Question: If the De Sabata Tosca didn't exist, what would be your reference?
I put on the De Sabata Tosca this morning, and it occurred to me, however one feels about it, it's a one-off. It's the Citizen Kane of opera recording, capturing a set of circumstances that would never again be possible. By 1955, De Sabata would be retired, Callas and Di Stefano would arguably not be in prime voice, and Legge would already have lost influence and it would have been more difficult with the advent of stereo to spend top dollar to bring the most expensive equipment to Milan.
There's nothing one can write about the performance that hasn't been written already. It's one of those performances everybody knows. Everybody knows its strengths, and because everybody knows its strengths, the few flaws stand out all the moreso. There are other ways to do Tosca, De Sabata gets through it at top speed, and there are all sorts of lyrical nuances which other conductors who take more time like Karajan and Sinopoli get. It presents such an idiomatic mastery of the score that you get very little sense of just how ingenious Puccini's writing is - in Levine you hear Wagner, in Karajan you hear Debussy, in Chailly you hear Schoenberg, but in de Sabata you only hear Tosca. And of course, however masterful the line readings, it's perfectly legitimate to prefer a voice not just for Tosca but for Scarpia that are both prettier and heavier.
But what's extraordinary about the De Sabata Tosca is not just as a an artistic achievement, but as a for a kind of art that we barely have any decent sounding memento at all. De Sabata's music making is defined by a kind of high-strung romanticism that is probably not unlike what Mahler sounded like at the Vienna Opera, and having any memento of it in decent sound before the Toscanini model took over everywhere is a bit of a miracle. Imagine Mahler lived to his nineties in good health and his conducting were captured like this, or if we got anything at all from the Met under Bodanzky and Panizza in decent sound, or a near stereo equivalent opera recording from Albert Coates or Barbirolli before his last years when he slowed down.
And if that seems likely, imagine how hard and expensive it was to even get the great old maestri to set down their operas: how many complete operas do we have in the studio from the more spontaenous maestri? In the 19th century, when performances were entirely ephemeral, the connective tissue of performances were entirely in the moment, performances developed in the moment of execution, unwritten accelerations and ritards were their glories, crescendi and diminuendi could happen anywhere, and it was all part of the organic process of performance. But in the 20th century, with the presence of a recording microphone, performance increasingly had to take on the predictability of a schematic. If a conductor like Furtwangler or De Sabata wanted to create a recording that simulated the organic process o their performances, it was either do the whole thing in a single take, or the expense could balloon to an exponent of the planned cost. Ask yourselves, why are there barely any opera recordings even from relatively cautious maestri with 19th century roots like Monteux and Bruno Walter? And while people were willing to take a chance on Kleiber and Klemperer, why did nobody ever get Mitropoulos or Albert Coates in the studio? To me, there's no question, it just would have been too hard to piece together great operatic musicmaking without organic takes, and however hard that is in orchestral music, it's exponentially harder in opera. There are so many orchestral recording from Reiner and Szell, but why did conductors as professional and consistent as them avoid opera recordings? What did they know that we don't? For maestri as consistent as Reiner and Szell to barely record opera means that the expense and frustration must have been astronomical. So that's how miraculous it is to have a De Sabata Tosca - without all those other examples in horrible sound, it would seem mystifying, like a completely different conception of opera for which there is no precedent or successor.
De Sabata probably refined this conception of Tosca every other year for twenty years and possibly even a few times during the second Toscanini era. This is what every great recording should be - the result of decades of work before the microphone even got involved. Had De Sabata's health held up, imagine for a moment an EMI/Scala/De Sabata series that includes Tristan, Aida, Otello, Falstaff, Traviata, Barber of Seville, Parsifal, Walküre, Götterdämmerung, L'enfant et les sortileges, Medea, Turandot, god knows what else.... and now you begin to understand how unlikely it was that we even have one or two complete mementos of de Sabata at La Scala in good sound.
No comments:
Post a Comment