Fausto Cleva (1902 - 1971)

At the Metropolitan Opera Cleva conducted the Italian repertoire almost exclusively, and between 1950 and 1971 he led six hundred and fifty-seven performances of twenty-seven different operas. Recordings of many of these performances have been preserved through the Metropolitan Opera’s regular Saturday afternoon broadcasts. While in Italy Cleva had worked with the composer Mascagni, and he proved to be a powerful and sympathetic conductor of operas of the verismo school, as recordings of his performances of Giordano’s Andrea Chénier (Metropolitan Opera, 1954) and Catalani’s La Wally (Carnegie Hall, 1968) clearly demonstrate. His conducting of the operas of Puccini was also highly idiomatic (La Bohème, Metropolitan Opera, 1951; Tosca, Metropolitan Opera, 1965).

Cleva’s commercial recording career falls into three distinct parts. During the early 1950s he directed a number of complete recordings of Metropolitan Opera productions for Columbia-USA, notably Gounod’s Faust, Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, and the double-bill of Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana and Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci. These were perfectly acceptable readings, if at times without the fire displayed in Cleva’s contemporaneous live performances. In addition he conducted many of the accompaniments for the arias recorded by singers under contract to Columbia, such as Richard Tucker. He went on to conduct several of the recordings released during the late 1950s by the short-lived Metropolitan Opera Club, including the Club’s issues of Verdi’s Aida and Rigoletto, as well as several verismo operas. Cleva then returned to the recording studios of RCA in 1964 for what is undoubtedly his finest commercial recording: Verdi’s Luisa Miller, with Anna Moffo and Carlo Bergonzi. This recording was one of the first to give the early and middle period operas of Verdi their full musical weight. Later he also recorded for Decca Catalani’s La Wally with Renato Tebaldi and Mario del Monaco. Cleva was a completely reliable and stylish conductor of the core Italian operatic repertoire, who at his best, as his interpretation of Luisa Miller and many of his live performances show, could be much more than this.