De los Ángeles: “Post-Romantic” Opera

Victoria de los Ángeles on the cover of her Warner box set (from the Amazon.com Web page)

In my last dispatch in accounting for the Victoria de los Ángeles: The Warner Classics Edition; Complete Recordings on His Master’s Voice & La Voix de son maître anthology, I decided that it would be appropriate to separate the earlier composers from the nineteenth century (Gioachino Rossini, Giuseppe Verdi, Charles Gounod, and Georges Bizet) from composers that chose to work with more dramatic “post-romantic” material. This later genre flourished in both Italy and France. Italy lead the way with Giacomo Puccini and the “Cav and Pag” composers, Pietro Mascagni (“Cavalleria rusticana”) and Ruggiero Leoncavallo (“Pagliacci”). On the French side, Jules Massenet accounts for two operas (Manon and Werther). He may be viewed as the predecessor to two more recent French composers, Claude Debussy (Pelléas et Mélisande) and Jacques Offenbach. The latter is represented only by the fourth act of Les Contes d’Hoffmann, since the libretto calls for three different sopranos accounting for the three different “tales,” the last of which being the one in which de los Angeles sang the role of Antonia. The one remaining opera in the collection is Manuel de Falla’s La vida breve.

Taken as a whole, this is clearly the lion’s share of the de los Ángeles collection. From a personal point of view, I am glad to have been able to fill in some of the gaps in my library of recordings. For the most part, however, I was not particularly concerned about those gaps. At the risk of drawing fire from unhappy critics, I would say that these operas all have narratives for which the decisions of the stage director count for more than the musical expertise of the performers. Thus, where my own work is concerned, I can benefit from familiarizing myself with the music so that I can subsequently consider the role that it plays in establishing the critical elements of a fully-staged drama.

Where de los Ángeles herself is concerned, I suppose the primary issue is whether or not her talents as a vocalist carry the same impact in the recording studio as they did on the operatic stage. Readers may recall that, where the earlier operas from the nineteenth century were concerned, I was never really drawn to any of these studio recordings. However, the full collection will be released for sale on an Amazon.com Web page, after which readers may feel free to disagree with any of my assertions or positions!