Golden Age

Two singers sang two arias at the Met last week and suddenly made clear that, vocally, opera is in the midst of a new golden age. Soprano Leontyne Price, in Aida, sang the famous O patria mia with such velvety beauty, such abundance of power, that she overshadowed most other recent Aidas. Later in the same week, Birgit Nilsson sang Turandot's climactic scene in a way that will be remembered for years as the fulfillment of the opera's own description of its heroine: "Fire and ice." If two such performances can happen within five days, in addition to Joan Sutherland's remarkable New York debut (see New & Excellent) it is plain that an exciting new generation of singers has taken hold--a generation that may reduce some of opera's grandest old names to mere echoes in the memory.

Incapable of Ugliness. The Met's revival of Turandot, its first in 31 years, made up for much in the way of dull productions earlier in the season. Turandot (last syllable pronounced dot) remains the one Puccini work that appeals almost as much to the mind as to the heart. Writing for three years, under the shadow of death,* the composer was determined to move away from what he had come to regard as his earlier "slight" music. "Create for me something that will make the world weep," he instructed his librettists. In their adaptation of Carlo Gozzi's 18th century play, as in the Puccini score, there are more hints of harshness and modernity than in any of his other works--shrieking harmonies; a howling, fickle mob; even political irony, as when the three comic but cruel ministers complain that the graveyards are full because of too many executions. And yet, try as he might, Puccini could not write ugliness. He remained, happily, a prisoner of his melodious gift, and tenderness keeps breaking into the nervous, jagged moods. The mixture makes Turandot Puccini's most fascinating opera, and the new production does it justice.

Its master is Leopold Stokowski, who made a brilliant Met debut at 78 and on crutches (he is recovering from a broken hip). Having always been a theatrical conductor in the concert hall, he seemed completely at home in the theater, drawing all the score's turbulence from the orchestra without trying to make it the star of the show at the singers' expense. Cecil Beaton contributed dazzling if hardly daring sets, notably a kind of winged pagoda against a distant, unreal blue sky, which suggested that Turandot is not set in a real China but in an exotic region of the mind.

The production's greatest glory, though, was its voices.

Impeccable of Tone. Newcomer Franco Corelli, as Calaf, the prince who stakes his life on winning the cold Turandot, is as handsome as any tenor who ever walked the Met stage, has a big, bronze voice that he can fling forth most of the time without strain; but often he lacks taste and sacrifices lyricism to masculinity, style to strut. Anna Moffo, as Liu, makes the part far more than the usual sweet rag doll: singing with impeccable beauty of tone but also with surprising force, she gives the character backbone, thus rendering plausible the scene in which she chooses to die rather than to betray Calaf.

Beyond a doubt, it is Soprano Nilsson who dominates the production. The famed second act aria, In questa reggia, and the whole scene that follows -- in which Turandot poses the riddles which Calaf must solve to save his life and win her hand --is one of the most difficult half-hours in all opera. Callas, who sang a fine Turandot, rarely managed it without alarming wobbles; Nilsson's voice was unshakable.

The aria, with its strangely warped lyricism and its fiendishly high range (almost consistently within the octave below high C), virtually challenges the singer to shrillness. Nilsson was never shrill. As one of the opera's riddles might put it, her crystal voice was hard without harshness and it cut without hurting, thus embodying the ultimate paradox of Turandot.

* Puccini died in 1924, before having written what was to have been the opera's last, grandly clinching scene. The work was finished reverently but unimaginatively by Franco Alfano, a minor fellow composer and friend of Puccini's.

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