ONE MORE EXAMPLE IF NEEDED

I just watched Lisa Della Casa’s Arabella, filmed live in Munich in 1960.  Here the salient question becomes not whether opera singers in the past could act but instead — can today’s opera singers live up to the acting standard of the past? I’m semi-kidding, but really, just as in Paul Czinner’s cinematic reproduction of the 1954 Salzburg Don Giovanni, where she sings Donna Elvira, Della Casa offers for posterity a total theatrical representation that has not been surpassed and is unlikely ever to be. Beautiful, thin, gifted with an exquisite voice, she was a superb musician and mobile stage inhabitant.