Tucker's Law of Musical Performance: Verdi's Aida: 66-103 years.
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.
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 when Gina Cigna somehow sings in both Berlin and New York at the Metropolitan, 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 nuance of Nello Santi or early Abbado live, 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. But 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.
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.
The greatest vocalism? As far as I'm concerned, there's only one choice: 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.
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 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.
Then there are such august legends of opera history as Caterina Mancini and Mario FIlippeschi. 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.
And then, over the course of one year, you have four very good but extremely imperfect recordings that take the work very seriously:
Maria Callas, Fedora Barbieri and an older 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 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? There is, of course, the famous live Callas in Mexico City where she tosses off a high E-Flat at the end of the Triumphal March. It's a high voltage affair--everybody keeps up with her: Mario del Monaco, Oriala Dominguez, Giuseppe Taddei. It is great opera, it is not great art.
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.
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 tableaux in Act IV. Think of Amanasro's music where he disavows Aida. It's basically the Monterone music in Rigoletto.
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.'
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