Renata Tebaldi · Mario del Monaco · Robert Merrill, Giacomo Puccini - Il Tabarro (LP, Album, FFR + Box) (Near Mint (NM or M-))

Media Condition:  Near Mint (NM or M-)
Sleeve Condition: Very Good Plus (VG+)
Country:    US  
Released:  
Genre:       Classical
Style:         Opera, Romantic

Comments:

 

Notes:

Notes in English Available in mono as A-4151 This is the one-record box set with a booklet of many pages (English translation by Peggie Cochrane). The vinyl is made in England, full frequency range recording (full frequency stereophonic sound). The below text are from the booklet: IL TABARRO - MICHELE, BARGE-MASTER, AGED 50 ... Robert Merrill - GIORGETTA, HIS WIFE, AGED 25 ... Renata Tebaldl - LUIGI, STEVEDORE, HER LOVER, AGED 20 ... Mario del Monaco - TINCA, STEVEDORE, AGED 35 ... Renato Ercolanl - TALPA, STEVEDORE, AGED 55 ... Silvio Maionlca - FRUGOLA, RAG-PICKER, HIS WIFE, AGED 50 ... Lucia Daniels SONG-SHEET VENDOR ... Piers de Palma TWO LOVERS ... Dora Oarral, Glanfranco Manganotti with the Chorus and Orchestra of the MAGGIO MUSICALE FIORENTINO Conducted by LAMBEBTO GARDELLI The libretto for II Tabarro was adapted for Puccini by his librettist Giuseppe Adam from the one-act play La Houppelande by the French playwright Didier Gold, written in 1910. The opera itself was completed towards the end of 1916, but did not achieve a first performance until December 14, 1918, at the Metropolitan Opera New York. It Tabarro is the work most affected by Puccini 's invariable insistence upon changes and amendments-for the most part unerring in the sureness of his intuitive apprehension and instinctive conviction of what is theatrically 'right'. The play-a sordid tale set among burgees on the Seine in the first decade of the present century, when their condition was poverty-stricken, squalid and unenviable in the extreme, -culminates in two murders-so-called crimes passionelles. Goujon (Tinca in the opera) knifes his whore of a wife in a quayside tavern from which he emerges, bloody knife in hand, just as Michel (Michele) presses his terrified wife upon the dead body of her lover. In the interest of the simplification required in order to convert the tale to operatic use, Puccini suppressed the sub-plot, only passing reference being made to Tinca's lot (Michele 's Ha per moglie Una bagascia). In the original, Georgette (Giorgetta), married to a prosaic, middle-aged husband much older than herself, seduces Louis (Luigi), a weak, malleable youth with a conventional outlook, a few years her junior. In the opera, Luigi is depicted as a far more impassioned and romantic lover, aware, too, of his deplorable and brutish condition. Then, the debased and brutalized pair, La Taupe (Talia) and his wife, the fantastic and grotesque rag-picker La Furette (La Frugola), is presented by Puccini in an almost sympathetic, somewhat Darby-and-oan-ish, light (see Frugola's [Io sognato Una casetta), for which there is little warrant in the play. Further, Puccini 's, too, is Frugola's air about her beloved tabby cat, sentimentally developed from the old rag-picker's slighting reference to an old dead cat, which used to do its jobs where it shouldn't. And the episode of the itinerant vendor of sheet music has been expanded with remarkable effect in suggesting the Parisian suburban environment and atmosphere, whilst the young lovers, who add such a magical and poetic touch with their lyrical farewells on the quayside, are wholly Puccini 's own. The most staggering alteration that the composer insisted upon, however, concerns Michele 's final monologue. Originally this followed the play quite closely -the barge-master, reduced to despair by the suspicion of his wife's infidelity and her changed attitude towards him in consequence thereof, muses, philosophizing upon life's vicissitudes in general and voicing a longing for death in the river, from whose waters he himself has so often helped to retrieve the bodies of the drowned. (Scotti, flume etemo, recorded separately on the accompanying disc). Not a hint of premeditated revenge here. Puccini insisted upon Adam replacing this somewhat costive and static piece by something much more dramatic and immediate. The work must end on a well-worked-up-to note of passion and horror. In the monologue which Adam then substituted (Nulla'Silenzio) Michele first broods darkly over the possible identity of his wife's lover, then longs to drag the culprit down to a watery death with him in the river. From the moment when the orchestral weighs in with the theme depicting the ceaseless monotonous flow of the sluggish waters of the Seine, Puccini succeeds in evoking by musical means the ominous atmosphere germane to this guignolesque plot, whilst at the same time conveying in masterly fashion the nostalgic melancholy of the September evening, by conjuring up the familiar sights and sounds of Paris in a manner which is little short of miraculous. It is given immediacy and point by such devices as the orchestrally-simulated wailing of tugs' sirens, motor horns from the quayside, bugles from ahearby barracks, a striking clock and even the swishing of other passing craft. The personages of the drama, too, are skilfully clothed in music which graphically depicts their various characters and changing emotional states. Far from being the pale echo of Tosca, as some of its earlier critics made out, It Tabarro is a spine-chilling little masterpiece, well able to hold its own against the finest examples of the genre.

A. Part 1. O Michele? Michele? Non Sei Stanco?
B. Concl.: Come? Non Sei Andanto? Scorri, Fiumo Eterno

Barcode and Other Identifiers:

Matrix / Runout ZAL-5662-2E H 1
Matrix / Runout ZAL-5663-3E O 1
Other OS.25743
Other M/T

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