For the Record: Massenet's Thaïs

FOR THE RECORD:

MASSENET’S THAÏS

ANNA MOFFO, GABRIEL BACQUIER, JOSÉ CARRERAS, JULIUS RUDEL, RCA 1975

The Chichester library was my operatic university. Throughout my teenage years I scoured its extensive record and score collection. I started with Russian, then Italian and German and then progressed further afield. One day a new LP box set appeared, with an opulent multi-coloured cover, and inside, a novelty booklet with a foldout with the highly photogenic Anna Moffo as the two Thaïses - courtesan and nun. It looked glam and a bit naughty, so I hurried home with it. Of French opera at this time, I knew Faust, Carmen and Pelléas, and Thaïs struck me as being a halfway house between the conventions of the earlier works and the free-for-all of Debussy. Massenet’s opera had a unique flavour to me, colourful, exotic, slyly sexy, and the final duet was, let’s face it, an orgasm.

Anna Moffo’s voice appealed mightily. I guess I didn’t know better, but I found her crooning and the tremulousness befitted the picture I had of a vulnerable soul in crisis; it sounded real and ‘lived’.

Only later did I discover that the recording was regarded as a bit of a joke. ‘Voiceless’, ‘the tapes should have been destroyed’, were among the critical reactions to Moffo. The work was bashed too: ‘second rate’ and ‘tawdry’ It is an opera that has never quite lived down Sybil Sanderson’s wardrobe malfunction at the premiere, and had then hit the headlines just two years before this 1975 recording, when Carol Neblett bared her considerable all in New Orleans.

As Jean Genet once wrote: ‘disgust prevents observation’. The self-appointed guardians of culture who dubbed Moffo’s performance voiceless clearly hadn’t listened. Truth be told, she encompasses all the extremes, even if the voice production is peculiar - even worrying at times. But what went missed was a performance that is intensely detailed and specific, far from the more secure but anodyne star turns available on other recordings. This version, flaws and all, turns an improbable journey into a far more universal parable than one might expect.

Forty two years late, in 2017, the recording appeared on CD for the first time. I purchased it immediately and listened with trepidation, wondering how it would compare with the few recordings I had heard since. It’s unquestionably the best for me, Julius Rudel’s conducting has the perfect balance of nuance and frisson, Bacquier embodies the fallen monk Athanaël like no other, and there is the bonus of a very young Carreras in his first commercial recording.

When I am now in a rehearsal room, helping singers to realize my own music, I am always aware how perfection doesn’t always equal communication. This recording has been a benchmark for me how imperfection can weave its own magic.

Postscript: at a Met performance in 2003 of another of my ‘pet’ operas (Rimsky’s Kitezh) a lady sitting two seats away commented on my glasses. The lady next to me, who I had not noticed, chimed in. I thought she looked a little familiar, but a buzz behind me alerted me that it was Anna Moffo herself! Instantly starstruck, I let on, but I didn’t have the courage to mention what a ‘lumineux voyage’ her recording of Thaïs was for me.