Verdi: Stiffelio – Battistoni

There is something almost unbearably poignant about a Verdi opera that its own composer eventually gave up trying to save. Stiffelio went through so many disguises — hacked apart, retitled Aroldo, its clergyman-hero converted into a crusader knight because a Protestant minister forgiving adultery from the pulpit was more than mid-century Italian censors, or the Church, could stomach — that for the better part of a century nobody quite knew what the original even sounded like. Manuscript fragments turned up in the 1960s, scattered, incomplete, requiring real detective work to reassemble. What we have now, in this Tutto Verdi release, is about as close to Verdi’s first thought as scholarship allows. That alone makes this disc worth attention, apart from whatever one thinks of the cast.

The piece deserves it. This is 1850. Verdi is fresh off Luisa Miller, three years still from La Traviata, already restless with number-opera conventions. A minister’s wife commits adultery. He finds out. He forgives her — publicly, from the pulpit, quoting Christ’s own words to the woman taken in adultery. It’s astonishing Verdi thought Trieste would let that stand. It didn’t. The kneeling congregation had to go. The scriptural quotation had to go. Lina’s anguished appeal to her husband as “Ministro, ministro” rather than husband — gone too, blunting exactly the theological-domestic collision that makes the opera interesting in the first place.

What survives, even in compromised form, is a work of real dramatic economy. No padding, no filler cabalettas simply because the form demanded them. Verdi is already thinking in scenes rather than numbers, already trusting recitative to carry psychological weight rather than treating it as connective tissue between the arias.

This performance, filmed in the house rather than assembled in a studio, has the virtues and vices you’d expect from theatrical rather than laboratory conditions. Roberto Aronica sings Stiffelio with a bright, somewhat metallic tenor that doesn’t always find the introspective coloring the role wants in its quieter pages. He throws himself at the Act III confrontation with real conviction, though, and by then the momentum of the writing papers over some of the vocal roughness. Yu Guanqun’s Lina is the more interesting assumption — genuine warmth in the middle voice, though the top can turn steely under pressure, particularly where the writing demands real Verdian squillo. Roberto Frontali brings decades of experience to Stankar, and it tells: this is a portrayal built on text, on the weight given to individual words, the kind of detail younger baritones often haven’t yet learned to supply. His Act III aria, “Lina, pensai che un angelo,” has real gravitas — dark-grained tone, a man being asked to choose between honor and love and finding neither answer bearable.

Compare this to the Sarah Caldwell forces who gave the American premiere in 1965 — pioneering, undercapitalized, thrilling in its way — or to the Muti performance at La Scala that did so much to establish the piece in modern repertory, or the Gardiner recording that first let listeners hear something close to the uncensored original outside a library reading room. This version doesn’t unseat any of them on vocal glamour. What it offers is visual immediacy: you see the singers navigating the tonal problem of the piece, which asks for both bel canto flexibility and something closer to verismo directness, sometimes within the same phrase.

The orchestra plays with more polish than fire. Competent, well-balanced, occasionally undercharacterized in the string writing that ought to churn with unease under Stiffelio’s confrontations. Woodwind solos come through cleanly; the harp writing that colors Lina’s more vulnerable moments registers nicely in this transfer.

Is it a great Stiffelio? No. Is it a valuable one? Unquestionably — if only because so few exist, and because the opera itself, ninety minutes of moral seriousness that Italian audiences of 1850 weren’t ready for, still hasn’t found its rightful place in the repertory. Verdi himself seems to have lost faith in it once the censors finished their work; he cannibalized the best music into Aroldo five years later and let the original die. He was wrong to give up on it. This recording, imperfect as it is, makes the case for his first instincts all over again.