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Giuseppe Verdi

‘Don Carlos’, Covent Garden 1958

1958. Royal Opera House, London
A recording from the first run of Covent Garden's iconic 1958 production of Verdi's 'Don Carlos', conducted by Carlo-Maria Giulini and directed by Luchino Visconti.
Composer Giuseppe Verdi
Conductor Carlo Maria Giulini
Singers Fedora Barbieri, Gré Brouwenstijn, Boris Christoff, Tito Gobbi, Jon Vickers
Ensemble Covent Garden Opera
Genre Opera

DON CARLOS at COVENT GARDEN in 1958

The current Royal Opera House, the third building on the Covent Garden site,
opened on 15 May 1858 with Meyerbeer’s grand opera Les Huguenots. To
celebrate its centenary in 1958, it was important for the only 12-years-old
Covent Garden Opera to prove its worth. The previous year’s historic
achievement of a complete Berlioz Trojans was to be revived under Rafael
Kubelik, nearing the end of his term as Musical Director. The Company’s
leading German conductor Rudolf Kempe was to conduct Strauss’s Elektra in
performances which brought the unscheduled sensation of Gerda Lammers in
the title role. Callas returned as La traviata and to sing Elvira’s mad scene from
Bellini’s Puritani as the centrepiece of a Gala in June. The previous autumn’s
lavish new Aida was revived with the dazzling young Leontyne Price, Regina
Resnik and Jon Vickers; but there was a need for that spring’s new production
to make a bold statement about the adolescent Company’s ambition.

Lord Harewood, who was General Administrator David Webster’s closest in-
house confidante in repertory planning and casting, favoured two candidates
for the title. One was Smetana’s Dalibor, which would have played to Kubelik’s
strengths and offered a vehicle for their emerging star tenor Jon Vickers. The
other was Verdi’s Don Carlos, not performed at Covent Garden since Beecham
conducted it in 1933, though Sadler’s Wells Opera had mounted a cut-down
version in 1951 for the 50 th anniversary of Verdi’s death with Joan Hammond as
Elisabeth, James Johnston as Carlos and the young Amy Shuard as Eboli. The
previous year 1950 had seen a famous production at Florence’s Maggio
Musicale conducted by Tullio Serafin; and Rudolf Bing had opened his long
tenure at New York’s Metropolitan with a new production of the 4-act Italian
version. As I learned later, it was and remained Harewood’s favourite Verdi
opera. It is undeniably grand opera, but it demands a top level cast in five or
six of its leading roles. Even more vitally, its success depends on the convincing
vision of its creative team of conductor and director.

The choice of Carlo Maria Giulini, the leading Italian musician of the post-
Toscanini era, and consequently of his collaborator on La Scala Milan’s 1955
Traviata, the film director Luchino Visconti (author of Senso and Rocco e i suoi
fratelli), was the foundation of the success of Covent Garden’s Don Carlos.
Together they achieved a fusion of music and drama, which remains Opera’s
much-sought but seldom-realised Holy Grail. Visconti was his own designer,
creating a series of stage pictures which conjured the forest of Fontainebleau
with its distant dwellings in contrast to the airy oppression of Philip II’s Spain,
and giving his characters costume changes which charted the progress of their
lives. He insisted that all court ladies wear long gloves! His skill as a director
was in restraint, providing his artists with an ambience, drawing on their own
personalities, but imposing a discipline which banished traditional operatic
mannerisms. The final parting of Elisabeth and Carlos was the more poignant
because they drifted to opposite sides of the wide stage, emphasising their
separation, resisting the temptation to hold each other during their duetting.
Likewise, Giulini encouraged an Italian ‘singing’ quality from his orchestral
strings and woodwind, long lines and firm chording from his brass, but avoided
the vulgarisms that can creep into Italian Verdi in the more martial sections. A
case in point is the friendship duet, ‘Dio, che nell’alma infondere’, for Carlos
and Posa in the first San Yuste scene. Giulini eschews heartiness, so that its
potentially jaunty tune becomes suffused with a mournful recognition that the
friendship is doomed. Every Verdi opera has its specific tinta. Don Carlos, as
befits a grand opera, offers a wide palette of browns and blacks, occasionally
contrasting with cream and gold. When you listen to the way Giulini makes his
musicians deploy their colours, you realise what an architect Verdi was and
why the 5-act version of this opera, even with some judicious cuts, is superior
to the 4-act revision.

Boris Christoff was definitive as King Philip. He used stillness to dominate
every scene he was in, so that his movements were by contrast terrifying.
Every detail was minutely calculated, yet it had the effect of spontaneity. It
was not the largest or most stentorian voice, but the phrasing had a unique
authority and he could veil the tone to impart an immense loneliness in his
confession to Posa in Act II or to the soliloquy at the start of Act IV, during
which he hardly moved from his chair. Tito Gobbi was the opposite, so
generous yet decisive in his movement, with an unmatched ability to
communicate with the most distant spectator. Compared with his
contemporary Ettore Bastianini, his voice suffered from a certain fissità and he
lacked the warm centre to his baritone which Italians love. But the personality
was so confident, the line so extended, that his death scene won all hearts.
Dutch soprano Gré Brouwenstijn, Desdemona for Kubelik, brought dignity as
well as sumptuous tone to Elisabeth. Her silent suffering in her bejewelled
golden costume in the auto-da-fè scene was as eloquent as her impassioned
prayer at the beginning of the last act. The title role is the hardest to bring off in performance, its only solo aria occurring early in Act 1 and absent from the climactic Act IV Scene 1. Jon
Vickers, still a Company member, endowed it with his enormous voice and
manic intensity which, in my experience, has never been matched in this part.
Just listen to him in the Garden scene trio, a soul on fire! Giulietta Simionato
was first choice for Eboli, but unavailable, and the opportunity to blood the
young Fiorenza Cossotto, so impressive in the small role of Teresa in La Scala’s
Sonnambula at Edinburgh Festival the previous summer, was judged too risky.
So, the feisty and popular Fedora Barbieri was hired, but proved vulnerable in
the role’s higher reaches. Giulio Neri, the cavernous bass who ‘owned’ the
part of the Grand Inquisitor, unexpectedly died aged only 48, and was replaced
by Marco Stefanoni and at later performances by house bass Michael Langdon,
as on this recording made three days before the centenary date.
This Don Carlos changed the perception of Covent Garden as an internationally
recognised opera house. That much was even evident to me as a callow 13-
year-old at that time. Its success reinforced the move, advocated by the Board
under its new Chairman Lord Drogheda, towards performing core operas in
their original languages, though ironically this opera’s original language was
French. Many years later, after I became Director of the Royal Opera, I
commissioned a fine production by Luc Bondy of the original version with a
superb cast led by Karita Mattila, Martine Dupuy, Roberto Alagna, Thomas
Hampson and José van Dam conducted by Bernard Haitink; but I was careful to
stipulate that the old Visconti designs should be preserved as a treasured
legacy of Covent Garden’s history. Still more valuable in recreating the past is
Music Preserved’s sharing of this recording, alongside those others from the
theatre’s memorable centenary season.

Nicholas Payne
16 July 2024

Giuseppe Verdi (1813 – 1901)

Don Carlos

Track 1: Act 1

Track 2: Act 2, Scene 1

Track 3: Act 2, Scene 2

Track 4: Act 3, Scene 1

Track 5: Act 3, Scene 2

Track 6: Act 4, Scene 1

Track 7: Act 4, Scene 2

Track 8: Act 5

 

This recording was made from a relay of a performances given at the Royal Opera House on 12 May 1958.

The recording cames from The Harewood Collection at Music Preserved.

Remastering by Paul Baily

  • Jon Vickers
    Don Carlos
  • Tito Gobbi
    Rodrigo, Marquis of Posa
  • Gré Brouwenstijn
    Elizabeth of Valois
  • Boris Christoff
    Philip II
  • Fedora Barbieri
    Princess Eboli
  • Michael Langdon
    Grand Inquisitor
  • Joseph Rouleau
    Monk
  • Jeannette Sinclair
    Tebaldo
  • Edgar Evans
    Count of Lerma
  • Ava June
    Voice from Heaven
  • Robert Allman
    Herald
  • The Covent Garden Opera Chorus
  • The Covent Garden Opera Orchestra
  • Carlo Maria Giulini
    Conductor

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