Moby Met ("Catch of the Day," episode 7)
A historic marathon

On January 29, "Catch of the Day" ran a two-plus-hour marathon through the The Inaugural Season: Extraordinary Met performances from 1966-67, a boxed set of ten full-length live opera broadcasts and highlights from eight more, all captured during the Metropolitan Opera's opening season at Lincoln Center, after more than eight decades in its original home at Broadway and 39^th Street. Busting its buttons, the company set a stratospheric bar that year. Brief liner notes cover essential historical background, but for libretti you're on your own. Most can be found easily online, so the inconvenience is minimal—and bear in mind the fire-sale price. As of this writing, Amazon is quoting $112.71 for the set, 22 CDs in all.

Our survey began as the historic season did, with the world premiere of Samuel Barber's Antony and Cleopatra, to Franco Zeffirelli's libretto after Shakespeare. Commissioning a grand new score to inaugurate a grand new house is the sort of grand gesture that has been known to backfire, for one reason or another. Verdi wrote Aida for the opening of the Khedivial Opera House in Cairo, but the Franco-Prussian war broke out, keeping the décor stranded in Paris, thus delaying the premiere by two years. (Rigoletto went on instead.) At the Met, the show went on as announced. In the title roles, Leontyne Price and Justino Diaz headed an all-star, all-American cast, under the baton of the glamorous Thomas Schippers. But Zeffirelli's extravagant spectacle (the cognoscenti called it vulgar) came to grief late in the long evening when a revolving pyramid broke down. As for Barber's score, it is fair to say it did not catch on. Rare subsequent revivals in concert or the opera house have come around less often than the proverbial blue moon, in a much-abbreviated edition that may be no improvement.

All alone by the telephone (well, not quite): Price's Cleopatra awaits her great moment.

But the live recording fairly bristles with excitement. Scorning the preamble of an overture, Barber plunges straight into the action with the Roman chorus on the verge of panic at scandalous news from Egypt. From that first excerpt, we jumped to the beaten Antony's noble farewell to his soldiers, chilly orders from Antony's ruthless rival Octavius (Jess Thomas), and the guilt-wracked suicide of the turncoat Enobarbus (Ezio Flagello), long Antony's brother-in-arms. Then we cut to the finale of the opera, where Price blazes with the asp at her breast, spangling her trademark golden phrases with flashes of the guttural and ferocious.

For our next segment, we served up a mixed bag, beginning with the final minutes of Act 1 of Richard Strauss's Die Frau ohne Schatten. Formerly unknown to the New York audience, the monumental fable scored perhaps the bull's-eye of the season. In our excerpt, we home in on the lowly Barak (Walter Berry), who asks for nothing more than children with the wife he worships. She, however, has just dashed his hopes with all the icy contempt at her command. Downcast and alone, Barak overhears three passing watchmen. Modulating into a major key, they raise their voice in a hymn to procreation as the divine purpose of conjugal love. Paul was unimpressed; I was close to tears.

Renata Scotto, a Butterfly for the ages.

On to Mozart's nimble Die Zauberflöte, which happens to have inspired Strauss's heavier-handed allegory. In the first-act finale, Prince Tamino and his sidekick Papageno, a child of nature, have become separated on their quest for the captive princess Pamina. In an interlude, Tamino honors the gods and cheers himself up playing his magic flute for the first time, delighting a menagerie of wild beasts. When Tamino exits, Papageno and Pamina appear, soon to be overtaken by her wicked jailer, but Papageno's magic glockenspiel saves the day. In the now-historic Met broadcast, the African American tenor George Shirley, as Tamino, gives his song an unusual dose of the heroic. Judith Raskin brings limpid candor and a spirit of adventure to Pamina, with Theodore Uppman in disarming form as her temporary protector. Then George Shirley, who was ubiquitous at the Met that season, gave an instant encore in the love duet from Puccini's Madama Butterfly, in tandem with the transcendent Renata Scotto as the child bride Cio-Cio-San. Scotto's girlish, almost feline timbre, brought home the heroine's extreme youth, innocence, and surrender to the love that will cost her her life.

In the third block of our program, we concentrated on Verdi's Otello, supreme among tragic operas after Shakespeare. The draw here is James McCracken's landmark interpretation of the towering title role. Full disclosure: Jimmy (shortly thereafter to become a beloved family friend) was my first Otello, in 1961. I had no words back then to evoke the clarion thrust of his singing or the visceral immediacy of his characterization, whether in tenderness or volcanic fury—in short, his animal magnetism on every vector. Yet these qualities were not lost on me. To encounter them afresh in this Met broadcast under the baton of Zubin Mehta was to relive them as if for the first time.

An Otello without peer: James McCracken.

His Desdemona this time out—not my very favorite—was Monserrat Caballé, represented on our show in proper sequence by the solo that sets in motion the expansive concertato in Act 3. (Kiri Te Kanawa's Met debut, in the same role, was several seasons in the future.) For the rest, we bookended the playlist with Otello's stupendous entrance ("Esultate!") and his solemn, ceremonial death scene ("Niun me tema"). In between, we picked up near the close of Act 2, where Jago, renowned for honesty, is weaving fabrications to cast scandal on Otello's blameless wife. In this quiet, diabolical scene, Tito Gobbi walks a tightrope between artlessness and mustachio-twirling malice, but when the tornado strikes, as soon it does, Jimmy rides the symphonic pandemonium from the orchestra pit like a coequal force of nature.

"The voice of an angel" goes wild. Tebaldi as La Gioconda.

Nuggets from the CD of excerpts rounded out the show. We had Renata Tebaldi and Rosalind Elias chewing the scenery in Ponchielli's La Gioconda. In general, Tebaldi favored more ladylike fare, but here she bares her claws. "I love him as the light of heaven," cries the pampered aristocrat Laura (Elias), staking her claim to the two-timing tenor. "I love him as the lion loves blood," Gioconda replies: game, set, match—and it is she who lays down her life to save him. Next Walter Berry and Christa Ludwig plotted the overthrow of the ancient Brabant in a spooky nocturnal duet from Wagner's Lohengrin.

On to Marvin David Levy's Mourning Becomes Electra—the other world premiere of the Met's inaugural season at Lincoln Center. To a libretto after Eugene O'Neill, the opera fared little better in the long run than Can we please hear some more? (This six-minute segment seems to be the only recorded snippet available.) For our finale ultimo, we turned to the trio from Act 1 of Verdi's matchless Il Trovatore, etched in starshine and thunderbolts by Martina Arroyo, Richard Tucker, and a fantastically incisive Robert Merrill. In time-honored fashion, the conductor Francesco Molinari-Pradelli lets them hold their high notes at the crest of the repeat of the big, big tune, but for just a split second, so as not to brake the stampede.

Rarest of glimpses: a moment from Marvin David Levy's ill-starred "Mourning Becomes Electra."