Anyone who frequents the internet will have come across YouTube and soon learned that what may have been planned as a quick information-seeking visit turns into several happy hours, as tempting suggestions are made as to what you might also be interested in seeing; another thing leads to yet another; and that is the afternoon gone. There is no more alluring — and of course, one insists to oneself, educational — primrose path than tapping into how a particular operatic aria has been sung by a variety of performers over the decades, so that what started out as a comparison between, say, Anna Netrebko and Renata Scotto as Mimi turns into a marathon search for the ideal rendering of ‘Si, mi chiamano Mimi’ and then on to other Puccini arias, and so on. It could be a lifetime, literally, before you had exhausted the ramifications of your search,
But with any luck you might soon get to that aria, or many others, as performed in a US series of TV programmes stretching from 1949 to 1963, in which very famous or hardly known singers performed for half an hour, courtesy of the House of Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, accompanied by a dodgy house orchestra conducted by a Stokowski lookalike, but emphatically not soundalike, called Howard Barlow. The guest singer was required to launch his or her programme by singing ‘If I could tell you of my devotion/ If my confession could give expression’, etc., a song composed by an interested partner, and then, introduced by a professional smiler of the time, to proceed to a mixed handful of songs and arias, clearly shot at various times, since the comical scenery and costumes change for each item; the pretence that it all happened in front of an audience is maintained by showing a collection of manic supersonic applauders — an identical lot for every artist, you soon notice.
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