Day 23: Poets and Peasants and Murder-suicides

Good afternoon, and welcome to Day 23!

Today I listened to extracts from two works of the 19th century stage.


Suppé: Overture to Poet and Peasant - July 18th, 1943

One doesn't usually hear such things about the music of Suppé, but I find this Toscanini performance of the Poet and Peasant Overture to be utterly sublime. I have often wondered if posterity has tragically undervalued this composer; there is a haunting melody in his overture to Die schöne Galathee that, with some modifications of orchestration and general context, could easily pass for Berlioz or even late Liszt. There is unfortunately no easy way to ascertain the worth of Suppé's operettas as distinct from the still frequently-performed overtures; a search on Amazon and other websites did not turn up any recordings of complete Suppé operettas, nor do I recall ever seeing one in a record store (back in the days when there were record stores). So has this composer been undervalued? There is no real way to know at this time, but this extraordinary Toscanini performance of the Poet and Peasant overture is by itself enough to earn Suppé further consideration.

Toscanini could be very inconsistent with the light Viennese repertoire. The recording he made of Strauss's Blue Danube waltz only seventeen months earlier was steely driven and utterly alien to the spirit of the music. The Poet and Peasant overture, on the other hand, could not be more different: it is beautifully shaped and phrased with a delicate, supple lyricism that ebbs and flows with grace and control. This is no mere fluff; this is the sublime creation of a master craftsman who happens to composing in a light vein. Toscanini understood this, and at last gave this music the seriousness it deserved. I hope someday we will be able to hear more of Suppé with the same gravitas.

Verdi: Overture and "Quando le sere" from Luisa Miller - July 25th, 1943

When Toscanini conducted these excerpts at NBC it had been more than forty years since he had last led a production of this supremely melodramatic opera. It's the standard formula: boy meets girl, girl likes boy, another boy likes girl, girl doesn't like other boy, first boy ends up being the Count's son, second boy threatens girl, second boy threatens girl's father, Count puts girl's father in jail, girl is forced to renounce love to first boy to get father out of jail, first boy gets angry and kills girl and himself. Got it?

Even for the stringent standards of realism for 19th century Italian opera this is stretching it, and I wonder if Toscanini's heart was really with this work. One review of his only La Scala production of Luisa Miller in 1902 called the performance "mediocre, because concord and conviction were lacking", while another said that "the work, which is certainly not one of Verdi's best, bored people." What I sense from these excerpts that Toscanini recorded many years later is not exactly boredom or lack of conviction, but simply that the conductor did not feel devotion to this music as he did to Otello or Falstaff. Although the overture is certainly played with fire, the string passagework is much messier than would normally exist in a recording that Toscanini had approved for release.

The "Quando le sere" aria, meanwhile, is certainly intense, but very stiff in execution: Toscanini's soloist, the wonderful Jan Peerce, almost sounds driven to the point of being uncomfortably declamatory. In this scene, Rodolfo (boy one) is lamenting the letter Luisa wrote in which she renounced her love for him. Rodolfo does not yet know that Luisa was forced to write this letter to get her father out of jail, and reminisces of the happy times they had spent together while cursing her betrayal. Painful emotions sting all the more when juxtaposed with feelings of lost happiness, and I think that was what Verdi was going for with his rather pastoral orchestration. The clarinet rivulets in this aria are typical of Verdi's moments of ironic tranquility, but there is no sense of serenity to this performance, only a muscular tenseness.

I don't mean to be overly harsh to this recording. We are very fortunate to have as much documentation of Toscanini's way with Verdi as we do; Toscanini was the only really significant link with Verdi to live well into the age of recording and to leave many performances for posterity. But there were other Verdi works that clearly were closer to the conductor's heart, and the recordings Toscanini left for the finest of Verdi's music are among the glories of the heritage of recorded sound.

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That's it for Day 23! I had originally intended to finish up with Toscanini's recording of Bizet's L'Arlesienne Suite, but I could not make the CD work; I will return to it at a later day. Tomorrow we will move on to Toscanini's seventh season with NBC, with more Verdi and works by Beethoven and Shostakovich.

Have a happy Friday!