The DVD documentary film on the life of Caruso (RCA Red Seal, 7/04) was concise and intelligent, good at matching sound and sight, identifying what was seen and heard, and too busy getting on with its job to be self-consciously arty in presentation. The Elusive Butterfly, a biographical film about the Czech soprano Jarmila Novotná, is none of these. It lets the camera rove at leisure over Manhattan, Prague and the Czech countryside; its commentaries are mostly enthusiastic generalisations; it mentions (say) the role of Gilda in Rigoletto but plays Violetta in La traviata, or plays Tosca’s ‘Vissi d’arte’ without mentioning Tosca at all; and it is heavy with the presumably symbolic ticking of clock or metronome and with images of butterflies, the elusive nature of which is hardly suggested by such evidently successful photography.

Yet it’s a film made with love, or at least filled with the love of many people who appear in it. Novotná’s children, now well on in middle-age, a nephew who recalls the time of her death, and several of her countryfolk who were proud of their representative in high places abroad, all speak with affection, and of course the photographs tell of a woman who was beautiful and strong in vitality on stage and off.

Everybody seems to agree that Toscanini was in love with her. She, young enough to be his daughter, was married to an aristocrat whose estate was confiscated first by the Nazis, then the communists. As a story, the life is most moving in its aspect of success abroad and exile from home. That may be also why the Czech songs (Songs of Lidice) with Jan Masaryk, the President’s son, as pianist leave the strongest impression of all the music heard.

Novotná was an artist of whom I can’t recall ever having read a word of criticism; she is also one whose recorded voice can sometimes, after all this praise, sound disappointingly shallow. The commentators in this film, with their reverential generalities, don’t attune the ear to something it was missing.