[Met Performance] CID:204480
Don Carlo {70} Metropolitan Opera House: 11/16/1965.
(Review)
Metropolitan Opera House
November 16, 1965
In Italian
DON CARLO {70}
Giuseppe Verdi--François Joseph Méry/Camille du Locle
Don Carlo...............Richard Tucker
Elizabeth of Valois.....Raina Kabaivanska
Rodrigo.................Robert Merrill
Princess Eboli..........Irene Dalis
Philip II...............Nicolai Ghiaurov
Grand Inquisitor........David Ward
Celestial Voice.........Margaret Kalil
Friar...................Luben Vichey
Tebaldo.................Mary Ellen Pracht
Count of Lerma..........Gabor Carelli
Countess of Aremberg....Sally Brayley
Herald..................Robert Nagy
Conductor...............Thomas Schippers
Review of Irving Kolodin in the December 4, 1965 issue of the Saturday Review
For his second Metropolitan Opera role, Nicolai Ghiaurov exchanged the robes and sword of a king of darkness (Méphistophélès) for the robes and sword of a king of light (Philip II) and showed himself equally capable of an engrossing character study. Verdi's" Don Carlo" presented him with a dramatic problem more static, less dynamic than Gounod's "Faust," and he modified his methods accordingly. Overall, however, there was the same inclination to paint in broad strokes at a cost to the finer shades of meaning.
Though the historic Philip married Elizabeth of Valois at thirty-three and took his fourth wife, Anna, at forty-three, Ghiaurov chose to play him as venerable and yellowing, rather than merely elderly and graying. To be sure, historic terms cannot be directly equated with operatic values, but the relationship of the factual and the fictional could have been closer. The result was to isolate Philip from the other persons of the drama, rather than to draw them together. Dramatically his treatment of Philip's great third act solo was more theatrical than some others that have been seen in recent years, especially when Ghiaurov chose to convert it from a reflective soliloquy into a dramatic monologue by leaving the king's chair and addressing the audience from the footlights.
Vocally, Ghiaurov's Philip extended by more than a little the impression of his Méphistophélès, particularly in his ability to sustain a vibrantly beautiful quality in his upper register. This has so much of a baritonal timbre that he was able to make the beginning of "Ella giammai m'amo" much more of a fully formed "mezza voce" than it often is with bassos who have to watch their ways in this register. On the other hand, he pays for it with a contraction of volume and richness at the bottom. The moment of vocal truth came in the confrontation with David Ward, whose tall, gaunt Grand Inquisitor belongs in the grand tradition of Hotter, Schoeffler, and Uhde (also Hines). Here the Scotch basso's bottom notes were distinctly broader and more to the dramatic point than those of his adversary. It was, otherwise, a Tucker-Merrill " Don Carlo," with a gain to all-around quality of sound.
Photograph of Nicolai Ghiaurov as Philip II by Louis Mélançon/Metropolitan Opera.