Mozart: Così fan tutte [CD]

Mr. Austin has offered more than sufficient grounds for anyone who loves Così fan tutte to acquire this excellent and inexpensive set. Let me, then, mount some personal hobby horses.

It seems to me that the greatest virtue of this set is the marvelous blending of voices in razor-sharp ensembles. To my ear, this is a cast of excellent performers who have long-since worked out all performing kinks before live audiences.

At the date of this recording, the Glyndebourne Opera had about 300 seats. (At a typical performance of the time, only two-thirds of those seats were occupied.) This must have had a positive effect on the singers, allowing them to focus on vocal quality and interpretation and freeing them from the need to fill a great, cavernous auditorium. I believe that this smaller-scale vocalism has been caught on the early Glyndebourne recordings to high advantage.

Reviewers elsewhere have taken note of the short takes required by the limited recording techniques of the 1930s and criticized this recording for the excessive speed of the overture and recitatives. It may well be that Fritz Busch did bow to the inelastic demands of technology--but he was a master conductor and, on its own terms, the overture sounds just fine to me. As for the recitatives, I cannot see how snap and brio are out of place in this, of all operas.

Così fan tutte has always been plagued by its libretto. This is not to suggest that da Ponte's work is anything but brilliant; no one has ever written a libretto to match any of his three Mozartian masterworks. The problem is that Così is--well, not nice. Three aristocratic men behave very badly and a pair of aristocratic ladies respond almost as badly, but then, of course, all of da Ponte's libretti are about aristocrats behaving very badly. Reading reviews of contemporary productions, one might even conclude that the PC police are aching to expunge the opera from the repertory, exactly as their Victorian forbears did in the 19th and early 20th Centuries. Surely, here in the 21st Century we can at last accept what was clear to the Age of Enlightenment: that nice young men and women sometimes act badly. A clear-minded and sophisticated handling of that fact, which da Ponte provides, should rank as a great work of art, neither more nor less.

Finally, there is the question of the instrument to accompany the recitatives. It appears in the Naxos brochure and again in Mr. Austin's comments. At the insistence of Fritz Busch, a piano was used in Glyndebourne performances and on this recording in preference to a harpsichord. Frankly, I do not know what Mozart's performing practice was, and a desultory search of the limited reference materials immediately available to me offers no enlightenment. Surely though, Mozart must have conducted his piano concerti from the fortepiano. Why would he have used a lesser and obsolete instrument for his operas? I am fully aware the C.P.E. Bach specified in 1762 that the harpsichord was the proper instrument, but why would Mozart, who had no qualms about updating and improving Handel's Messiah, give a fig about the opinions of a mere chip off the old Bach?

By excising some of the items, making a few very minor cuts, and telescoping some of the secco recitatives, the recording project fitted onto forty 78 sides. Reviewers subsequently offered unstinting praise. "A triumph for all concerned." "Of the three Glyndebourne Mozart opera recordings conducted by Fritz Busch, this is the best." "One of the most enchanting sets ever made". Comments like these, taken from the 1950 "Record Guide" led many music lovers to acquire this opera set and become familiar with a Mozart opera that had almost dropped out of the performing repertoire.

Besides the genius of Mozart and his librettist Da Ponte, the guiding hands of EMI producer Fred Gaisberg, Glyndebourne's director Carl Ebert and conductor Fritz Busch ensure that everything here is of high artistic level. To sample Busch's skill in deftly pacing and phrasing a page of the score, try the trio that concludes Scene One (Track 4).

The role of Fiordiligi is sung with relentless steadiness and power by the Canadian soprano Ina Souez. No demure, winsome, shy creature is this signorina! Austrian soprano Luise Helletsgruber is the haughty Dorabella. English tenor Heddle Nash, singing in a once admired style that detractors sometimes called "bleating", exudes charm with the ladies and easy fraternity with the men. The aria "Un' aura amorosa" does not lie easily for his voice, however. German baritone Willi Domgraf-Fassbaender (the father of Brigitte) is entirely at home in the part of Guglielmo, his only trouble being an inability to avoid turning every "questa" into a "qvesta". Australian baritone John Brownlee makes a genial Don Alfonso, and there is added sparkle given to the proceedings whenever diminutive Austrian soprano Irene Eisinger appears as the maid Despina.

At Fritz Busch's insistence, a piano is used in the secco recitatives instead of a harpsichord. For the benefit of collectors like me who have been wondering why this reissue has taken so long to appear in the Naxos Historical Recordings catalogue, restoration engineer Ward Marston explains in the accompanying notes that finding clean, crackle-free 78s has not been easy.