Hey everyone! Welcome to Day 79!
Wow, the project is almost done. Tomorrow will see the end of what has been an amazing musical journey. But the goodbye tears are for another day (tomorrow). Today is a day for opera.
Verdi: Un ballo in maschera - January 17th and 24th, 1954
Un ballo in maschera was the work that bookended Arturo Toscanini's long association with the world of Italian opera. The conductor's parents took him to see a production of the work at Parma's Teatro Regio in 1871, when he was only four years old. Eighty-three years later, Toscanini conducted Un ballo at NBC, in what was to be his last performance of a complete opera.
Toscanini was well aware that this would be the end of his storied career in operatic theatre. Following the second of the two broadcasts that was to comprise this complete Un ballo, Toscanini said that "This was my last opera performance. I began by hearing a performance of Un ballo in maschera at the age of 4, up in the gallery, and I've finished by conducting it at 87." Opera lovers have been left tantalizingly little in the way of recordings to document Toscanini's way with Italian opera, but that is what makes these few surviving performances so great in importance.
Un ballo in maschera has a curious history. Loosely based on an assassination that took place at a masked ball in Stockholm in 1792, the opera went through a wide variety of changes to satisfy government censors wary of the plot's political intrigue. What began as an opera named Gustavo III that was set in Stockholm eventually became, after a three year gestation, Un ballo in maschera, an opera set in colonial Boston. It seems that the Boston setting is pretty much ignored in modern productions, but I still find it amusing to think about an opera set in America that has main characters named Riccardo, Renato and Silvano. I think those were my three best childhood friends.
As the opera was performed in a concert setting for the purposes of this 1954 broadcast, I don't think its setting really matters - though it doesn't sound much like Boston to my ears (or Stockholm, for that matter). What it does sound like is a master conductor having the time of his life in an opera that he had loved dearly since childhood, and which he knew he would be conducting for the last time. During the rehearsals for the performance, Toscanini told the orchestra "I'm an old relic, but I won't let you down." Based on the extraordinarily high level of this performance, I seriously doubt that the old man let the NBC Symphony or his cast down.
Yet there is an interesting remark in Toscanini and the Art of Conducting by Robert C. Marsh, who was in the audience for these broadcasts. Marsh writes that he is "competent to assure the person who listens to the recording that what he hears is superior in a number of ways - particularly balance - to what one heard in the actual performance."
It is certainly true that recordings can cover a multitude of sins, but I have a hard time accepting Marsh's statement. For my taste, everything is a bit too closely miked in the recording. This may marginally raise the level of audible detail, but it also subtracts from maintaining a sense of theatre. This is actually a bit of a blanket criticism I have of all of Toscanini's concert opera performances at NBC. Although these operas were obviously not staged, this makes it all the more important to maintain the illusion of theatricality in the music-making.
All this applies only to the recording, not to the performance itself. Although the general trend in Toscanini's later work is one of diminished control, this performance of Un ballo in maschera is so ebullient in its execution that any flaws are quite unimportant. Arturo Toscanini was one of the greatest opera conductors in history, and this performance was the perfect way to close the career of this old relic.
...........................................................................................................................................
That's it for Day 79!
Check back tomorrow for the end of the project, which will feature some very spiritual works as well as the greatest Italian work ever written by a German.
Happy Friday!
No comments:
Post a Comment