After stoically suffering through Heartbeat Opera’s feeble Faust, I wanted a more satisfying Satanic experience, so I turned to Boito’s Mefistofele. Chris’s Cache this week serves up three devilish treats featuring all-American Margherita/Elena doublings by Carol Neblett, Johanna Meier, and Aprile Millo seduced and betrayed by José Carreras, Ermanno Mauro, and Richard Leech under the malign influences of Cesare Siepi, Samuel Ramey, and Dean Peterson.

When the Met produced Robert Carsen’s production of Mefistofele in 1999, the opera hadn’t been done by the company in over seventy years. However, it wasn’t always neglected. In fact, it was a work the Met produced during its very first season starring Christine Nilsson who had earlier opened the Met in Gounod’s take on the tragic heroine.

Absent from the Met since 1926, the American Opera Society revived it in concert form in 1966 with Renata Tebaldi, as both Margherita and Elena, Carlo Bergonzi, and Nicolai Ghiaurov.

There is a live recording with both Tebaldi and Ghiaurov from Lyric Opera of Chicago the year before in which Tebaldi only sang Margherita with Elena Souliotis performing Elena in her U.S. debut at age 22; Alfredo Kraus is their Faust.

During the early 1970s in London, Denny Dayviss curated a starry concert opera series modeled on New York’s American Opera Society. Today’s Mefistofele was one of its offerings including Siepi in a role he had recorded but hadn’t recently performed live. It also documents early London appearances of Neblett and Carreras. The ad for the concert mentions Bianca Berini in the cast but presumably she got a role more interesting than Martha elsewhere.

The opera’s big local postwar break came in 1969 when New York City Opera produced it for Norman Treigle with Neblett and Robert Nagy as Faust. Its great success there continued in the mid-1970s with the ascension of Ramey who took on a number of Treigle’s roles there after his passing in 1975. The NYCO Mefistofele heard today comes from its first revival in four years and first since the death of Treigle. It’s remarkable that it would take Ramey seven more years to debut at the Met. Meier had come to the Met in 1976 replacing Montserrat Caballé in Ariadne auf Naxos, a job she’d do again at the Met three years later when Leontyne Price bowed out of most of her Strauss performances.

By 1999 Ramey was one of the Met’s biggest stars, so the San Francisco Mefistofele was brought in for him. Veronica Villaroel was the premiere Margheerita/Elena, Leech the Faust. Villaroel and Ramey got the broadcast in February 2000 when Richard Margison had taken over as Faust. Peterson was Ramey’s cover and sang two performances during the fall, as did Millo, but they only intersected in today’s pirate recording.

Boito: Mefistofele

Margherita/Elena: Carol Neblett
Martha/Pantalis: Enid Hartle
Mefistofele: Cesare Siepi
Faust: José Carreras
Wagner/Nereo: Neil Page

Conductor: Anton Guadagno
Finchley Children’s Music Group
London Symphony Orchestra & Chorus
Royal Festival Hall, London
25 May 1972
In-house recording

Margherita/Elena: Johanna Meier
Martha: Beverly Evans
Pantalis: Sandra Walker
Mefistofele: Samuel Ramey
Faust: Ermanno Mauro
Wagner: David Griffith
Nereo: Joaquin Romaguera

Conductor: Julius Rudel
New York City Opera
7 April 1977
In-house recording

Margherita/Elena: Aprile Millo
Martha: Diane Elias
Pantalis: Jennifer Dudley
Mefistofele: Dean Peterson
Faust: Richard Leech
Wagner: Tim Willson
Nereo: Bernard Fitch

Conductor: Mark Elder
Metropolitan Opera
4 December 1999
In-house recording

Each Mefistofele can be downloaded by clicking on the icon of a cloud with an arrow pointing downward on the audio player above and the resulting mp3 file will appear in your download directory.

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