In my earlier record-collecting days
the "Così fan tutte"
was the 1962 Böhm EMI with Schwarzkopf
heading a starry cast, rather as the
"Figaro" was the Erich
Kleiber on Decca. The Kleiber "Figaro"
has pretty well maintained its position,
at least among pre-"authentic"
interpretations, while the pre-eminence
of the Böhm "Così"
seems less assured. Personally, I got
it as a "safe" choice in an
early CD reincarnation and found it
about as enthralling as a wet blanket.
In the wake of period-style and period-style-influenced
interpretations, critical opinion seems
to have veered in my direction over
the last decade-and-a-half but at the
time only the E.M.G. Monthly Letter,
of glorious memory, found it a disappointment
compared with EMI’s previous LP set
under Karajan. Basically, Böhm
would appear to believe that Mozart
was still writing the old style of opera
in which the story-line is carried forward
in the recitatives – albeit at a fairly
stately progress in his hands – while
the musical numbers offer a sort of
static commentary on the larger philosophical
issues, to which the words are only
a peg. Despina’s two arias and the Dorabella/Guglielmo
duet are extreme cases where the singers
do all they can to enunciate their words
with some sense of fun while the conductor
provides an exquisitely manicured orchestral
backdrop which seems deliberately intended
to contradict the meaning of what is
being sung. Personally, I disagree profoundly
with such a manner of interpreting this
opera – a manner which might be suited,
among Mozart’s works, only to "La
Clemenza di Tito" and early pieces
such as "Mitridate, Re di Ponto"
– but if it sounds like your ideal then
you might possibly prefer Böhm’s
even more marmoreal final reading (1974)
on DG. I have duly listened to the Böhm
EMI again as a comparison with Karajan,
and also to a 1957 broadcast under Vittorio
Gui which permitted me to hear Sesto
Bruscantini’s Don Alfonso in a different
context. This performance has not been
officially issued though, the operatic
grapevine being what it is, I don’t
rule out the possibility that you might
run a bootleg version to earth if you
tried hard enough. A very much
later (1990) Bruscantini performance
of this role was issued by Orfeo in
a performance under Gustav Kühn
otherwise performed by some very young
singers of whom at least three – Antonacci,
Bacelli and Dohmen – have remained with
us.
Other cross-references,
unavailable to me, might be worth following
up. Schwarzkopf and Merriman were together
again at La Scala under Guido Cantelli
in a legendary performance that established
this opera in the Italian repertoire
rather as Busch’s Glyndebourne performances
of the 1930s had done in England. Here
the present Guglielmo, Rolando Panerai,
sang Don Alfonso, as he did twenty years
later in the last Böhm version.
Merriman returned to Dorabella in a
well-regarded DG set under Jochum with
Seefried, Köth, Haefliger, Prey
and Fischer-Dieskau. Lisa Otto’s Despina
can be heard live under Böhm in
a 1954 Vienna performance with Seefried,
Dagmar Hermann, Dermota, Kunz and Schöffler.
Despite Karajan’s numerous re-recordings,
this is one work to which he did not
return.
Schwarzkopf is noticeably
more vivid with her recitatives and
in the ensembles under Karajan. The
stop-watch shows that her two arias
are actually slower with Karajan but
they seem less static due to the conductor’s
greater emotional participation. This
would seem to be the performance of
the two by which Schwarzkopf is best
remembered. Incidentally, at a 1961
concert in Naples at which she sang
a string of Mozart arias conducted by
Carlo Franci, she adopted a somewhat
more flowing tempo for "Per pieta,
ben mio", presumably at her own
choice.
Nan Merriman’s darker
voice differentiates the two sisters
better than is the case with the more
similar Christa Ludwig and she provides
plenty of character in her recitatives
and ensembles. Her arias are not so
interestingly sung, however, and there
is a trace of scooping in "Smanie
implacabili" which I didn’t much
care for. Christa Ludwig’s much more
detailed response reveals her as the
great singer we know her to be. Furthermore,
Böhm is at his least devastating
in these arias and indeed his very lively
"E’ amore un ladroncello"
is one of the few moments of his performance
I really enjoy. Lisa Otto offers the
traditional soubrette Despina but curiously
she inverts the normal practice in her
disguised voices, singing the Doctor
very nasally (and also out of tune,
deliberately or not) and adopting a
sort of owl-hoot for the Notary, which
Mozart actually marked to be sung nasally.
Whether this was Otto’s own idea or
Karajan’s could be checked out by reference
to her 1954 performance under Böhm.
Hanny Steffek, for Böhm, does not
change her natural voice much for the
Doctor and offers the usual nasal Notary,
as does also Elena Rizzieri for Gui.
Potentially I would prefer Steffek to
Otto since her timbre is less shrill,
but she suffers more than anyone from
Böhm’s funereal tempi. Arguably
Rizzieri, as a native Italian and helped
by that master-Rossinian Gui, is better
still.
Léopold Simoneau’s
suave emission and exquisite artistry
made him one of the most admired Mozart
tenors of his day – a finer Ferrando
could hardly be imagined. Alfredo Kraus
– brought in to replace an unavailable
Nicolai Gedda – was a great singer too,
of course, but here seems less inclined
than the rest of the cast to counter
Böhm’s blandness. Panerai and Taddei,
Böhm’s Guglielmo, were both outstanding
Italian baritones. It is probably Karajan’s
greater urgency which leads me to prefer
Panerai rather than the singing itself.
The scheming, cynical,
Don Alfonso is really the pivot on which
the whole opera hangs. For Karajan,
Sesto Bruscantini adopts an almost whispered,
insinuating manner, achieving his ends
by stealth. For Gui he is quite different,
perhaps more the conventional comic
bass, strutting around and organizing
everybody and everything. Walter Berry,
for Böhm, is good but a size smaller.
You don’t get the same idea that he
is at the centre of the plot.
Karajan, as always,
is intensely individual but, while he
could be a heavy Mozartian in later
years, for the most part everything
here sparkles and flows naturally. Even
when I don’t agree, he’s rarely impossible,
as Böhm so often is. I certainly
know which my choice would be. I should
point out, though, that Karajan has
the recitatives drastically cut and
takes a few snips at the actual music.
Böhm, by the standards of his live
performances and his first recording
on Decca – with Della Casa, Ludwig,
Loose, Dermota, Kunz and Schöffler
– uses a relatively full text (his 1974
version, in spite of the slow tempi,
fits onto two CDs because of the savage
cuts), though not to the extent of reinstating
Ferrando’s first Act Two aria. So if
you want a complete text, none of the
historical versions will do.
The Karajan "Così
fan tutte" has been reissued by
EMI themselves in the Great Recordings
of the Century series. Regis offer reasonable
reportage of the LPs as you would hear
them if you had good copies and the
means to play them. Surface noise is
detectable on headphones but would probably
not worry you in domestic surroundings
unless you have a padded cell for a
listening-room. Distortion comes and
goes, corresponding, I imagine, with
the end of the original sides. It is
never too serious. The booklet has notes
and a synopsis. In a desperate attempt
to make amends for all the times they
have spelt Giuseppe Di Stefano with
a small "D", Regis have spelt
Herbert von Karajan with a capital "V",
while maintaining the small "D"
for the librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte!
They also continue to be reluctant to
understand that the omission of an accent
from an Italian word may change the
meaning radically. I haven’t heard the
"official" EMI transfer, but
no one should feel short-changed by
the sound produced by the present one
in view of its venerable age and it
does provide some extras, which the
EMI doesn’t. Most of these are from
a recital disc conducted with unobtrusive
good sense (i.e. à la
Böhm) by John Pritchard and including
arias from parts Schwarzkopf did not
normally sing on stage – Cherubino from
"Figaro", Zerlina and Donna
Elvira from "Don Giovanni".
Maybe in 1953 she had not decided definitively
which Mozart parts she was going to
sing, but even later on she seems to
have enjoyed forays into other singers’
Mozart roles. In the Naples concert
referred to above she followed the Fiordiligi
aria with Dorabella’s "E’ amore
un ladroncello" and Susanna’s "Deh,
vieni" from "Figaro".
It would have been nice to have had
these here, but of course the 1961 recordings
are still under copyright.
Lastly, we have two
extracts from a 1952 "Martini &
Rossi" concert. The "Martini
& Rossi" concerts were a series
sponsored for at least a decade by the
manufacturers of the popular drink and
featured arias sung by two singers -
plus the odd duet if the singers in
question happened to be on speaking
terms - with a few orchestral items.
They were broadcast and recorded by
RAI and quite a lot of this material
has been issued on CD. The fact that
this particular concert was conducted
by Mario Rossi is purely coincidental
– Rossis are as common in Italy as Smiths
in England. This same concert also included
a version of "Zeffiretti lusinghieri"
which might have been preferred to the
one under Pritchard. It opens with a
stretch of recitative not recorded in
1953. The conductor’s more urgently
detailed response – in spite of almost
a minute of recitative the Turin performance
is only a few seconds longer – is taken
up by Schwarzkopf. Also in 1952, by
the way, Schwarzkopf collaborated with
Rossi in a performance of Mozart’s "Betullia
liberata", a work otherwise absent
from her discography. A bootleg version
has been issued but, with Cesare Valletti
and Boris Christoff among the other
singers, something more official would
be welcome.
In conclusion, since
I have advocated before now an appraisal
of the broadcast material left by the
under-recorded Vittorio Gui, let me
sum up the pros and cons of a hypothetical
release of his "Così fan
tutte". The Fiordiligi, Orietta
Moscucci, is the drawback, obviously
a little flustered in the early stages
where she snatches extra breaths in
unsuitable places and generally not
entirely secure. An attractive voice
and a natural handling of the recitatives
- in her own language, after all - make
some amends but she is no match for
Schwarzkopf or for many other recorded
Fiordiligis. The Dorabella, Miriam Pirazzini,
could be preferred to Merriman, though
hardly to Ludwig. Juan Oncina and Franco
Calabrese, the Fernando and Guglielmo,
are familiar from Gui’s Glyndebourne
Rossini sets. Oncina had not quite the
vocal beauty and resources of Simoneau
or Kraus, but was an attractive artist.
Only recently my colleague Goran Försling
was remarking that Franco Calabrese
usually only got comprimari roles
on disc so it sounds as if at least
one listener would be interested in
his Guglielmo - also to be heard on
the Cantelli performance. I have already
discussed the Despina and Don Alfonso.
Gui’s two acts come
in at about 78 and 72.5 minutes and
so would go onto two CDs. This is not
because his cuts are greater – if anything
he has a little more recitative than
Karajan – but because on the whole he
is swifter. And even when he is not,
as in the duet "Prenderò
quel brunettino", his greater lilt
makes him seem so – how one’s heart
sinks as Böhm begins this piece.
He knows how to make a finale spin and
he also knows what can be sung, so his
tempi never actually seem rushed. This
recording certainly demonstrates that,
if EMI had had the imagination to invite
Gui rather than Böhm to conduct
the second Schwarzkopf recording, the
result would have been a classic to
set alongside the Kleiber "Figaro".
In view of the casting, this RAI version
could not achieve the same status, and
its viability would also depend on whether
a sympathetic re-mastering of the original
tapes could make it sound a whole lot
better than my off-the-air taping, which
seems about ten years older than it
actually is.
Christopher Howell
REGIS RRC 3010 [3 CDs: 62:56 + 63:06 + 75:50]
