Verdi Otello – Tebaldi and Beirer

There is something almost touching about the sheer improvisation of it all — a company scrambling to mount Otello in a language most of its chorus barely spoke, borrowing sets from whatever corner of the storeroom hadn’t already been claimed by the de Falla premiere down the hall. Deutsche Oper Berlin, June 1962, betting everything on one soprano’s willingness to fly back into a house she’d sung in only once before. That she said yes tells you something about Renata Tebaldi’s generosity as an artist. That the results survive at all, on grainy black-and-white film with mono sound that crackles like an old radio, is a small miracle of preservation.

The production is functional, no more. Hans-Peter Lehmann’s stage direction and Wilhelm Reinking’s sets have the provisional look of something assembled overnight, because it was. The chorus sings in German while the principals negotiate Italian, and the effect, on first encounter, is faintly absurd, like subtitles that don’t quite match the dubbing. You adjust. Opera audiences always have.

And then Tebaldi opens her mouth, and none of it matters.

I have lived with her Decca release under Karajan — the one from May 1961, made barely a year before this broadcast — for the better part of five decades, and what strikes me watching this film is how little distance separates the two. The voice retains its creamy, burnished warmth through the middle register, that velvet covering every phrase even at forte, and her floated pianissimi in the “Willow Song” and the “Ave Maria” remain things of genuine wonder. She spins a thread of tone so fine it seems to hang suspended in the theater’s dry acoustic, refusing to break. Whatever Callas possessed in dramatic voltage — and I’ll not relitigate that old rivalry here, both women were finished with it long before their deaths — Tebaldi possessed in sheer vocal opulence, an instrument built for exactly this repertoire. She was never much of an actress; the hands flutter in the conventional gestures, the stage movements feel blocked rather than inhabited. It scarcely matters. Desdemona was her signature role for good reason.

Hans Beirer is the evening’s necessary compromise. A Deutsche Oper stalwart since 1943, a Wagnerian who’d sung at Bayreuth and La Scala both, he simply doesn’t have the squillo, the Italianate ping in the upper register that Otello demands — think of Del Monaco’s baritonal thrust, or even Vickers’ anguished heldentenor solution to the role. Beirer’s “Esultate!” lands without much thrill, and the Act I love duet, “Già nella notte densa,” finds him oddly detached, phrasing correctly but singing at half-light where Tebaldi is already incandescent. He rallies in the final act. The murder scene has real weight, some desperate cornered-animal quality creeping into the voice. But by then it’s almost too late to matter dramatically.

William Dooley, making his Berlin debut in what would become a three-decade tenure with the company, sings a vocally robust Iago without yet locating the character’s corrosive interior life — the calculation, the sly delight in destruction that made Gobbi’s Iago so unsettling. The voice itself is firm, well-produced, a young American baritone’s calling card. Mario Ferrara’s Cassio is more than serviceable; Sieglinde Wagner and Ivan Sardi round out the smaller roles competently.

Giuseppe Patanè conducts with the idiomatic feel you’d expect from an Italian trained in the old repertory tradition, though the orchestra occasionally sounds under-rehearsed in the storm music that opens the opera. The brass is a shade ragged, the ensemble not quite locked in. Forgivable, given the circumstances.

Should you seek this out? If you want your first Otello, no. Go to Del Monaco and Tebaldi under Karajan on Decca, or Vickers with Serafin. But as a document of Tebaldi in her prime, captured on film rather than merely preserved on disc, this has real value. Half-improvised evenings sometimes yield the most durable evidence of greatness. This is one of them.