Rosa Ponselle: Becoming an (American) Diva

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In the first of our recent posts on Vincenzo Bellini’s Norma, we included the magisterial aria, “Casta diva,” sung by Rosa Ponselle. Her Met debut is one of the astonishing Cinderella stories in the performance history of opera. And from that dazzling start she went on to become one of the unforgettable vocal artists of the last century.

Opposite the world-famous tenor Enrico Caruso in the Met’s very first performance of Verdi’s La Forza del destino (November 15, 1928) was a twenty-one-year-old soprano who had never had a voice lesson--let alone sung on an operatic stage. She had been born Rosa Ponzillo in Meriden, Connecticut in 1897 to parents who had immigrated from Caserta, very near Naples, Caruso’s home town. The first musician in a non-musical family was her beloved sister Carmela, ten years Rosa’s senior, who, discovered by the church organist, had studied music and eventually moved to New York to make her living as a café singer.

In the meanwhile, Rosa sought work as a pianist in local nickelodeons and occasionally as a singer in movie theatres. At age nineteen, she joined Carmela in New York. Together they formed an act promoted as “Those Tailored Italian Girls,” mixing popular songs, Broadway show tunes, and operatic arias. The sisters, both endowed with dark, smooth, flexible voices, were immediate hits and were soon propelled to the pinnacle  of the vaudeville circuit, the Palace, where they commanded top dollar.  Here they are in “Comin’ Thro’ the Rye,” recorded in December 1919.  In this rendition, the familiar song becomes a vehicle for voices of operatic power exercised in authentic bel canto style. Note, in particular, the interpolated virtuoso cadenza redolent of Bellini.

But Ponslle aspired to a grander stage some blocks down Broadway from the Palace. In May 1919 her agent arranged for an audition with Caruso. She sang “Pace, pace” from La Forza del destino, in anticipation of the upcoming premiere of Verdi’s opera that fall. The great tenor, duly impressed, introduced her to the Met’s general manager, Giulio Gatti-Casazza. That she fainted during “Casta diva” did not discourage Gatti from contracting her for six operas (in only six months) for the 1918-1919 season, at $150 a week, considerably less than her fee touring in Keith’s vaudeville shows. She sang more than twenty times in five works, all of which she had to learn, including two Met firsts and a world premiere.

Here is Ponselle in “Pace, pace,” the glorious aria from her debut role. Still in love with Alvaro, the perpetrator of her cruel destiny, the solitary, penitent Leonora begs for peace. In this 1928 recording, at the peak of her career, Ponselle, ever alive to her character’s despair and agitation, varies dynamics and sustains phrases with rock-solid assurance and her accustomed tonal splendor. The crescendo and decrescendo of the opening note have rarely been matched.

Also in 1928, Ponselle recorded the last moments of La Forza del desino with her frequent superlative collaborators tenor Giovanni Martinelli and bass Ezio Pinza.

Staging Cavalleria and Pagliacci Now

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The last of the six new productions of the Met’s 2014-15 season, Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci, opened on April 14,  2015. In general, critical response to these recent investitures has weighed heavily on the side of disappointment. Not one of the lately unveiled stagings can be said to have enjoyed the enthusiastic consensus of reviewers. Briefly then: The reception of The Death of Klinghoffer was mostly positive, that of Le Nozze di Figaro, cool at best. The notices of Iolanta/Bluebeard’s Castle were mixed; those of The Merry Widow and La Donna del lago, negative; and those of Cavalleria and Pagliacci, primarily so. And only Mozart’s treasured comedy and the Mascagni/Leocavallo hugely popular double bill were reinvestitures of core repertoire favorites that often find themselves subjected to particular scrutiny, especially when they propose significant rereadings of the work.

In our previous post, we tracked the controversy over departures from conventional settings of the core all the way back to the 1951 Pagliacci. We argued that the heated operatic debate of the present day had its origins in the reception of a last-minute addition to Rudolf Bing’s inaugural season.

Not surprisingly, given that the April productions are new, staging was front and center in the reviews of Cav/Pag. And since the productions they replaced were signed by Franco Zeffirelli, the comparison with the Zeffirelli aesthetic, beloved by many of the public and detested by almost all critics, would inevitably come to the fore. “In the beginning, say 1970, there was Franco Zeffirelli. He turned Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci, the eternal verist twins, into a pair of kitsch spectaculars. Audiences applauded the scenery” (Financial Times, April 15, 2015).

Zeffirelli’s long association with the Met began with his ecstatically received 1964 Falstaff and ended with his much derided 1998 La Traviata. Between the two, there were ten others, including his 1970 Cav/Pag. Managements have been wary of angering  Met patrons by shelving his sets with nonchalance. Only La Bohème and Turandot survive. As Peter Gelb put it some years ago:  “I promised the Met subscribers when I first came on board—well, I didn’t promise anything, but I did say that there were two iconic Zeffirelli productions, Bohème and Turandot, and that the other Zeffirelli productions are going to be replaced. A lot of these things are just sitting there like lead weights, so there is a lot of catching up to do” (New Yorker (Oct. 22, 2007).  He has been good to his word. The Zeffirelli Falstaff, Tosca, Traviata, and Carmen are history.

And now so too are Cavalleria and Pagliacci. Zeffirelli deployed much of the action of Cavalleria on a monumental church stairway that filled half the stage; realistic housefronts with balconies and views of the hill town framed this meticulous slice-of-life rendering of a bright, colorful Easter Sunday in Sicily. 

Eschewing the slightest hint of the picturesque that floods the Zeffirelli version, even in the religious procession, the David McVicar/Rae Smith production drains the stage of the specificity of the quotidian, of color and light.

 Cavalleria rusticana (model), Metropolitan Opera, 2015

Displacement here is not of place or date--the action transpires as is prescribed in a Sicilian village circa 1880--but of time. The artistic team turns day into night (some have observed that the darkness signals not mass on Easter morn, but midnight mass). A revolving platform repositions again and again a patriarchal community of subjugated women and swaggering, predatory men, the better to give  relief to the drama of individual betrayal. Santuzza, victim and ultimately avenger, is repeatedly set apart from the black-clad villagers whose codes she has broken.

Many of those glad to bid farewell to Zeffirelli’s obsessive pictorialism, including reviewers who missed few opportunities to put him down, were disappointed by its replacement, spare or not. The Times was irritated by the over-active platform, the New Yorker found the staging “relentlessly grim,” the Observer thought that it “bombed on just about every level.” Only the Wall Street Journal gave a thumbs up. With caveats about the lighting and the male dancers who mimed Alfio’s horses, we thought the show compelling in its abstraction, particularly as it transformed the lengthy genre scenes of village life into comments on the opera’s social/sexual politics.

For Pagliacci, McVicar and Smith moved the action forward from 1865 to 1950 and from Calabria to Sicily. We are alerted that the two operas take place in the same southern Italian town square by the imposing stone walls that enclose both narratives. There, the unity ends.

As it happened, the square, neon lights, and stalled truck of the McVicar/Smith Pagliacci turned out to be more naturalistic than Zeffirelli’s rocky outcroppings, stunted tree, and big sky. 

Pagliacci, Metropolitan Opera, 2015; Patricia Racette, George Gagnidze

The new version added a three-man vaudeville team. The intervention of the trio into the prologue (one of several inventions) violated the expository, deeply human and complex import of the baritone’s aria. While the press, in general, was amused by the antics, for us the slapstick of the play-within-a-play went too far in making the critical contrast between farce and melodrama. For this post, we have chosen two clips that demonstrate the power of music and text when the performer rather than the production is the primary site of meaning.

Lawrence Tibbett sings “Si può?” (If I may)” in this scene from Metropolitan (1935), the fifth of six feature films he made between 1930 and 1937. Tibbett, who had a successful career in Hollywood simultaneously with his Met stardom, is captured here at his extraordinary prime, reaching out to the audience with gestures as subtly inflected as his phrasing and the colors of his voice. The charisma of the singer and the purpose of the character are perfectly joined.

Giovanni Martinelli sings “Vesti la giubba” in this 1926 Vitaphone short. The aria is forever associated with Enrico Caruso, the tenor who holds the Met record for performances of Pagliacci. Martinelli became the company’s Canio after Caruso’s premature death. As you will hear, he favors an unusually slow tempo. Sustaining astonishing tension with astonishing vocal energy, the tenor gives the tragic density of the short piece its full due. 

The Met in World War I, 2

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On this 100^th anniversary of the onset of the Great War, we pick up where we left off in our post of November 8, The Met in World War I, 1. 

From 1914 to 1917, the Met programmed its seasons much as it had in preceding years. As late as October 16, 1917, six months after the performance of The Canterbury Pilgrims disrupted by the news that Congress had declared war against Germany (see our previous post), Olive Fremstad, one of the Met’s two leading Wagner sopranos (the other was Johanna Gadski), had signed on to rejoin the company after a three-year absence. A week before opening night and only nine days before she was scheduled to sing Isolde, Fremstad was informed that all opera in German was cancelled for the season and so, therefore, was her engagement. Tristan und Isolde turned into Boris Godunov. In all, general manager Gatti-Casazza replaced more than forty scheduled German performances, nearly one-third of the season’s calendar. The action was taken, according to the official explanation, "lest Germany should make capital of their [operas in German] continued appearance to convince the German people that this nation was not heart and soul in the war." Though no one could have guessed it at the time, the last performance in German from the Met stage for the duration and beyond had taken place on April 13, 1917. 

The press was essentially unanimous in opposing the management’s edict. A Tribune headline read, “German Opera is Still Welcome at the Metropolitan” (Sept. 23, 1917). The Sun was confident that the public did not “think of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms and Wagner as exclusively representing the Teutonic people.” The Mail declared, “Art knows no frontiers.” A ban on German opera would, for the Times, be tantamount to “excluding the great classics of German literature from the public libraries.” Signed contracts and the views of influential music critics notwithstanding, in a charged climate the board bowed to war hysteria, voting to exile the German language from its auditorium, and leading Wagner specialists from its roster. 

Subscribers who objected and demanded refunds were refused on the grounds that the company had “made no definite promise as to the complete and precise repertoire of its present season.” In a letter from management, they were further told that “the decision of the Board of Directors to withdraw opera sung in the German language was dictated not only by a sense of patriotic duty but also by a desire to safeguard the interests of our patrons and to prevent possible disorder.” The German-language repertoire tentatively announced (it was common practice to float many more titles than would be mounted) for 1917-18--Fidelio, Lohengrin, Tannhäuser, Tristan und Isolde, Meistersinger, Parsifal, Rheingold, Walküre, Siegfried, Götterdämmerung—was scratched. To compensate for the ban on German (the number of performances in German in 1916-17 was forty-six), performances in Italian rose from eighty-eight to 122, and in French from thirty-three to forty-eight.  The premieres represented Entente Powers Italy, France, Russia, and the United States: Mascagni’s Lodoletta, Henri Rabaud’s comic Mârouf, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Le Coq d’or, and The Robin Woman: Shanewis by Charles Wakefield Cadman, a specialist in Native-American music.

The Armistice coincided with opening night, November 11, 1918; the company celebrated offstage and on-. In the afternoon, a procession to Times Square and back of Met administrators, Gatti included, instrumentalists, and singers followed a “dummy” Siegfried, hung in effigy from a gibet and helmeted to resemble Kaiser Wilhelm. Between acts of the evening’s opera, Samson et Dalila, the national anthems of the Allies rang through the house, the “Star Spangled Banner” capped by Caruso’s high B flat. 

In 1919-20, the gradual reintegration of Wagner began with Parsifal, but only in English; in 1920-21, Lohengrin and Tristan were on the program, again in English; all did well at the box office. In 1921, when the ban was lifted, Italian maintained its plurality although performances in German increased gradually through the decade. In the mid-1930s, with the advent of Kirsten Flagstad, German again claimed its pre-war season share of approximately thirty percent.

The world’s great singers gave their thrilling voices to the war effort. In his heavily-accented English, Caruso made a fervent recording of George M. Cohan’s 1917 rousing “Over There.” It ends with “Par là-bas,” the French version of Cohan’s recruitment anthem.

Just four days after the Armistice, Connecticut-born Rosa Ponselle made her Met debut opposite Caruso in the company’s first La Forza del destino. In that 1918-19 season, shorn of operas in German, she was conscripted to head the casts of two English-language works enlisted to take up the slack: Carl Maria von Weber’s Oberon, presented in its original English text, and the world premiere of an American opera, Joseph Carl Breil’s The Legend. Here she sings Ivor Novello’s 1914 “Keep the Home Fires Burning.”

John McCormack, who was never on the Met roster, sang on its stage with the Chicago-Philadelphia Opera Company. He lends his sweet timbre, refined style, and exemplary diction to Jack Judge’s “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary,” composed in 1912 and taken up by British soldiers when the war broke out.

First Night and Other Fausts

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As we look forward to the September 22 opening of the Metropolitan’s 2014-15 season, we take a moment to look back on the very first of the Met’s opening nights. The account that follows is drawn from our forthcoming book, Grand Opera: The Story of the Met (University of California Press).

October 22, 1883

The confusion outside the new opera house on opening night, and the commotion within, delayed the prelude to Charles Gounod’s Faust. As one wag put it, no one seemed to mind except "a few ultra musical people in the gallery." On the sidewalk out front, scalpers hawked parquet seats at $12 and $15 each and places in the balcony at $8. Overeager takers apparently failed to notice that as late as 7:30, $5 balcony tickets were still on sale at the box office. "It comes high but we must have it," read the caption under Puck's lampoon of the rush for pricey tickets. Ushers in evening dress escorted patrons to their seats. The three tiers of boxes and the parquet were filled, the balcony nearly sold out. Only the $3-a-pop uppermost section, the "family circle," so renamed to repel roués accustomed to appropriating it for themselves, showed empty seats. When the prelude was over and the curtain rose on the old philosopher's study, the audience finally fell silent.

The lease of the house to theatrical manager Henry E. Abbey came with the board's charge that he assemble a company for the Met's first season. The “Italian” of his "Grand Italian Opera" meant that French and German works would be sung in Italian. That was no surprise. Years later, in evoking an 1870s Faust at the Academy of Music with Christine Nilsson, the Marguerite of the 1883 Met opening, Edith Wharton took a jab at this practice: "An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences."

  

Alas, the performance that launched the theatre on 39^th Street and Broadway disappointed critics and public. The high point of the evening was the interruption of the garden scene to mark Nilsson's proprietary relationship to the role. Presented with a sash of golden leaves in a velvet case, "first holding the box down so that the audience obtained a view of its contents, she placed it upon the chair in front of the casket, and kneeling repeated the [aria]." But for the Times reviewer, who took note of the soprano's wonted acting and musical expressivity, the "Jewel Song" "was scarcely rendered with the requisite buoyancy and brilliancy." The Faust, Italo Campanini, arguably the world's leading tenor, had been Italy's first Lohengrin, London's first Don José, and New York's first Radamès. That night, his "old-time sweetness" was intermittent and his "old-time manly ring" suffered "the evidences of labor" (Tribune). The reception of the principals might have been more sympathetic had the architects gotten their way in situating the orchestra. Borrowing from Bayreuth, they had sunk the pit below the level of the parquet. But the conductor objected to the near invisibility to which he had been relegated. The pit was raised, putting maestro and orchestra in full view, obstructing the stage picture for many and, of greater import still, undoing the balance of voices and instruments. The orchestra descended to the intended plane two weeks later, and there, with sporadic minor adjustments, it stayed.

(Readers of this post can access the entire first chapter of Grand Opera, devoted to the inaugural season, by going to http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520250338)

Since that fabled and flawed night in fall 1883, there have been many fabulous performances of the opera that lent the Met the sobriquet “Faustspielhaus.” Faust stands eighth in the tally of titles presented by the company. The opera’s enduring popularity is as much a tribute to Gounod’s elegant and tuneful score as it is to the opportunities it has offered singers, beginning with Nilsson and Campanini. The hedonist Faust, the betrayed Marguerite, the nefarious Méphistophélès, and the stalwart Valentin have been favored vehicles for the likes of legendary tenors Jean de Reszke and Jussi Björling,  sopranos Emma Calvé and Nellie Melba, basses Fyodor Chaliapin and Ezio Pinza, baritones Antonio Scotti and Robert Merrill. 

We have chosen as our earliest example a 1910 extract from the Garden scene. Faust is on the verge of seducing the innocent Marguerite. Enrico Caruso and Geraldine Farrar, one of the most potent box-office pairings in Met history, capture both the characters’ expression of eternal love and their barely contained passion.

Valentin was the second role undertaken by Lawrence Tibbett in his debut season, 1923-24; success and renown came to him in 1925, full-fledged stardom in the 1930s. He kept Faust in his repertoire until 1934, the year he recorded “Avant de quitter ces lieux.” In this aria, Valentin, about to go off to war, commends his sister to divine protection. With exemplary style and restraint, Tibbett fills out the broad arc of the melody that conveys the character’s simple faith.

A lyric soprano with coloratura fluency, a great French stylist, Victoria de los Angeles bowed at the Met in 1951 as Marguerite; she sang this role with the company more often than any other and is featured in two commercial recordings of the complete opera. Her warm voice projects all the ebullience of the young woman, dazzled by the chest of bracelets and necklaces she finds in her garden, a gift from the young man who is about to win her heart.

Bulgarian bass Nicolai Ghiaurov made his sensational Met debut as Méphistophélès in 1965. He sang it only eight times, and more’s the pity. Here he is in a 1979 Lyric Opera of Chicago video of the Devil’s serenade, an ironic take on the love scene Faust and Marguerite have just enacted. Ghiaurov envelops the sardonic mockery in his plush timbre.

In 2011, Jonas Kaufmann assumed the title role in the Met’s latest investiture of Faust. He managed to respect the late-Romanticism of the piece in the face of a production keyed to a horrific, post-Hiroshima atomic nightmare. In Zurich, in 2004, he lovingly addressed Marguerite’s humble dwelling in gracefully shaped. long legato phrases, reaching the climactic high C at mezzo forte which he then diminished to piano. A remarkable feat.

Future posts will focus on the Met program in the upcoming season, beginning with Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro, the opening night fare.