Mozart: Le Nozze di Figaro – Giulini

There is a moment early in the second-act finale — the Count storming toward the closet door, Rosina’s voice climbing into that particular register of aristocratic panic — where you can hear exactly why this recording refused to die. Giulini’s strings don’t just accompany the terror; they seem to be sweating alongside it. Sixty-plus years on, the old EMI Figaro still breathes like nobody told it that half a century has gone by.

I’ve owned this set in more formats than I care to admit: the original LPs my father left me, a cassette dubbed by a friend in graduate school, the 1990 CD box, and now whatever digital incarnation happens to be circulating this month. Each time I return to it I brace for disappointment. Each time it fails to arrive.

Start with the obvious: Schwarzkopf’s Countess. By 1959, when this was recorded, she’d been living inside Mozart’s aristocratic melancholy for the better part of two decades, and it shows in ways both wonderful and faintly disconcerting. “Porgi, amor” arrives not as a plea so much as a confession delivered through clenched composure, the vowels rounded to a fault, the phrasing so studied you can practically hear Walter Legge’s pencil marks in the margins. Some listeners find her mannered. I find her devastating, though I’ll grant the mannerisms are real; this is Countess-as-tragic-heroine, verging occasionally on Marschallin territory, which is not quite where Da Ponte left her but is a legitimate place to go.

Taddei’s Figaro is the true anchor here, a voice with grain and weight, unafraid of comedy but never merely comic. His “Se vuol ballare” has genuine menace in it, the kind that reminds you this opera is, underneath the powder and the intrigue, about class warfare conducted through arias. Waechter’s Count is aristocratic, a bit cold, superbly sung. You believe absolutely that he owns the house and everyone in it. And Moffo’s Susanna, fresh-voiced and quick, holds her own against colleagues twice her experience; “Deh vieni, non tardar” floats out into the summer-night hush Giulini builds around it, hushed strings, a sense of the garden itself listening.

Giulini, not yet the man who would later stretch Brahms symphonies to the point of suspended animation, keeps things moving here: Classical proportion, sprung rhythms, textures that never thicken into syrup. This was one of the first modern stereo Mozart opera recordings to sound like it trusted the music rather than smothering it in interpretive weather. That restraint has aged well; next to some of the more effortful “authentic” Figaros that followed — Gardiner’s brisk correctness, Jacobs’s sometimes overworked characterization — Giulini’s Philharmonia sounds almost like it discovered period style by accident, through good taste alone.

Now the caveats, because there always are some.

This transfer keeps the traditional Basilio-Curzio ordering in Act Three rather than the sequence scholars now argue Mozart actually intended before backstage double-casting forced the change. A musicological quibble, mostly, though purists will grumble. More regrettable: the two “insurance” arias for Marcellina and Basilio in Act Four are simply absent, as they seem always to have been in Giulini’s traversal. There’s no evidence he ever recorded them, unlike Gui’s older Glyndebourne set, where they existed on LP before EMI itself sawed them off for CD.

The technical question that actually matters concerns how a given reissue handles the Act Two finale, that magnificent nineteen-minute engine of accumulating chaos, sextet after sextet piling in like guests arriving at a party nobody wants to end. EMI’s 1990 CD transfer split it crudely across a disc break, gouging a hole in the architecture at precisely the wrong moment. Spreading the reading across three discs instead of two solves this, preserving the movement’s unbroken sweep, though even here a small pause intrudes, a scar tissue memory of where an LP side once ended. It’s a small thing. It shouldn’t matter. It does, slightly, the way a hairline crack in a fine vase does.

Sound quality remains vivid without being falsely brightened: analog warmth intact, orchestral detail startlingly clean for a disc of its vintage, though I’d want to hear it against Warner’s more recent remasterings before declaring a definitive winner on engineering alone.

Does the world need another Figaro? No. Does it need this one, still, on shelf or hard drive? Emphatically yes. Whatever quibbles attach to text or transfer, the singing and the conducting constitute a Mozart style now essentially extinct: patrician, unhurried, deeply human. Buy it for Taddei’s swagger, for Schwarzkopf’s ache, for Moffo’s moonlit Susanna. The scholarship has moved on. The greatness hasn’t.