Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Verdi: Un Ballo in Maschera

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

It's the season for costume parties, so I figure this is the appropriate moment for listening to Giuseppe Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera ("A Masked Ball," 1859), a work of international standard repertoire that I have broadcast three times before going way back to Sunday, April 16, 1989. Un Ballo in Maschera has been frequently recorded.

Our WWUH classical music record library has several historic recordings of "A Masked Ball" on LP. In 1989, and again in 2010, I employed the Angel/EMI three-LP reissue from 1986, with Riccardo Muti conducting at Covent Garden. Many great singers of the second half of the twentieth century essayed roles in this warhorse of the repertoire. The 1975 Covent Garden production of "Masked Ball" starred tenor Placido Domingo and mezzo Fiorenza Cossotto. On Sunday, November 6, 2011 came an even more historic recording of Un Ballo made live at the Met in mono sound in 1955, with Dimitri Mitropoulos conducting. Soprano Zinka Milanov and other notables of the era were in the cast (Sony Classical CDs).

This Sunday we reach back to 1967 for an early stereo recording made in the RCA Italiana Studios in Rome. Erich Leinsdorf directs a cast drawn mostly from the Metropolitan Opera and starring soprano Leontyne Price and tenor Carlo Bergonzi (three RCA Red Seal LPs). Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera suffers from a mutilated libretto. The censors in Naples forced some ridiculous changes to it. "A Masked Ball" should have been set in Sweden in the year 1791 when the Swedish monarch Gustavus III was assassinated at a costume ball. To please the censors the setting was shifted to New England- to Boston, to be exact. Curiously, there's an element of humor in this opera that's absent in so many other of Verdi's works.