Coming to this historic video recording after Muti’s La Scala version (see above) is to register a quite different operatic world. Recorded in black and white at a performance in the Stuttgart Staatsoper in June 1961, it offers a sound, conventional production with in-period costumes and realistic if symmetrical sets by Max Fritzsche. Significantly, the designer’s name, omitted from the printed material, is identified only at the end of the credits after the performance, and even then there is no naming of the stage director. How different from these days when the director is so often boss in the opera-house with ‘concept’ productions.

What this DVD is specially valuable for is, of course, the assumption of the title role by Renata Tebaldi. So dominant in our memories has Maria Callas’s characterisation become, that we tend to forget that the role of Tosca was just as central in the repertory of her great rival of the time, Tebaldi. The latter’s firm, creamy tones, perfectly controlled, could hardly be more sharply contrasted with the thrillingly individual, if at times flawed, singing of Callas. Tebaldi seemed to represent the very essence of the prima donna, grand in a traditional way, and who better to play the part of an operatic prima donna in Tosca?

There is ample evidence here of that commanding security in the role, with Tebaldi in 1961 still at her peak. Yet as recorded in limited mono sound, with voices well forward of the orchestra, there is at times an untypical edge on the creamy tone at the top. True to form, Tebaldi rises magnificently to the challenge of ‘Vissi d’arte’ in Act 2, with fine shading of tone and flawless legato in that moment of repose. The Stuttgart audience rewards her with almost a minute and a-half of applause.

That said, one has to note that in her acting this Tosca is not so much passionate as stately. I remember Philip Hope-Wallace reviewing one of her performances at Covent Garden, and remarking that when she threw herself off the battlements, it was rather like watching an elderly matron entering a swimming-bath at the shallow end. Here, happily, she simply exits along the battlements (in this production a bare, modern-looking Castel Sant’Angelo) to perform her leap out of sight, a merciful get-out for a singer less-than-agile even in her late thirties.

The film direction, like that of the stage director, is conventional, relying on the full stage picture rather more than is common today, and with odd priorities: in the first scene, the Sacristan is made to hog the camera in close-ups far more than Cavaradossi. Eugene Tobin as Cavaradossi, like many tenors, starts lustily, and then gets more expressive as he goes along, never betraying signs of strain. George London makes a handsome Scarpia, imperious and vehement both in his acting and in his singing. Yet as so often in recordings, his pitching is often vague, at times almost like sing-speech, gritty in tone, focusing best at extremes of dynamic, loud or soft.

Franco Patanè as conductor is at times over-emphatic, again presenting a conventional view, and rarely conveying the sort of magnetism that makes the Muti performance so gripping. The camera never lets you see him or the orchestra before the final curtain-calls. Optional English subtitles are provided but no other extra. The leaflet gives minimal information, but includes a list of tracks.