The 20th-Century Baritone: Pavel Lisitsian (1911-2004)

 The voices of Lawrence Tibbett Leonard Warren, Robert Merrill, Ettore Bastianini, and Tito Gobbi have been preserved in complete recordings of the great Verdi roles. An earlier cohort of Italians, Antonio Scotti, Pasquale Amato, and Giuseppe De Luca, left a rich legacy of recorded excerpts. And my apologies to those excellent singers whose names I have omitted. But no list of Verdians should be without Pavel Lisitsian, a Soviet artist of Armenian descent who was the principal baritone of the Bolshoi from 1940 until the mid-1960s.

Lisitsian rarely sang outside of the Soviet Union. He did make a rapturously reviewed recital tour of the United States in 1960 and sang twice in opera, once in New York (March 3), once in San Francisco (as Valentin in Faust) a month later. In a chilling coincidence, his sole Met appearance was as Amonasro on the night before Leonard Warren, the Met’s leading baritone, died onstage while singing in a performance of La Forza del destino.

Along with the standard Russian repertoire, Lisitsian sang the major Verdi roles, all in the vernacular, as was the custom even in the major European opera houses through the 1950s.

Lisitsian’s instrument is utterly even from top to bottom, resting on an endless supply of breath that gives him access to a wide dynamic span. His pristine timbre sustains a clarity of diction and an expressive range of interpretive choices. His recording of Renato’s aria from Un Ballo in mashcera, “Eri tu,” encompasses the character’s fortissimo rage over what he thinks is his wife’s betrayal and his pianissimo regret at the loss of her affection.

 

 

Prince Yeletsky’s aria in Act II of The Queen of Spades, a heartfelt declaration of love, demonstrates Lisitsian’s exceptional legato, the precision of his intonation and attacks, and ease throughout his range. This recording is the gold standard for one of Tchaikovsky’s most haunting melodies.

Lisitsian concertized extensively. His recitals included Russian art songs, but also German lieder, in Russian. (During his North American tour, he sang in German and Italian.) Here is Schubert’s “An die Musik,” sung in Russian, in an odd arrangement with orchestra, taken much more slowly than by most artists, but overflowing with passion and gorgeous tone.

 

 

P. S. YouTube has a good number of items performed by Lisitsian, all of them worth hearing. Here is the Act III Aïda-Amonasro duet, apparently from a live performance at Moscow’s Bolshoi, with the thrilling Galina Vishnevskaya (her 1961 Met Aïda was memorable).

 

World War II and the Met Roster, 3: Ebe Stignani, the Absent Amneris

In June 2014 we published two posts centered on the impact of World War II on the Met roster, the first on June 11 and the other on June 21 (see our blog archive in the right-hand column). The Met's revival this fall of its well-worn 1988 Aïda (it is scheduled for live internet streaming on November 5) prompts us to tell the story of the extraordinary Italian mezzo-soprano, Ebe Stignani, whose Met debut in 1939 fell victim to impending hostilities.

That year the New York Times carried an article titled “Ten Italian Artists Detained in Italy” (October 6). According to the report, "officials of the company had gone to the Italian pier ... expecting to meet a contingent of singers, but none of the expected artists was on the boat.” Imagine their surprise! The Met was later informed that the singers were unable to secure passports. Among the ten, all of whom had already obtained visas from the US authorities, was Ebe Stignani. The next day, the Times offered this explanation: that several of the artists, including Stignani, had been booked for performances in Italy “and it is feared that should the war continue the artists might not be able to get passage back to Italy in time for their scheduled appearances.” Besides, should the US declare war, the singers might find themselves unable to return to Italy for the duration. So it was that Stignani did not fulfill her contract with the Met and New York audiences were deprived of an unforgettable Amneris, Aïda's Egyptian rival.

In this excerpt from a live performan of Aida, Stignani is the despairing Amneris who realizes that she has brought the death sentence upon her beloved Radamès. Ramfis is sung by bass Giulio Neri.

We pick up the trail of Ebe Stignani and the Met in 1950, general manager Rudolf Bing’s first season. Verdi’s Don Carlo was the opening night bill. Months before, Bing had asked his friend, conductor Alberto Erede, to suggest a cast worthy of his inaugural production. In his reply to Bing of January 18, 1950, Erede recommended Renata Tebaldi or Delia Rigal, in that order, for Elisabetta, Boris Christoff or Cesare Siepi for King Philip, Giuseppe Taddei for Rodrigo, Mario Del Monaco for Carlo. Tebaldi was busy in San Francisco; Christoff was contracted, then denied a visa for suspected Communist sympathies. Bing eventually chose Robert Merrill for Rodrigo and Jussi Björling for Carlo. For the Countess Eboli, Erede was explicit in rejecting Stignani because of her age (she was then only forty-seven and in phenomenal voice) and because he doubted that “her appearance would be acceptable for an American audience,” although, he conceded, “she is still very good.” In all likelihood "appearance" weighed heavily in the rejection. Erede’s choice, Fedora Barbieri, was awarded the role.

Ebe Stignani did sing in the United States, but not nearly to the extent that opera fans would have wished: she gave a string of recitals in 1948, including one rapturously received in Carnegie Hall, was engaged by the San Francisco Opera in 1938 and 1948, by Philadelphia and Detroit in 1951, by Chicago in 1955. In a 1971 Opera News interview, Stignani responded to the question, “why did you never sing at the Met?” with, “I simply do not know. They did not call me again. Why talk about it?”

Right at the start, from the time of her 1925 debut, it was apparent that Stignani had one of the truly great voices of the 20^th century. Toscanini engaged her for La Scala just a year later; she was a major star until her retirement in 1958. Featured in complete opera recordings of the 1930s and 1940s, she was the preferred mezzo opposite Maria Callas in many post-war albums, both pirated and commercial.

The phenomenal sound of Stignani, huge yet finely controlled, rich in harmonics and texture yet even in its registers, is best appreciated in her live recordings. It was the theatre, not the studio, that inspired her most compelling singing. Here she is in a 1953 La Scala performance of Il Trovatore. The tenor is Gino Penno, who sang briefly at the Met. The gypsy Azucena narrates first her mother’s death at the stake, then, her own horrific error when in a paroxysm of vengeance she mistakenly threw her own child into the blaze. Her expressive voice and diction made Stignani a great actress. The knowledgeable Milan audience, unable to restrain itself, begins its ovation before the aria is finished.

We end with an excerpt from the 1953 film adaptation of Aïda, starring a very young Sophia Loren in the title role, her voice dubbed by Renata Tebaldi, and the American actress Lois Maxwell lip-syncing Stignani's Amneris. In this scene (somewhat abridged), the Egyptian princess tricks her Ethiopian slave into confessing her love for the Pharaoh's general.

 

 

The Met in World War I, 1

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In this post and in one we are planning for later in the month, we add our voices to the chorus of historians of 20^th-century Europe and America, including cultural historians, who have marked the centenary of World War I this year, and this week mark the Armistice of November 11, 1918 that ended the hostilities. 

From 1914 to 1917, the year the United States entered the war, the impact on the Met of the fighting in Europe was limited principally to the difficulties of transporting European artists to New York and back. Passports and safe-conducts were precious commodities. In May 1915, the dangers of ocean travel came home to 39^th Street with the catastrophe of the Lusitania, sunk by a German U-boat.  Only fate and his premature exit from the Met in a huff kept Arturo Toscanini, his wife, and daughters from the passenger list of the doomed transatlantic liner on which the family had originally had reservations.  Two years later, the Met mourned the tragic death of Spanish composer Enrique Granados. On his return from New York following the Metropolitan world premiere of his opera Goyescas, the ship on which Granados and his wife were crossing the English Channel was torpedoed by a German submarine.

While on the stage it was largely business as usual, Met artists were not impervious to the patriotic passions of the time. At the center of nationalist nastiness was the German soprano Johanna Gadski. A fixture at the Met from 1900 to 1917, she had become openly contemptuous of the United States. In spring 1915, coincidentally a day after the attack on the Lusitania, a gala for the benefit of the German Red Cross, a performance of Die Fledermaus not sponsored by the company, was scheduled for the house. The German colors were to be displayed, “Deutschland über Alles” was to be sung, there were to be speeches. The performance took place, but Gadski thought better of singing the anthem, the speeches were curtailed, and the colors were not shown. In the same year, Gadski’s husband, Captain Hans Tauscher, was charged with conspiring to blow up the canal that joins Lake Erie and Lake Ontario; he was acquitted. Gadski herself was alleged to have pronounced publicly that, given a chance, she would have happily blown up New Jersey’s munitions plants. The New York Globe called for Gadski’s ouster from the Met for hosting a 1915 New Year’s Eve party at which fellow German Otto Goritz, a Metropolitan baritone, was reputed to have sung a parody in celebration of the Lusitania disaster. 

Gadski’s reputation as a stalwart Wagnerian is substantiated by her recordings. Her warm timbre is far more phonogenic than that of most dramatic sopranos of the era. Her voice is remarkably well-schooled, solid throughout the range, even capable of agility. She is responsive to the text and has the means to utter Wagner’s expansive phrases with no hint of strain. One of the most breathtaking moments in Die Walküre comes in Act III: Brünnhilde bestows on the pregnant Sieglinde the broken sword that Siegfried, the future hero, will reforge; Sieglinde rapturously responds with gratitude and pledges to save her unborn child. Gadski, like many Wagner sopranos sang both roles, in separate performances of course. Here she takes on the successive phrases first of the Valkyrie, then of the expectant mother. The recording was made in May 1917, just one month after Gadski’s final performance at the Met. 

A versatile member of the company, Gadski was by no means limited to the German repertoire. A quarter of her nearly 500 performances were in Italian roles. In the long list of sopranos who have sung Aïda with the Met, she stands fourth, with two more to her credit than Leontyne Price. This recording reveals the full body of Gadski’s voice, her affinity for Verdi, and the assured manner that easily surmounts the difficulties of the Act III aria, “O patria mia.”

On April 2, 1917, during a performance of the American composer Reginald De Koven’s The Canterbury Pilgrims, the audience was electrified by the news that Woodrow Wilson had appeared before Congress to call for a declaration of war against Germany. Late editions of New York papers circulated from hand to hand in the boxes. In the audience was the recently recalled ambassador to Berlin James Gerard. He stood to exhort the crowd to cheer the President; from another box came a shout for cheers for the Allies and the United States Army and Navy. The orchestra struck up “The Star-Spangled Banner.” As Act IV began, mezzo-soprano Margarete Ober, “one of a dozen German stars [more accurately, two stars and a handful of comprimarios] on the stage at the time, had the leading part with Mr. [Johannes] Sembach in the final scene. She was singing a phrase of the Wife of Bath when she stopped and fell full length upon her back, striking heavily on the floor. Sembach and [tenor] Max Bloch lifted her, but she sank again, and the two men carried her out through the stage crowd, considerably to the detriment of the Wife of Bath’s bridal gown” (Times). The cast sang on without her to the opera’s end. In the years of America’s neutrality, 1914-1917, Ober and her German compatriots had had no problem singing with French and British colleagues, nationals of countries with which Germany was at war. Nor was there any serious threat of anti-German feeling affecting the repertoire. 

That would quickly change.

Post-script: Reginald De Koven

The Canterbury Pilgrims was the only opera by Reginald De Koven performed at the Met. His other opera, Rip Van Winkle, had its premiere in Chicago. Neither had long shelf lives. An influential critic, De Koven was also a prolific composer of operettas, many of them successful in the late 19^th century and beyond. His music is remembered, if dimly, because an aria, “O promise me,” from his Robin Hood (1890), became a standard sung at countless weddings for many generations. Louise Homer, principal Met contralto from 1900 to 1918, delivers the melody with rich yet finely focused tone.