Search - Carreras, Varady, di Almeida :: Halevy: La Juive

Good performance of an unjustly neglected opera

L. E. Cantrell | Vancouver, British Columbia Canada | 11/17/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

"SOURCE: Studio recording made over eight days in London during August 1986, with over-dubbing completed during a week-long session in Munich in February 1989.



SOUND: Good digital stereo.



CAST: Eleazar, a wealthy Jewish jeweler who holds a secret - Jose Carreras (tenor); Rachel, his daughter - Julia Varady (soprano); Leopold, a Christian prince and worthless hound dog who disguises himself as Samuel, a Jewish painter, in order to make time with Rachel - Dalmacio Gonzales (tenor); Princess Eudoxie, betrothed to Leopold (or perhaps his wife--the French, German and Italian versions of the libretto have it one way while the English version has it the other) - June Anderson (soprano); Cardinal Brogni, a one-time judge who, prior to taking priestly orders, had lost both wife and daughter when Rome was pillaged by the Venetians - Ferruccio Furlanetto (bass); Albert, an officer of the Emperor Sigismund's Imperial Guard - Rene Schirrer (baritone); Ruggiero, Provost of the City of Constance - Rene Massis. CONDUCTOR: Antonio de Almeida with the Philharmonia Orchestra and the Ambrosian Chorus.



TEXT: An uncut performance of "La Juive" would be of Wagnerian length, well over four hours. It has probably never been performed in that way during a single evening. For this recording, the text has been cut to a little over three hours and fits comfortably on three disks.



The booklet accompanying the set has this to say: The cuts "included several spectacular crowd scenes, so beloved of Grand Opera, drinking choruses, and so on. The chorus opening Act V was cut" as was "Eudoxie's aria `Je l'ai revu' in favor of her show stopping Bolero.... We also included the ballet scene ... because ballet was such an indispensable element of Grand Opera."



DOCUMENTATION: Libretto in French, English, German and Italian. Pictures of Halevy, the recording session, performers from the original production of 1835, two shots of the conductor and portraits of the five principal singers. Brief history of and commentary on the opera. Short summary of the plot. Track list that identifies singers, provides timings and refers to the appropriate pages of the libretto.



COMMENTARY: This recording comes with a considerable amount of documentation but it omits one of the most salient facts about the production. The opera was laid down in 1986 without the part of Eleazar. At that time Jose Carreras was engaged in his battle against leukemia. After his recovery, a seven-day recording session in 1989 for the missing Eleazar marked the tenor's return to the recording studio. Eleazar was then over-dubbed on the existing recording and the set was issued to the public. No doubt, sharp-eared audiophiles with absolutely nothing better to do with their time will be able to detect the joins. I have not noticed them and I have no wish to find them.



"La Juive" was first performed in Paris in 1835, the year of Donizetti's "Lucia di Lammermoor." It is a classic French Grand Opera in the canonical five-act form, with its ballets placed suitably for the convenience of the influential Jockey Club, whose members always arrived fashionably late at the opera house. (An example that pig-headed Wagner refused to heed some years later with his "Tannhaeuser.")



Halevy was very much a professional in the world of opera. His librettist was the ubiquitous Eugene Scribe, whose verses (often commissioned from others) were hardly memorable but who certainly knew how to construct a well-made play full of spectacles. All this makes his choice of casting doubly peculiar. His five main singers consist of two tenors, two sopranos and a bass. Admittedly, Eleazar is a dramatic part made for such heavyweight tenors as Caruso and Tucker, while Leopold is a very high-flying lyric tenor. On the other hand, the two sopranos, Rachel and Eudoxie, both in love with Leopold and inclined to talk about it, are destined to create aural confusion.



"La Juive" takes place 1414, during the Council of Constance, a town portrayed as a great deal more anti-Jewish than, say, Teheran today. The fairly intimate plot involving the five main characters was clearly designed to lead to and intertwine among a series of grandiose and expensive stage spectacles. The music has a more muscular nature than I, for one, associate with French opera and quite often sounds like early Verdi (who in 1835 had yet to compose his first opera.) There are also definite hints of things that would come to be known as "Wagnerian," not the least of which is the way the structure of the opening scene prefigures "Die Meistersinger."



"La Juive" was a popular opera in the Nineteenth Century but it effectively faded out of the standard repertory after the 1920s. It has always evoked mixed responses: Berlioz and Verdi disparaged it, while Mahler and Wagner (of all unlikely people!) were fans.



The performance is good. The orchestra and chorus are certainly up to the challenge, although I find some parts too slow for my personal taste. Carreras, here at the beginning of the second state of his voice, sounds fine, but he is clearly not what he had once been. Gonzales is good, too, but his voice is only a little lighter than Carreras' and hard to distinguish from it. Both sopranos are fine but even more difficult to tell apart. The bass, Furlanetto, is excellent and probably the best-suited of the five for the requirements of his part. This is a polyglot cast whose French may sometimes disturb linguistic purists, but that doesn't bother me a bit.



As a good performance in more-or-less up-to-date sound from a strong cast in an opera considerably better than its performance frequency would suggest, I think this "La Juive" is worth five stars.



However, there is a better performance available. Opera d'Oro has a live recording of Richard Tucker singing Eleazar in a production that squeezed Scribe's five flabby acts into three blazing ones. It fits onto two disks. The tenor who sings Leopold is a satisfactory high-flyer whom no one could ever mistake for Tucker. And Richard Tucker was born to portray Eleazar. Listen to him belt out that old warhorse "Rachel, quand du Seigneur" and hear the cheers that follow it--then you'll know what bringing down the house really means. The sound of the inexpensive Od'O set is just so-so.



Get the Carreras/Varady version for more music and better sound. Get the Tucker set to hear what opera should be."