Nearly a hundred years later, recordings of the 'big three' still haven't been bettered from those old Sabajno/Molajoli recordings with La Scala's B-List singers who can sing most later stars off the stage. No one can possibly equal their vocal security, their cohesive ensemble, their Italian diction, their grasp of every detail and secret. These are generations for whom Verdi accompanied every stage of their lives. They were literally put on earth to perform Verdi, and particularly to perform the 'Big Three.'
Listen to the violins in 'Che e cio'. It's reorchestrated for the recording, Verdi didn't even write their part. But their grasp of what Verdi needs musically is so innate that it's better than any woodwind playing reminiscent of an organ-grinder. This is some of the greatest orchestral playing on record. It is, quite simply, an ideal of playing to which we can only aspire through the decades ever since.
Later Verdi breaks his own mold, and there's a reason masterpieces like Otello and Don Carlo never achieved the love of Rig/Tra/Tro from the crowd faithful. Operas like Falstaff and Boccanegra can only benefit from outsiders to the tradition. When Kleiber and Solti conduct Otello, they can reach the stars, but when they do Traviata, they fundamentally sound more like themselves than Verdi. Imagine a Jon Vickers Alfredo - he could sing it, but it would be perverse. A Bryn Terfel Rigoletto? It would make us laugh in all the wrong ways.
Absurd as it often is, Verdi's high romanticism will never die. So long as listeners have a pulse they will weep at Violetta's plight just as they will hold their lover's hands when hearing the beauties of Chopin's arpeggiated thirds. The very sincerity and earnestness of such music is a vision of humanity we all need to experience, just as people today need the earnest humanity of our culture's own high romantics like Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen. It's human oxygen, it makes us remember that everyone near us is deserving of compassion and that, so often, the people we look at askance are merely misunderstood.
I don't truly love Verdi. Unlike Mozart, the nature his transcendence does not survive any misunderstandings. His situations are just too absurd and extreme, and if the singers are anything less than great, all you're left with is laughable dramatic situations, full of coincidences and cliches. And unlike Mozart, Verdi does not generally laugh along with us.
The greatest friend of the universal experience is the particular, and the more idiomatically Verdi's 'big three' are performed, the more universal they grow and the less absurd they seem. Nearly everybody reading this has all been there on nights when the singing was just not that great, and when presented with something less than exemplary musicianship, you can't possibly get past Verdi's intellectual limitations. But on those nights when the hours go to the stars, there's no limit for how Verdi can move any of us.
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