Dear readers, I wish you and yours a festive San Silvestro and the very best of everything in 2012: health, wealth, love, success, serenity, and your heart’s dearest desires.

To start off the celebrations, Roberto Alagna and Tiziana Fabbricini sing the brindisi from La traviata in the 1991 La Scala production by Liliana Cavani, with Riccardo Muti conducting. (And if you don’t mind something tacky but wonderful, listen to this.)

Incidentally, I believe that the brindisi was the bit of music that Stravinsky mentioned in his interview with an avant-garde journalist in Buenos Aires. The encounter as told by Robert Craft:

“Maestro, what is your opinion of La traviata?” Stravinsky looked severely at the interviewer and threw back at him: “Recently I had the pleasure of listening to its delicious waltz and never in my life would I be capable of composing anything to equal that.” The journalist fled.

Posts resume after the New Year’s holiday. Augurissimi!

Just as the drinking song in Macbeth dissolves into mayhem, the one in Otello leads to disaster, too. In Act I, after Otello’s triumphant entry, Iago embarks on his campaign of destruction. He proposes a toast to Otello and Desdemona. Cassio adds his own flowery praise of the bride, while Iago encourages him to drink and drink some more. In his intoxication, Cassio attacks Roderigo and challenges Montano to a duel. Roused by the commotion, Otello strips Cassio of his rank.

This clip (apologies for the poor video quality) is from the 2008 Salzburg Festival production of Otello. Carlos Álvarez portrays Iago, Stephen Costello is Cassio, and Aleksanders Antonenko sings the title rôle. (My apologies: I don’t know the names of the artists playing Roderigo and Montano.) Riccardo Muti conducts.

Year-end festivities typically involve lots of imbibing, correct? (I myself don’t tipple, so I rely on you to tell me.)

Given that “Verdi” wine is sold in low-end chain stores here in New York, I’m guessing that it’s swill. Oh well…

Over at Re-visioning Callas, I’ve already posted one Verdian drinking song—from Macbeth, to start off our celebrations on a merry note. Here, instead, I offer you the song “Mescetemi il vino.” From 1845, it is a setting of a text by Andrea Maffei, one of Verdi’s close friends and a distinguished poet and translator.

Following are two performances of this song, the first one by José Carreras with Luciano Berio conducting. (I don’t know whether Berio or someone else crafted the noisy orchestration.) The second is by Renata Scotto, with Vincenzo Scalera at the piano.

The text to this song appears in many recital programs. (Here are relevant Google search results; I prefer not to link directly to PDFs to protect your computer security.)

Arrigo Boito wrote to Camille Bellaigue after Verdi’s death:

This is the day, of all the days of the year, that he loved the best. Christmas Eve recalled to him the holy marvels of childhood, the enchantments of faith, which is only truly celestial when it mounts as far as belief in miracles. That belief, alas, he early lost, like all of us, but he retained, more than the rest of us, perhaps, a poignant regret for it all his life.

He gave the example of Christian faith by the moving beauty of his religious works, by the observance of rites (you must recall his handsome head bowed in the chapel of Sant’Agata), by his homage to Manzoni, by the ordering of his funeral, found in his will: one priest, one candle, one cross.

He knew that faith is the sustenance of the heart. To the workers in the field, to the unhappy, to the afflicted around him, he offered himself as example, without ostentation, humbly, severely, to be useful to their consciences…

In the ideal, moral and social sense he was a great Christian, but one must be very careful not to present him as a Catholic in the political and strictly theological sense of the word: nothing could be further from the truth.

Read more about the Laudi alla Vergine Maria.

To all who keep the holiday, Happy Christmas!

Giacomo Puccini turns 153 years young today. Verdi Duecento honors him with Carlo Bergonzi’s performance of “Che gelida manina,” one of the supremely great recordings of the master’s music; with a film clip of Puccini; and with music by Puccini sung by Maria Callas and others at re-visioning callas and in the blog archives.

Buon compleanno, maestro. E grazie.

Verdi’s Aida had its world premiere in Cairo on 24 December 1871. It had its Italian premiere, supervised by the composer, in 1872 at La Scala, with Teresa Stolz in the title rôle.

The selections in this post include a performance of the Aida overture (not the familiar prelude). As I understand it, Verdi wrote the overture for the 1872 premiere but in the end decided to stick with the brief prelude he had written for Cairo.

Please also see earlier posts touching on Aida, including performances featuring Dusolina Giannini and Aureliano Pertile, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, and a staging by the great Robert Wilson.

Over at my Callas blog, there is an Aida smackdown and a snippet from that infamous “gladiatorial” Mexico City Aida.

• Overture (Toscanini, NBC Symphony Orchestra, 1940)
• “O céleste Aïda” (Georges Thill, year?)
• “Ritorna vincitor!” (Maria Callas, 1964)
• “Ciel! mio padre!” (Elisabeth Rethberg, Giuseppe de Luca, Giacomo Lauri-Volpi, 1930)
• “L’aborrita rivale a me sfuggia” (Giulietta Simionato, Jon Vickers, 1964)
• “O terra addio” (Montserrat Caballé, Plácido Domingo, Riccardo Muti, 1973)

The Italian-American soprano Dusolina Giannini was born on this day in 1902. She died in 1986.

A versatile artist whose repertoire ranged from Mozart to contemporary music along with Lieder and popular songs, Giannini was an intense, committed interpreter. Her 1928 recording of Aida under Carlo Sabajno, with Aureliano Pertile as Radamès, happens to be my favorite set of this familiar opera.

Today’s selection features Giannini and Pertile with (briefly) the baritone Giovanni Inghilleri in the duet “Pur ti riveggo” from Act III of Aida. Hear her also in “Ritorna vincitor!” on the wonderful Cantabile subito site (scroll down), and in other music by Verdi. See also the Aida smackdown, which allows you to compare Giannini and Pertile in the Tomb Scene with other illustrious interpreters, including Mirella Freni, Maria Callas, and Plácido Domingo.

Pink Martini are a wonderful Portland, Oregon-based orchestra with an eclectic repertoire including music in many languages and from many different artistic traditions.

Their 2010 holiday album, Joy to the World, is now in heavy rotation at Starbucks here in New York, and it includes “La vergine degli angeli” from La forza del destino—a perfectly lovely holiday hymn if one forgets the bloody, calamitous context out of which it is wrenched!

The vocal soloist is China Forbes, and Thomas M. Lauderdale leads the ensemble. (Actually, I believe that the vocal soloist is Storm Large.)

If for some silly reason you are offended by this “pop” treatment of Verdi’s music, then by all means take refuge in performances of the aria by Rosa Ponselle (with Ezio Pinza), Maria Callas, and (from Charles Sturridge’s film Aria) Leontyne Price.

The Sei romanze of 1838 included two settings of Goethe (translated by Luigi Balestra): yesterday’s “Deh pietoso o addolorata” and also “Perduto ho la pace,” which had been set in a vastly more compelling manner by Schubert some twenty years earlier.