This Berlin, 1960 performance of Giacomo Puccini’s La Boheme is a true collector’s item, in as much as it follows a practice little employed in the 21st c., but still in active if already declining use in the middle of the last century, that of singing an opera in a language other that in which it was written, that being German here rather than Italian. The casting however, is imposing by any contemporary standard, with Pilar Lorengar, Rita Streich, Sándor Kónya and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in the lead roles. Albert Erede leads the Staatskapelle Dresden.
