Recovering the Forgotten Singer, 8: Lois Marshall

The international career of Toronto-born Lois Marshall (1924-1997) began in the early 1950s, subsequent to frequent radio and television appearances in Canada. Viewers of the CBC saw Marshall in the demanding roles of Donna Anna (Don Giovanni) and Leonora (Fideliio). Winner of the prestigious Naumberg Award, she was soon contracted as leading soprano by Arturo Toscanini for a radio concert of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, and by Sir Thomas Beecham for recordings of Mozart’s Die Entführing aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio) and Handel’s Solomon. The beauty of her timbre, her excellent musicianship, and remarkable technique won her these difficult assignments.

Marshall’s concert career, encompassing a wide-ranging repertoire, lasted for more than three decades. Her stage performances of opera were regrettably few since her mobility was limited by the polio she had contracted as a child. On disc and in recital she programmed arias from the Baroque period to the 20^th century.

Here is a clip from Beecham’s 1957 recording of Die Entführung aus dem Serail. Konstanze, a Spanish noblewoman is captive in a Turkish harem. She answers Pasha Selim’s entreaties for her love with the aria “Ach, ich liebte, war so glücklich (Alas, I loved, I was so happy),” bemoaning the separation from her true love, Belmonte. The seamless legato of the opening adagio section is followed by the challenging embellishments, at the top of the singer’s range, of the vehement allegro passages. As she spins out the opening phrases, and attacks the runs and trills with utter confidence, Marshall rises to Mozart’s disparate demands.

“When I am Laid in Earth” is Dido’s lament in Act III of Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. Abandoned by Trojan prince Aeneas, the Queen of Carthage announces her suicide to her devoted retinue and asks only to be remembered. Expressing Dido’s deep sadness, Marshall deploys her rich middle register with utter evenness. In this 1963 clip she is accompanied by a Dutch chamber ensemble.

Although she recorded Italian arias by Bellini, Verdi, and Puccini, and often sang them in concert, Marshall’s voice was perhaps most suited to the repertoire of the Jugendlich dramatischer Sopran, the dramatic lirico spinto. Her rendition of “Leise, leise, fromme Weise! (Softly, softly, My pure song!)” from Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz glows with the warmth of her sound, the long-breathed sureness of her phrasing, and the ease of her agility. First, Agathe tenderly evokes the sweetness of the night and her love for Max, then betrays her excitement when she senses his approach. The clip is from a commercial recording issued in 1958.

 

 

Marshall’s versatility is captured by her many YouTube selections.

In Memoriam: Renata Scotto (1934-2013)

 The vast repertoire of Renata Scotto encompassed 19^th century vocal music, from the Classical Cherubini to the Grand Opera of Meyerbeer, through the great bel canto composers, Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti. Although she often played Verdi’s Violetta, Gilda, Lady Macbeth, Luisa Miller, and Desdemona, Scotto was perhaps most renowned for her Puccini roles. On the concert or the operatic stage, and most often on both, she left her mark on nearly all his works, from Le Villi (Anna) to Turandot (Liù). From the mid-1960s through the early 1980s Scotto was one of most widely recorded operatic sopranos; approximately forty of her complete performances are available on commercial and pirated CDs and DVDs.

Following her 1952 debut in La Traviata, Scotto was engaged by the major Italian opera companies. Her breakthrough to international stardom occurred during the visit of La Scala to the 1957 Edinburgh Festival when she replaced Maria Callas in Bellini’s La Sonnambula. She first appeared in the U.S. as Mimi in Chicago in 1960 and five years later triumphed as Cio-Cio-San at the Met, the role with which more than two decades later she bade farewell to the company.  She had racked up more than 300 Met performances in New York and on tour. Fortunately for us, she can continue to be seen and heard streaming in the 1977 inaugural telecast of PBS Live from the Met, La Bohème, and eight other titles in the series. And after retiring from major lyric theatres in the 1990s, well into her sixties, she took on a new language, German, and new arduous roles, the Marschallin (Der Rosenkavalier), Kundry (Parsifal), and Klytemnestra (Elektra).

Scotto was often the object of harsh criticism. Some found her detailed phrasing overly fussy, her acting mannered, and “over the top.” Many criticized her for attempting parts that normally fell to rich-voiced dramatic sopranos—Bellini’s Norma, Ponchielli’s Gioconda, for instance. There is no denying that she was often unable to produce the requisite volume with beautiful, rounded tone. But for many there were sufficient compensations in her refined bel canto technique and her deep insight into the music and the text.

I have chosen three clips that illustrate Scotto’s command of the light-voiced lyric coloratura manner, the more assertive phrasing demanded by Verdi, and the searing intensity needed for Puccini.

At the close of Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’amore, in the heartfelt “Prendi, per me sei libero (Take this, I have bought back your freedom)” Adina at last confesses her love for Nemorino as she offers him proof that she has saved him from his reckless enlistment in the army. This clip is from a televised 1967 Florence performance conducted by Gianandrea Gavazzeni. Scotto’s mastery of messa di voce, the gradual crescendo and subsequent decrescendo of a single note, shapes the aria with the emotions the character is finally able to express. The Nemorino you see seated next to Adina is Carlo Bergonzi.

Scotto’s Gilda is captured on two commercial recordings. This clip is drawn from the version conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini. Here, in “Tutte le feste al tempio (Each holy day in church),” Gilda confesses to Rigoletto, her distraught father, that she fell in love with a handsome stranger, the Duke of Mantua disguised as a poor student, and was later kidnapped by the Duke’s courtiers.

As Scotto enacts Cio-Cio-San’s resolve to commit suicide and bids an agonized farewell to her little son, she summons the tragic stature of the abandoned wife determined to die with honor. This clip is drawn from a remarkable 1967 recording conducted by Sir John Barbirolli. At the very end you will hear the voice of Pinkerton {Carlo Bergonzi) calling out, all too late, the name of the Japanese wife he has betrayed.

YouTube offers a profusion of Scotto’s performances. Particularly recommended are her Violetta (La Traviata), Elena (I Vespri Siciliani), Cio-Cio-San (Madama Butterfly), and the DVD of her 1977 Mimì from the Live from the Met telecast.

Mascagni’s L’Amico Fritz and Lodoletta: “commedia lirica” and “dramma lirico”

With Cavalleria rusticana (1890), his first opera and the liminal title of Italian verismo, Pietro Mascagni (1863-1945) was assured a place of privilege in operatic history. In a single act, the composer distilled the unbridled passion—and jealousy—of a woman betrayed. Revenge followed, and with it the offstage duel fatal to her guilty lover. So goes life in a Sicilian village in the late 19^th century as depicted in the libretto based on the Giovanni Verga novella (1883). That more than one reviewer credited the success of the piece to its high drama rankled the composer.

In response, Mascagni next chose “a simple libretto, something almost insubstantial, so that the opera will be judged entirely on its music.” Like Cavalleria, L’Amico Fritz (1891) has a rural setting, sylvan Alsace. But here, the similarity ends. In Fritz, a “commedia lirica,” the eponymous hero is a confirmed Jewish bachelor and wealthy landowner. David, the local rabbi, takes it upon himself to awaken his “friend’s” love for Suzel, the daughter of one of his tenants. The happy ending promises the couple an imminent wedding.

L'Amico Fritz enjoyed enormous acclaim at its Rome premiere, was soon conducted by none other than Gustav Mahler in Hamburg and was taken up quickly by other European companies. Yet the work failed at the Met in 1894. Since then, L’Amico Fritz has been heard a mere handful of times in New York, has survived on the margins of the core repertoire in Italy, and is only occasionally presented elsewhere. Perhaps, bent on an “insubstantial” plot so as to privilege his music, and as a rebuke to the critics of his first opera, Mascagni compromised the afterlife of his second.

If productions are rare, recordings of L’Amico Fritz are plentiful: we have at least ten editions on CD or DVD, some taken from live performances, two produced in the studio. The most popular excerpt, the Act II “Cherry Duet,” is on YouTube in a plethora of versions. Here, drawn from a 1969 complete studio recording, are Luciano Pavarotti and Mirella Freni at their peak. Fritz and Suzel, still hesitant to express their feelings for each other, sing instead the praises of music and Springtime.





Earlier, Suzel offers a bouquet of violets to Fritz along with her Act I “Son pochi fiori (Just a few flowers).” In a clip from a 1980 studio recording Leona Mitchell lends her rich, well-equalized timbre to both the aria’s dramatic opening and its expansive conclusion.








Between 1890 and 1935 Mascagni published fifteen operatic scores, many bearing labels that signal their diverse genres—lyric comedy, tragedy, drama, melodrama, idyll, among others. His 1917 “drama lirico,” Lodoletta, is based on Ouida’s 1874 novel, Two Little Wooden Shoes. The title character, a Dutch orphan, and Flammen, a French painter exiled in Holland, are chaste lovers. When Flammen is pardoned, Lodoletta follows him to Paris in Act III and, mistakenly thinking him unfaithful, dies in the snow on his doorstep.

Lodoletta, moderately successful at its Rome premiere, was greeted with even less enthusiasm elsewhere. The Met’s most bankable cast notwithstanding--Geraldine Farrar, Enrico Caruso, Pasquale Amato--the opera managed to string together very few repetitions in two seasons. A single aria, Lodoletta’s “Flammen, perdonami (Flammen, forgive me),” is familiar to contemporary operaphiles in the excellent renditions of Freni, Renata Tebaldi, Renata Scotto, and Renée Fleming.

And then there is Mafalda Favero. Favero and Jussi Björling made their Met debuts in a 1938 La Bohème. The tenor went on to a long career with the company; the soprano, detained in Italy by World War II, never again returned to the United States, alas. Favero’s 1941 recording of “Flammen, perdonami” is unforgettable. The exceptional clarity of her diction captures the crushing pathos of the dying Lodoletta.

Accessible on YouTube is a complete recording of L’Amico Fritz conducted by the composer and starring Ferruccio Tagliavini and Pia Tassinari. Roberto Alagna and Angela Gheorghiu are Fritz and Suzel in a more recent album. Strongly recommended is the “Cherry Duet” sung by Favero and Tito Schipa and also by Tagliavini and Magda Olivero.

Recovering the Forgotten Singer, 7: Kurt Moll

Kurt Moll (1938-2017) was the preeminent German bass in the world’s most prestigious opera houses from the 1970s to the 1990s. A favorite of conductors, among them Herbert von Karajan, Leonard Bernstein, Georg Solti, and Carlos Kleiber, Moll was sought, again and again, for Gurnemanz (Parsifal), Sarastro (Die Zauberflöte), Rocco (Fidelio), the Commendatore (Don Giovanni)—for the stage, of course, as well as for recordings and DVDs of Strauss, Wagner, and Mozart produced in this period. His is a magisterial voice, deep, wide-ranging, and exceptionally sweet.

The clip, “La vendetta (Vengeance)” that follows is excerpted from a 1980 Paris performance of Le Nozze di Figaro. In a mock opera seria manner Moll declaims Don Bartolo’s fulmination against Figaro and articulates with precision its witty opera buffa patter.

 

Baron Ochs in Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier was one of Moll’s signature roles. We see him here in a clip from a 1984 Salzburg Festival performance conducted by von Karajan. The lecherous Ochs cheerfully accepts an invitation to an tryst with the maid “Mariandel,” (his rival, Octavian, in disguise). Helga Müller-Molinari plays the sly Italian messenger. Executing the extreme highs and lows with ease, the bass’s warm timbre invests the character’s most lyrical music with the infectious lilt of the score’s familiar waltz.     

The doleful mood of Franz Schubert’s song “Der Wanderer” calls on Moll’s dark sound to express the despair of the wanderer, homeless, friendless, loveless, and finally hopeless. The singer subjects his immense instrument to the intimate dimensions of the German lied.

 

You will find a profusion of Kurt Moll clips on YouTube. Especially recommended are Sarastro’s arias from Die Zauberflöte and Osmin’s arias from Die Entführung aus dem Serail. You will also find renditions, in German, of Prince Gremin’s aria from Eugene Onegin and King Philip’s aria from Don Carlo.

Recovering the Forgotten Singer, 6: Yevgeny Nesterenko

Russian bass Yevgeny Nesterenko (1938-2021) was one of the phenomenal singers the U.S. discovered in 1975 during the first New York visit of the Bolshoi Opera. His Boris Godunov was a highlight of a several-week visit that introduced a generation of Soviet stars, among them Elena Obraztsova, Yuri Mazurok, and Vladimir Atlantov, many of whom went on to international careers.

Soon after winning a first-place prize in the 1970 Tchaikovsky competition, Nesterenko joined the Bolshoi as its leading bass. The Moscow company remained his home for three decades. At the Vienna State Opera and at La Scala he performed the principal roles of the core repertoire written for his voice type.

Nesterenko’s dark, rich timbre, the ease and strength he commands throughout his range, and the power and subtlety of his acting are fully deployed, as you will see, in the death scene of Modest Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov. The czar’s tender farewell to his son is the inexorable denouement of this tragic history play. Our clip is drawn from a 1978 Bolshoi performance.

Here is the bass’s lyric interpretation of his Act III aria from Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin. In this commercial recording the mature Prince Gremin voices the depth of his love for his young wife, Tatiana.

Nesterenko was one of the leads in La Scala’s 1978 revival of Verdi’s Don Carlo, conducted by Claudio Abbado. A recording of that production is excerpted here. The singer’s heartrending delivery of “Ella giammai m’amò (She Never Loved Me)” conveys the despair of King Philip as, alone on the stage, he comes to understand that his love for his consort, Elisabeth of Valois, has never been requited.

After his retirement from the opera stage and the concert hall, Nesterenko pursued an active teaching and scholarly schedule until his death from COVID-19.

We encourage readers of this blog who share our enthusiasm for this very great and largely forgotten artist to access YouTube clips of Nesterenko in arias by Mozart, Rossini, Borodin, Puccini, and songs by Mussorgsky, Rachmaninoff, and Shostakovich.

Recovering the Forgotten Singer, 5: Helen Traubel

When Helen Traubel (1899-1972) debuted at the Met in 1937, the company had the extraordinary luxury of alternating the stellar Brünnhildes of Kirsten Flagstad and Marjorie Lawrence. Traubel’s operatic stage debut, at nearly forty years of age, was in the Met premiere of a short-lived English-language opera by Walter Damrosch, The Man Without a Country; two years went by before she was assigned a Wagner lead, Sieglinde in Die Walküre. And it was not until 1941, when Flagstad returned to her native Norway for the duration of the war and Lawrence was felled by polio that Traubel became the company’s leading hochdramatischer soprano.

Two decades as a concert artist had honed Traubel’s voice, voluminous, equalized from top to bottom, encompassing both lyric and heroic passages with no loss of timbral purity and clear diction.

Aside from four performances in the Damrosch opera and a late turn as Der Rosenkavalier’s Marschallin, Traubel’s 176 Met appearances, over seventeen consecutive seasons, were devoted exclusively to Wagner. Senta, in Der Fliegende Holländer, was the sole heroic soprano role in the Wagner canon that she did not undertake. Only Johanna Gadski, in the early 20^th century, sang more Walküre Brünnhildes than Traubel who, herself, is second only to Flagstad in the lineage of the company’s Isoldes.

Here, in a 1950 commercial recording, the soprano sings both parts in Walküre’s triumphant scene in which Brünnhilde bestows Siegmund’s broken sword on Sieglinde, the future mother of the hero, Siegfried.

Traubel’s effulgent “Liebestod” comes from a 1945 recording with the New York Philharmonic led by Artur Rodzinski.

 

By the start of Rudolf Bing’s tenure as general manager of the Met in 1950, Traubel was nearing the end of her reign over the Valhalla of Wagnerians. Her top register receding, she appeared more and more as a cross-over artist in cabarets, and on television with the likes of comedian Jimmy Durante. Bing, publicly disapproving of her excursion into pop culture, terminated her contract in 1953. She soon starred in Pipe Dream (1955), one of the few failures of musical theatre luminaries Rodgers and Hammerstein, and had featured roles in movies with José Ferrer and Jerry Lewis.

Our final track is from Deep in My Heart, a 1954 biopic loosely based on the life of operetta composer Sigmund Romberg. Ferrer and Merle Oberon are prominent in the clip. Traubel does justice to an old song, “Auf Wiedersehen.”

The soprano’s other extra-musical interests included part ownership of a St. Louis major league baseball team and authorship of two mystery novels.

Met audiences have heard brilliant Brünnhildes and Isoldes since 1953—Birgit Nilsson, Hildegard Behrens, Gwyneth Jones immediately come to mind—but none, in our view, with the rich, warm sound of Helen Traubel at her peak.