For thirty-odd years I was an ardent listener to the Saturday afternoon broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera. (I gave it up when the "good-music station" was drowned out by the gabble from station WEST and the FCC informed me that this was a condition my government had determined was best for my area.) I recall a particular afternoon when, in one of his fireside chats to the peasants, Rudolf Bing explained that there was no need to ask for a different repertoire because "your Metropolitan" provided all the operas worthy to be heard; those that gathered dust on the shelves deserved to. So there! .In those distant days Sir Rudolf had no special reason to consider the power of the LP to stir up an apparently insatiable hunger for operatic novelty. In recent weeks I've acquired recordings of Rachmaninoff's Francesca da Rimini, Humperdinck's Konigskinder, Auber's Manon Lescaut and La Muette de Portici, and Leoni' s L 'Oracolo, some of which I'd not even heard of when Mr. Bing made his announcement. In roughly the same time period there have been productions of Offenbach's Christopher Columbus in St. Paul, Massenet's Le Roi de Lahore in Seattle, Holst's The Wandering Scholar in Sarasota, and Bellini's I Capuleti e i Montecchi and Rossini's Tancredi in Dallas. Of these, the Met has presented only the Massenet, and that over fifty years ago!
And now here is the first "legitimate" recording of Tancredi--though I've possessed for some years a "piracy" featuring Anna Reynolds. Tancredi was Rossini's ninth opera to be produced; it was brought out to riotous acclaim in Venice when he was two weeks short of his twenty-first birthday! It represents his first attempt at a serious work, and seems to have been the first opera to cast a woman in an heroic male role. This last probability signaled the beginning of the end of the reign of the castrati. ( Over a two-hundred year period tens of thousands of little Italian boys were emasculated in the hope that they would strike it rich as operatic sopranos and altos. The last of that ilk, Prof. Alessandro Moreschi, lasted long enough to make some perfectly horrid records. However, in her notes to the work under consideration, Mme. Dominique Fernandez appears darkly to hint that we should go back to the practice in the interests of authentic performance!)
Rossini had already created a stir that (to mix the figure) was to infect all Europe. In La Pietra del paragone (whose overture he used again for Tancredi!) he had introduced the orchestral crescendo that became his hallmark, though he had swiped the idea as he did a good many others. If his form was basically conservative, he had a sound sense of drama (without which operas do deserve to gather dust); more importantly, he introduced a sinuous, sensuous type of melody that was to be taken up by Bellini, Donizetti, and Verdi as the essence of Italian opera. One must recall that Italian opera is a popular phenomenon, from which audiences want to depart whistling the tunes. One tune in Tancredi, the first-act aria "Di tanti palpiti," was so infectious that it became a mania--as unavoidable as "You are my sunshine" was in rural America in the 1940's.
From observing BBC shows on the tube, my wife and I have come to believe that everyone in England can act, and that shows are cast by a draft system. It now becomes apparent that this is also true of singing. I hadn't had time to get used to Margaret and Janet Price when along comes young Patricia and her playmates. Apparently this is a cast of up-andcomers, all specialists in bel canto, and the review in the Gramophone finds them up to the mark. The performance is special in that it represents Tancredi as Rossini wrote it, steam-cleaned of, 150 years of incrusted distortions. But no one will tell me why it had to be produced in Rennes, a provincial capital notable for urban renewal and for bookshops that do not have the Guide Michelin for Benelux!