I am not, you may have noticed, Korngold's greatest fan, but the aria (eventually becoming a duet) ''Gluck, das mir verblieb'', which kept the names of this opera and its composer alive during their long eclipse, is a stunner, there's no other word for it: obstinately memorable, moving in its lovely reprise at the very end of the opera. Oh, that there was anything else in the score to match it, I was about to say, to which you (if you are a Korngold fan) might well reply ''Have you not, MEO, enthused in your time about not a few operas by the likes of Cilea and Giordano that contain one plum aria and not a great deal else?'' Ouch; though I suppose I could protest that Cilea and Giordano and their ilk had fewer pretensions that Korngold, did not promise far more by demonstrating such an assured mastery of the postStraussian orchestral apparatus. And of course if it's opulence you're after, big melodramatic gestures stunningly scored, strikingly stage-evocative images, gratefully curving and beautifully supported vocal lines, Korngold provides it in abundance.
To me the disappointing thing is that the quality of ''Gluck, das mir verblieb'' is its simplicity its directly touching, almost folk-like plainness, which is at war with Korngold's amazingly sophisticated resource. Several times in the opera he hints at that quality again: early on, in a little exchange between the hero Paul and his devoted old servant Brigitta, again in Act 2 when Brigitta almost wordlessly reproaches him for his relationship, to her a blasphemy, with an actress who is the double of his dead wife. There is just a shadow of that directness to Paul's infatuated duet, later in the same act, with the double herself, Marietta and it fleetingly but more strongly returns in the last act, where shadow and substance, living Marietta and ghostly Marie, are in direct confrontation. But time and again it is buried in strenuously melodramatic declamation, in orchestral overkill, and in a plethora of far more trivial ideas which Korngold seems unable to distinguish from the real thing. The opera's 'big scenes' (the interruption of a wild masquerade by an apparation of ghostly nuns; a half-real, half-nightmarish religious procession) are splendiferously noisy but dismayingly empty and insubstantial.
Still, in a performance like this the undoubted allure of Korngold's surfaces is maximized, and perhaps the gulf between the real thing and the false is thus less painful. Kollo neighs a bit in his declamatory passages, and Neblett has a touch of squalliness in hers, but both can float the high phrases of the tune quite beautifully. Prey is in honeyed voice for the other song that survived independently, a toothsome little Viennese bonbon of a Serenade in Act 2; Wagemann and Luxon add touches of distinction to their roles. Leinsdorf brings a great deal of energy to Korngold's noiser pages and yards and yards of multi-coloured plush to the luxuriant ones. The recording is bright and clear.'