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Taking Liberties.

Article Excerpt
The conductor Will Crutchfield, who specializes in bel-canto opera and doubles as a musicological detective, recently sat down to compare all extant recordings of "Una furtiva lagrima," the plaintive tenor aria from Donizetti's "L'Elisir d'Amore." Crutchfield wanted to know what singers of various eras have done with the cadenza--the passage at the end of the aria where the orchestra halts and the tenor engages in graceful acrobatics. Donizetti included a cadenza in his score, and later supplied two alternative versions. Early recordings show singers trying out a range of possibilities, some contemplative, some florid, none the same. Then came Enrico Caruso. He first recorded "Una furtiva lagrima" in 1902, and returned to it three more times in the course of his epochal studio career. After that, tenors began replicating the stylish little display that Caruso devised: a quick up-and-down run followed by two slow, sighing phrases. Out of more than two hundred singers who have recorded the aria since Caruso's death, how many try something different? Crutchfield counts four.

That arresting statistic indicates the degree to which classical performances have been standardized over the past century. Many listeners would identify Caruso's cadenza as the "traditional" one, but Crutchfield, in a forthcoming essay on changing perceptions of operatic style, calls it the "death-of-tradition" cadenza. As a conductor, Crutchfield is campaigning for a return to spontaneity and idiosyncrasy. Each summer at the Caramoor Festival, in Katonah, New York, he presents two or three works from the golden age of bel canto--Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, and Verdi, with Handel, Gluck, and...

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