[ARSCLIST] A tale of a recording

[Mike Richter <mrichter@xxxxxxx>]

I suspect that the following narration may be longer and more convoluted 
than some will care for - and I warn you that the dog is shaggy, there 
is no conclusion. But for those who may be interested, here is a tale of 
the history of one performance of Verdi's La Traviata. It is derived 
from what I have been told and what little I can find in print.

The date was 27 March 1958; the venue was San Carlos Opera House, 
Lisbon. The three principal solo roles (of ten cited soloists in all) 
are for soprano (Maria Callas), tenor (Alfredo Kraus) and baritone 
(Mario Sereni). In addition, there were the orchestra under Franco 
Ghione, the chorus, the chorus masters, and supernumeraries. Portugese 
National Radio broadcast the performance and, as a courtesy, gave a tape 
of the broadcast to the tenor.

Kraus felt that this was an exceptional night in the theater and that 
the recording captured much of its glory. He gave his tape to one of the 
more notorious (!) New York 'pirates', Ed Rosen who now does business as 
Premiere Opera. Ed agreed and made the recording available in his 
catalogue. In the way of such things, dubs of dubs of dubs made their 
way into the catalogues of other pirates and of personal collections.

In 1980, Capitol Records issued an LP set clearly remastered from a 
late-generation copy of the original tape with a fresh copyright. It may 
be that rights were cleared with the Callas estate, with Kraus and 
perhaps with Portugese radio, but no further. Still, it was EMI and the 
LPs and later the CDs have been on the shelf ever since. (If Portugese 
radio had been involved in the reissue, one believes they would have 
checked their own master rather than using the poor copy; hence, my 
doubt that they cleared the release.)

A few years ago, Portugese radio discovered that their master tapes of 
the performance sounded far better than the EMI remastering from the 
dub. They issued a limited edition - 2000 copies - as 'gifts' to 
contributors to the opera company. A friend of the company sent a copy 
to me, asking that I make it freely available so that the pirates not 
have an incentive to exploit it.

As it happens, the equalization of the reissue was wrong in the sense 
that it did not fairly represent the sound of the singers I knew from 
live performance, notably Callas and Kraus. It was clear that that was 
an attempt to restore the balance between pit and stage, but the price 
was higher than I could condone. I re-equalized the recording and posted 
it complete and as selections at my WWW sites and included it on a 
CD-ROM. I made only one CD-DA copy and sent that to friends (who 
confirmed my judgement on equalization); they passed a copy on to a 
titled collector who made a copy for a noted audio engineer. That 
engineer added track breaks and the recording is now published by a 
substantial label in the opera world (Pearl).

There is reason to believe that only the rights of the Callas estate, 
Alfredo Kraus (since passed on), and possibly Portugese National Radio 
have been considered at any stage in this process. In probable violation 
of copyright (again!) I have images showing the difference in 
compression between the EMI LP release and the files I posted at
  http://www.mindspring.com/~mrichter/emiaudio/emiaudio.htm

In all of this, credits and clearances have been few and are seldom 
acknowledged. In my judgement, that's fine; the most important point is 
that an exceptional performance is available to all. Some of those 
involved in the history may have profited financially (I did not, but 
that is my choice), but recent and future generations will not have lost 
this bit of their heritage.

Mike
--
mrichter@xxxxxxx
http://www.mrichter.com/