Tullio Serafin - VERDI: Aida [CD]

AIDAVerdi wrote his Egyptian opera Aida for performance at the new Cairo Opera House, which had opened in 1870 with a performance of Rigoletto. The story of the new work has some basis in the Hellenistic Aethiopica of Heliodorus, but was claimed as the original work of Auguste Mariette, known as Mariette Bey. It has been suggested that Temistocle Solera was responsible for the scenario, but if this is so, the fact was not known to Verdi, who had quarrelled with Solera in 1846 over the libretto of his opera Attila. The text of Aida was by Antonio Ghislanzoni and the opera was finally staged in Cairo on Christmas Eve 1871, after various delays, during the second season at the new house. It was mounted the following February at La Scala, Milan, in both places to very considerable acclaim.The recording of 1946 was conducted by Tullio Serafin, whose thorough grounding in the traditions of Italian opera and inspired leadership did much to encourage and foster interest in the art, particularly in the years after 1945, when younger singers could profit from his long experience. From 1924 until 1934 he had worked at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, conducting a wide-ranging operatic repertoire, and on his return to Europe was engaged first as artistic director of the Teatro Reale in Rome, which he finally left in 1943. His earlier career had involved him with La Scala, Milan, before and towards the end of the first world war, and he returned there for the first post-war season in 1946.Beniamino Gigli had made his operatic début in 1914 and his début at La Scala four years later in Boito’s Mefistofele, undertaking the rôle of Faust again in that opera for his Metropolitan Opera début in 1920. He continued to appear at the Met for the following twelve years, returning to Italy and pursuing an international career there and elsewhere in the years that followed. It was in 1946 that he was able to re-establish his international reputation once more as the heir to Caruso in a career that only ended in 1956, the year before his death. In the present recording he is partnered by the Italian soprano Maria Caniglia, who had made her début at La Scala in 1930, at the age of 25. She appeared there until the destruction of the theatre in 1943 and returned for three seasons from 1948, after its rebuilding. She died in 1979. The rôle of Amneris is sung by the great Italian mezzo-soprano Ebe Stignani, who had made her operatic début at the San Carlo in Naples in 1925 in the same part. She was engaged for La Scala by Toscanini in 1926 and continued there and in an international career for many years, with a repertoire that embraced the principal Verdi mezzo rôles, including that of the Requiem, which she memorably recorded with Gigli, Caniglia and Ezio Pinza under Serafin in 1939. The dramatic baritone Gino Bechi sang at La Scala from 1939 until 1953, appearing at the post-war re-opening of the house in 1946. He