera house where it's playing. It is such a shame: this is probably the greatest conducting we have ever heard of Aida, and yet you can barely hear the orchestra.

Erede/Tebaldi: Apollo to Dionysus Meter: 5

But the next year comes a recording overseen by Alberto Erede, one of those maestri di capella whom we took for granted, who on their average days made the trains run on time, and on the great days provided a level of involvement and inspiration that was never inhibited by a lack of knowledge about the idiom. All one can say is that this is greatness. Is Erede as great as Gui or Toscanini? Of course not. Erede was a maestro di capella, Vittorio Gui is one of the most underrated conductors of the 20th century. Erede cannot possibly hope to generate the fireworks of a star conductor and orchestra in the Triumphal March, but for once it seems like a solemn ancient triumph, not a state fair. But Erede was nobody's fool, once an assistant to Fritz Busch in Dresden. He's not as literal as Toscanini, not as supple as Gui, not as trusted by singers as Serafin, but he combines the best of all three (along with a magnificent octave up rewrite of the brass in the triumphal march scene); always in the ballpark of the score without being a slave to it, and here you can hear the damn orchestra! Just to give an example of how great Erede is: in Act 1 Scene II, my favorite scene, every time the male chorus ansewrs the Priestess's 'Possente' the chorus is just a little bit slower than the time before. Furthermore, we get to hear Tebaldi and del Monaco in embryo, two of the great voices of all time, young and hungry, ready to give absolutely everything. Even Tebaldi provides emotional involvement, and occasionally you can even hear a quiet note from del Monaco! The now seasoned Ebe Stignani is a little past her prime, but she keeps up with these young lions the way she once kept up with Gigli and Cigna.

Callas/Barbirolli: Apollo to Dionysus Meter: 8

And then there's the greatest romantic reading. Not the greatest Aida, certainly not the greatest sounding Aida, far from the most perfect, but romanticism at its best: John Barbirolli in an actual honest to god opera broadcast: twenty years after he swore off opera after making his bones (batons) there, here he is, showing what the fuss was over fifteen years before he returned to opera when he was already past it. Barbirolli and Callas, who would have ever thought? Giulietta Simoniato next to them, luxury casting in the basses with Michael Langdon and Giulio Neri, and no less than a 26 year old Joan Sutherland singing the priestess. The only unfortunate presence is entirely too German sounding Kurt Baum sounding like he wandered over from a production of the Merry Widow. I love Barbirolli the way I love Gigli: everything's over the top and I couldn't care less. He never misses a chance to start a rallentando five bars early, to linger on a recitative like it's already a love duet, but unlike certain more mummified conductors, at least he speeds up as much as he slows down. This is romanticism as it should be done: what comes out exhibitionist when done by de Sabata and Muti sounds like emotion itself under Glorious John. Known as the great accompanist of his time, he's the perfect partner for Callas, not just supporting her but encouraging her every dramatic instinct. I don't know if it's at all appropriate for Aida, it feels like Callas is singing Tosca, but her intensity is positively feral. For those who believe opera is mere melodrama, she schools us all here as everywhere else. Even if she doesn't have a Radames to match, she is so absorbing here that she needs no Radames at all.

So let's pause for a second: why, in my perception, is the Barbirolli/Callas so much closer to the spirit than other ultra-romantic performances from the late thirties? The answer is that one approach feels like an arena event, and one feels sacred. One feels as though it's meant to excite, one feels as though it's meant to move. What feels hammy at the old Met is felt at Covent Garden. What feels attacked in Berlin feels inhabited in London. What feels like a party fifteen years earlier at 30s CG feels like a rite of the soul in 50s CG.

And then, over the course of one year, you have three very good but extremely imperfect recordings that take the work very seriously:

Serafin/Callas: Apollo to Dionysus Meter: 4

Maria Callas, Fedora Barbieri and a more mature Richard Tucker at La Scala under the ever-reliable Tulio Serafin. Callas is... not Aida. Some people will go for Callas in anything the same way some people will go for Olivier or Streep in anything. I am not one of them: mature women like Tosca and Violetta, sure, but ingenues like Aida and Gilda? Fuck no... Even when Callas was in her twenties she sounded 47 and had the romantic appeal of a lady in the Trump cabinet. Nevertheless, what makes Callas Callas is that even when she is utterly unsuited to the role, she finds things in it nobody else does. 'Actorly' it may be, but every line reading has intention and nuance and character: even if it gives the impression of a 60 year old Meryl Streep playing Juliet, it's still a wonderful performance of its type. Everybody else takes a back seat to the Callas show: only Tito Gobbi has a fighting chance to get the spotlight off her. Everything else is rather... mid?

Kubelik/Rysanek: Apollo to Dionysus Meter: 6

Still better than them both is my dear Rafael Kubelik, conducting the Vienna Opera with singers like Lyonie Ryzanek, Hans Hopf, Jean Madeira, George London... are we sure this is Aida and not a Wagner opera?... and sure enough, it's in German. But for what it is, it's absolutely glorious. If you can imagine Italian vowels amid all that vocalism, magnificently played and paced, put those brutal German consonants out of your mind.

Karajan/Tebaldi: Apollo to Dionysus Meter: 2

But then we start getting to decadence like that Solti recording, and also the first by that other voice wrecker: Herbert von Karajan: frankly the worse voice wrecker. More on that anon again. In 1959, Karajan is barely fifty, and he doesn't have many ideas about Aida yet. This is more a 'record' than it is a performance or an interpretation. It is clear, at least to me, that Karajan is not in charge here. The producer is: the once famous John Culshaw, who in his lifetime had a power that exceeded even Karajan's. Culshaw wanted an artificial soundstage, and Karajan, always intrigued by recording technology, provided everything Culshaw wanted. The result was that Karajan had a brand to manufacture rather than ideas. It is all very Karajanish: polished and so imposing in loud moments it sounds sculpted from marble, but the many intriguing ideas of Karajan's twenty-years-later remake are not here. In its place we have bombast: inflated tempi, inflated orchestral sound, inflated singer mic placements, inflated dynamic contrasts that leave you turning the volume dial up and down. In Renata Tebaldi, the world's greatest singer and worst actress, Karajan had the perfect Aida for his conception and the perfect Amanasro in Cornell MacNeill (must be a family thing...). Poor Carlo Bergonzi and Giulietta Simoniato thought they were recording Verdi but are stuck in an entombed monument. Simoniato was so good, so complex, so caught between ferocity and tenderness that in the beginning of Act IV, she briefly warms Karajan up, but otherwise this Verdi has more Wagner in it than Solti's Ring.

Mehta/Apollo to Dionysus Meter: Something this shallow breaks the scale. 

The next stage of decadence is 1965, when we get Birgit Nilsson as Aida: Wagner's trumpet herself, along with the most dangerous tenor of them all: Franco Corelli, who as always holds nothing back and whose electricity threatens to obscure even the largest voice and loudest orchestra, and that's what he gets. The Rome Opera Orchestra plays like the world's loudest orchestra when mic'd this closely, and they are inflamed by Zubin Mehta at all of 29, and still with us at 90. As always with Mehta, the sound defines thrills and passion and lushness, and there is nary a detail to be found. Nary an orchestral crescendo, nary a rubato, nary even a piano; all taken at the safest possible tempos at every moment to convey Mehta's massive mass. Even then, Mehta was a master of short cuts. The Act III prelude seems to be the one time he glances at the metronome, and it's one of the few markings that doesn't work--no violin section can ever coordinate those spiccatos evenly at that speed: and you realize Mehta takes it at the recommended speed because he has no desire to savor the delicacy and the langor. This recording announces it is unapologetic spectacle from the first 'guerra'. Visceral excitement everywhere, punching with as much force and speed as George Foreman. It is Aida the carnival, and this party rages. It's a great recording, it's also absolutely shameless. It is left to Grace Bumbry to keep up with these cyclones, and she acquits herself pretty well, but no mic can hide just how much more powerful those other two voices are. Bumbry is the only person here trying to find any seriousness. 

Muti/Caballe: Apollo to Dionysus Meter: 8 1/2

Then there is that even more magnificent 1974 recording of Muti and Caballe. Magnificent of its type that is... Muti is absolutely ferocious in that Al Pacino way where everything is senselessly hammed in a manner that is more about the performer than the work, but nobody can deny the absolute charisma of it. The triumph scene is an absolute carnival: you can practically sea the roller coasters and cotton candy, but my god does he get the grandeur here: only Muti and Levine approach Toscanini in this all-crucial scene. Everything about this reading is melodramatic, but Aida is melodramatic. Furthermore, Muti at 33 did not yet have the cache to rein in interventionist singers like Caballe and Cosotto: so the scenes between them become a melodramatic campfest of hellcats. Caballe does not miss a chance for the kind of portamento and pitch losing accent that would drive Muti crazy, while Cosotto spits her accents out like a snake does her venom: dots are doubled all over the place. You can even hear the imperturbable Piero Cappucilli straining his voice to match Muti's knife-wielder energy. This is much more about the fireworks than Verdi. Some dynamics and accents are respected, but Muti conducts as though he's never heard of a metronome and with all kinds of interpolated rubatos that you'd only find elsewhere in the types of de Sabata and Panizza performances he spent a career railing against. And yet, unlike Solti, this is a performance by a conductor who knows his Verdi so well that he knows just how much romanticism this approach needs. We would wait for Muti to match his professed seriousness with substance for another thirty years. This is greatness, but it is definitely decadence. 

Chailly/Urmana: Apollo to Dionysus Meter: breaks the scale. 

And then there is Riccardo Chailly's pass at it. Chailly, unlike Muti, didn't need time to evolve. He was always a cold fish, but his musical values were bedrock from the moment he appeared on the scene in his early 20s, as was his utter intolerance for opera's bullshit. Not since Toscanini has there been a conductor who is such a stickler for the urtext. How he gets singers to comply with him is a mystery no one will ever solve, but as with every other piece, there has never been an Aida this thought through. Unlike in, say, Mahler, which has been thought through so many ways that another new approach can elicit groans, Verdi needs this sort of cleaning up badly. No one in recorded history, among those who got good sound at least, has considered so much how crucial certain orchestral lines are and just how they should balance against the voice. Some of the tempos are right on the metronome clicks, others are too slow as has become Chailly's latter-day mein in opera, and Chailly occasionally hews to tradition in manners he never would ten years earlier like slowing up for Aida's first stage entrance or at Amneris's cries of "Ah Vieni" at the beginning of Act II. As ever with Chailly, it is not the complacent slowness of Perlea or the mummified slowness of young Karajan. It is a means to get utter linear clarity and nuanced detailing. You might not like the aesthetic: I vastly prefer Chailly's mien here to what he does in most of the Germans, but even in when you don't like Chailly, he is a maestro among maestri, and this is one of the few truly great performances in the years after Aida's golden age. This isn't melodrama, it's not even romanticism, we hear, finally, Aida's full pyramid from just about all its sides: form, color, line, vocalism, characterization, spectacle, pacing and that indefinable pagan spirituality. Neither melodrama nor complacency here. It would have been nice to get this level of sound and orchestral playing with the singers of fifty years earlier, but finally, hear this, and you basically hear what Aida is.  

And yes... this is the famous production which Alagna left in a huff after getting boo'd after the first aria. Listening to how well he does here, I don't blame him. He is not as subtle as his female co-stars, and is not acting up their storm, but he is acquiting himself as a Radames whose singing is pretty close to magnificent in a century that doesn't have magnificent Radameses. On the other hand, the gods blessed this recording with two absolutely fabulous female leads: great singing actresses with powerful voices and a minimum of warble. Their Act II duet is absolutely electric: dramatic, colorful, characterized in three dimensions. You can hear both the smiles and the insincerity in Ildiko Komlosi's voice just before she erupts in rage. Violetta Urmana suffers as a truly great prima donna does, only to occasionally erupt in joy rather than rage. The only problem is Carlo Guelfi's Amanasro, whose vocal insuitability he conceals by snarling: not the worst solution... This performance, truly, is something to behold. 

Muti/Netrebko: Apollo to Dionysus Meter: 5

But then there is Muti's Salzburg performance in 2017. Forty-three years after the recording, only one bona-fide star in Anna Netrebko (is there more than one bona-fide star in any production anymore?), and otherwise the best Verdi singers you can find in 2017, who a very far cry from what they were in 1974. This is such a different Muti. It's far from perfect: the ego is still there, the departures from the score are all over the place. Muti still contorts Verdi in manners opposite from what he professes whenever it suits him, and yet the knowledge, the affection, the ability to find the right color, or tinta, the perfect Italian sound (sfumato--to use an art term) he gets from the Vienna Philharmonic, it's a miracle unseen in this piece since the days of Toscanini and Gui (his teacher). Perfection is not on the menu, nor supposed to be. Chailly is perfection, old Muti is infinity. He has all Karajan's ability to find the exact right color and balance the instrumental lines against the singers so that the orchestra becomes a participant rather than just an accompanist: but unlike Karajan, the orchestra never dominates. Muti may be the dictator, but he does not demand complete stardom here. This is the sort of late-in-life mastery we only get from conductors who've devoted their life to this music: the way we get that extraordinary aliveness from so many Brucknerians late in life: Blomstedt, Haitink, Wand, Skrowaczewski, Giulini, Jochum, Karajan... this is Muti in Verdi. Even the instruments sound like voices. 

Essential: * means especially so

de Sabata/Cigna '37 for its incredible visceral energy

Panizza/Cigna '37 for its incredible extravagance

Toscanini/Nelli '49 for an idea that is perfect, even if not more *

Gui/Mancini '51 for a near platonic ideal of a performance, if only we heard the orchestra better **

Erede/Tebaldi '52 to show precisely what impact Aida could make when the world knew this opera better than ever before or since. ***

Callas/Barbirolli '53 for a plumbing into Aida's soul *

Kubelik/Rysanek '55 for a ceaselessly warm chamber approach 

Varviso/Nilsson '64 for the most underrated conductor to stand in the opera pit

Mehta/Nilsson '65 for pure spectacle and visceral thrills

Muti/Caballe '74 for pure melodrama 

Levine/Price '84 for Price's last ever opera performance, for the most promising young maestro since 1950 who never delivered, and for a lifetime's experience from a singing actress who for thirty years, WAS Aida 

Chailly/Urmana 2004 for everything Aida is. ***

Muti/Netrebko 2017 for a revival of Verdian style from a master who has learned from this music his whole life. **

I don't want to condescend to Verdi, I've spent too much of my life doing that already, but the populism is part of what's great about him. If people want to say that Verdi is as great as Mozart and Beethoven, they have to play him as seriously as they play Mozart and Beethoven: and how much of Verdi's appeal does that shore?

Other people would disagree with me, but I think Aida is of a different variety from his greatest operas. It was written to be a grand summation of Verdi's career, but Verdi was mining his more populist side in Aida, not the side of great art which he found in Otello, Falstaff, Boccanegra and Boito. In Verdi's greatest operas, he starts with the story and creates music to set the story: that's how we get Rigoletto and Traviata and Otello and Falstaff. But in Don Carlo, one cannot help sensing that he began with the setting, and even moreso in Aida. Everyone talks about how great and dramatic Act III is, but after O Patria Mia I find Act III weak sauce. I feel as though Verdi is just moving through the gears of what an opera is supposed to do before he gets to the next amazing tableauxes in Act IV. Think of Amanasro's music where he disavows Aida. It's basically the Monterone music in Rigoletto.

The right conductor never got there: Karajan II and Gui got close, so of course did Toscanini in his way, and we might wish in this piece for masters as great as Mitropoulos, Fricsay, Giulini, Carlos Kleiber (either Kleiber really...), Franco Ferrara, but I think the truly right conductor for this piece was Guido Cantelli: a conductor with Toscanini's austere inevitability but without his rigidity: a Toscanini who could lower the temperature to warmth, the conductor James Levine threatened to become and never did. This is the recording we're missing and oh the tragedy. In my mind, I hear great singing actors like Franco Corelli, Giulietta Simoniatto, Shirley Verrett late in her career when she switched to soprano, all under the disciplining hand of Guido Cantelli leading the Philharmonia in a performance that's loud when it should be loud, quiet when it should be quiet, and formally perfect. The spectacle gets its entire due, but it stays in proportion so it never crowds out the intimacy. Cantelli would stick to Verdi's tempi like Toscanini, he bends the rhythm no more than 5 or 10 clicks for singers like Gui; he observes the accents without overdoing them the way Muti does in every bar, and he would have all the weight of sound Abbado lacks. 

And yet there is so much about Aida that is art at the top of Parnassus. I don't think it's the usual scenes people say. It's not the triumphal march, and it's not even really the tomb scene (except for the offstage choruses). It's the preparations for battle before Ritorna Vincitor, it's the ritual in praise of P'tah, or the offstage judgement scene. Aida is almost unique among Verdi in how it strives for ceremonial sublimity. You can feel it in the Triumphal March if it's not played as a carnival (good luck...), but even outside the Triumph scene, Aida requires a great chorus. A few Verdi operas require a great chorus, particularly among the early operas, but only Don Carlo requires a chorus to create something that seems anywhere close to this large: as though the scene is set of an entire civilization. As far as 'choral epics' go, it's up there with Boris and Les Troyens, and like in those epics, the chorus is what gives the scenes their vividness. I sometimes feel as though Aida is great in exact proportion to how much he gives the chorus to do, but in order to hear the greatness of Aida's most famous scene, you need an ascetic of the Toscanini/Chailly variety who rein tempos to absolute steadiness so that it doesn't feel like just 'elephants on parade.'