Verdi: La Traviata.

Muti can leap with ease from symphony to opera and from Mozart to Verdi--and I have commented in this space on the excellence of his rendition of Mozart's violin concerti Nos. 2 and 4, with Anne-Sophie Mutter, and of Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice. He is one of the best all-purpose conductors today--a musician who gets into the score instead of sitting on top of it. (toscanini would sometimes make Mozart sound like a singing commercial.) Recently, Muti gave us a restrained and lilting La Traviata (Angel-EMI DSCX 3920)--a Verdi opera that was once dismissed by the "critics" as a showcase of barrel-organ tunes. How little those critics understood the depth of Verdi's craftsmanship, his rich and sensitive orchestration, and his unfailing sense of harmony!

Verdi developed steadily, from the raw peasant strength of his early operas to the rich profundities of Otello. As his letters show, he took his music seriously and worked at it with total creative commitment. It was fashionable once to denigrate him as a "commercial composer" and, until George Bernard Shaw put the myth to death, to say that he was influenced in his later years by Wagner and his Harrumphing Rhine Maidens. If Verdi took anything from anyone, it was only to reclaim from Vienna what Vienna had taken from Italy. His libretti, until he began working with the poet Boito, were bravura and demanded a supspension of disbelief. But his operas were drama and they were music, which is what opera must be.