Celebrating the Voice in Song

When it comes to marvelous singers of the past, we have a seemingly endless stream of repackaged recordings, but their actual presence is fading fast. Which makes this laserdisc and videotape collection of footage--of Caruso and Chaliapin, of Tebaldi and Tetrazzini, of Bjorling and Callas and so many more--simply priceless. And revelatory.

Once upon a simpler time, there was no need for irony in opera production. Singers didn’t act natural, they simply sang and proudly. A few looked good (it’s fascinating to see Rise Stevens movie-star gorgeous in the 1941 musical “The Chocolate Soldier” and hear her describe how she was told to sing an octave lower for the camera so as not to distort her mouth). Many more must have looked camp even then.

Consider Magda Olivero, queen of opera queens. In interview footage here, she describes how a halo engulfed her when she sang! Lauritz Melchior sings Wagner on a cruise; Kirsten Flagstad does it in a nightclub (introduced by Bob Hope), and there’s Tebaldi’s over-the-top Mimi in “La Boheme.”

But there are also performances that break your heart, such as Boris Christoff singing the death scene from “Boris Godunov” on TV in 1956, or Beniamino Gigli captured at a recording session in 1933 singing Handel with exquisite tenderness.

And the greatest revelation of all--Callas. Even in the company of many of the century’s greatest singers, she steals the show: in a rare clip from what has come to be known as her “Lisbon Traviata” and in the famous clip of her Tosca.

Our opera singers can never be like this again, just as our movie stars can never be like Gable or Garbo or Bogart, or our musicals like “Oklahoma!” Times have changed, art has changed. But entertainment hasn’t--and it is a rare and wonderful treat to travel back for a couple of hours to more innocent times and art.

*

Albums are rated on a scale of one star (poor), two stars (fair), three stars (good) and four stars (excellent).