Halévy: La Juive (Vienna State Opera, ORF, Deutsche Grammophon, 2003)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last Sunday night my husband Charles and I watched the DVD I just got of one of the most remarkable operas ever composed, Jacques Fromental Halévy’s La Juive (“The Jewess”). It’s been a singularly cursed opera, at least during the 20th century: after first performing it in 1895 the Met revived it in 1919 as a vehicle for Enrico Caruso in the star tenor role of the Jewish patriarch Eléazar – only it turned out to be the last role Caruso added to his repertoire and the last he ever performed in December 1920 before he took sick late that year and died eight months later, in August 1921. Then Richard Tucker, star tenor at the Met for a quarter-century, wanted the Met to revive it for him in the early 1970’s. He got as far as two staged performances in New Orleans and a concert version in London, where RCA Victor allowed him to record a single LP of excerpts, before he died. (It was a personal project ...