Rosa Ponselle, 2: An American Diva

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In our previous post, “Rosa Ponselle: Becoming an (American) Diva,” we sketch the beginnings of Ponselle’s astonishing musical journey. Here we continue our evocation of her storied operatic career.

There had, of course, been many American divas before Ponselle’s 1918 Metropolitan debut, among them Lillian Nordica, Emma Eames, and Geraldine Farrar. These and other predecessors had a key formative experience in common: all had performed on European stages, most had European training. Ponselle alone was entirely home grown; the Met was her conservatory. Her operatic appearances elsewhere included only a handful of performances in London and Florence, and these came late in her career. Despite her success abroad, her fear of foreign audiences never left her and she was quick to make her way back to New York.

In her nearly two-decade-long Met tenure, Ponselle took on more than twenty roles, including the world premiere of an American opera and seven company premieres in the Italian, French, and English repertoire. The most lasting of these firsts expanded the Verdi corpus to encompass La Forza del destino (see our previous post), Don Carlo, and Luisa Miller. She was also the Elvira in the 1921 revival of Ernani, which had been absent from the Met since 1903. One reviewer put it this way: “It is a matter of wonder at that she can sing this music lightly and rhythmically, yet in full voice with the timbre of a dramatic singer.” And wondrous is her execution of Elvira’s opening aria, “Ernani, involami,” replete with incisive recitative and passages of florid singing that explore the limits of the soprano’s range. Here, in one of the most prized Ponselle recordings, her rich, dark voice articulates a long-breathed trill that would be the envy of a light coloratura in, say, Lucia di Lammermoor.

Ponselle never sang a Puccini role. Mimì and Cio-Cio-San were unsuited to the size and color of her voice; Tosca was the property of Maria Jeritza in the 1920s and early 1930s; Manon Lescaut belonged to Lucrezia Bori and Frances Alda. In 1923, she did however record Manon’s “In quelle trine morbide.” The soprano’s seemless legato captures the protagonist’s realization that she has exchanged the precious love of the impoverished student Des Grieux for the empty luxury of her rich protector Geronte.

   

In her final Met years, Ponselle was driven to Carmen by her interest in the role, of course, and also by her insecurity at the top of the range. Audiences loved her, not so the critics who complained of the liberties she took with Bizet’s rhythms and who carped at her outsized gestures. Hollywood, on the other hand, alive to the diva’s popularity, was intrigued. Two decades earlier, Geraldine Farrar had become a moving picture star in a pre-talkie “Carmen” (see our post of January 4, 2017). The trite “home hither” postures of Ponselle’s gypsy, captured in this test, were a bad omen. In any case, as reported by Peter G. Davis in The American Opera Singer, the artist sabotaged her chances at M-G-M by demanding an outrageous fee.

Habanera

A 1937 Met Carmen on tour in Cleveland was Ponselle’s last hurrah. You can hear it on Youtube. Her voice still sumptuous, she retired early to Villa Pace, her Maryland home. She was only forty.

Carmen: High and Low

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On February 11, 2017, the Metropolitan Opera will broadcast via radio its matinee of Carmen. Only Puccini’s La Bohème and Verdi’s Aïda surpass Carmen in number of Met performance, one thousand and counting. 

Bizet is, together with Ruggero Leoncavallo and Pietro Mascagni, one of only three composers of multiple operas to have just one of his many titles boast a place in the standard repertory, and so prominant a place to boot. Pagliacci ranks ninth; Cavalleria rusticana tenth. Other of the composers’ operas, Bizet’s Les Pêcheurs de perles, for example, or Mascagni’s L’Amico Fritz, or Leoncavallo’s Zazà make it to the bills of international houses only sporadically.

Carmen was performed by the Met during the company’s first season, 1883-1884, in Italian, and then in German until 1891. It did not come into its own, however, until the management saw its way to the original French and brought together a cast--Emma Calvé, Jean de Reszke, Emma Eames, and Jean Lassalle—described by the Times as “near to justifying the epithet ‘ideal.’” Calvé set what still stands as the single-season record for a singer in a single major role, thirty-one performances. Abandoning all restraint, the exigent New York critic, Henry Krehbiel, called hers “the most sensational triumph ever achieved by any opera or singer.” We hesitate to include a clip of Calvé’s Carmen here; the poor quality of early recordings does not do her voice justice. You can find a number of her arias on Youtube.

Until the 1930s the Met’s star sopranos, Calvé, Geraldine Farrar, Maria Jeritza, and Rosa Ponselle in turn, claimed Carmen for themselves. Occasionally a mezzo-soprano would have a go at the part. The role’s range accommodates both higher and lower voice types. The darker or lighter timbre is each congenial in different ways to the character’s shifting moods. In the 1940s, a mezzo-soprano, Risë Stevens, tilted the balance to the deeper voice. Photographed in ads for Camels and Chesterfields brandishing Carmen’s signature cigarette, occasionally cast in the movies and frequently heard on the radio, Stevens was one of the most widely recognized classical artists of the period. Since she first took on the role (she sang it 124 times for the Met, second only to Calvé), Carmen has belonged nearly exclusively to the mezzo.

Here are clips of two of Carmen’s arias, the “Habanera” and the “Gypsy Song.” The “Habanera” is sung first by American soprano Leontyne Price. This excerpt is drawn from a complete recording of the opera, her sole assumption of the role. For purposes of contrast, Price is followed by Russian mezzo-soprano Elena Obraztsova in a live performance at the Vienna State Opera. Price binds the notes of the music’s coiling phrases in a hypnotic, silvery legato. Obraztsova conveys the character’s humor and appeal in the warmth of her sound.

French soprano Régine Crespin’s “Gypsy Song” comes from a complete recording of the opera. Again, for purposes of contrast, American mezzo Maria Ewing is here excerpted from a live performance from Glyndebourne. Crespin foregrounds the elegance of Bizet’s music with a voice both sumptuous and finely focused. For Ewing, the aria is not a showpiece, but rather a fierce expression of Carmen’s independent nature. In this emphatic public moment, the mezzo succeeds in inviting us into her private thoughts.

Postscript

For eight seasons, beginning in 1914-1915, Geraldine Farrar sang sixty-five performances of Carmen, all but four of the company’s total in this period. Her charisma, beauty, and stagecraft led to a sustained Hollywood career, beginning with Cecil B. De Mille’s silent adaptation of Carmen. In her screen debut, Farrar exhibits the flashing dark eyes, the beguiling smile, the supple body, and the singularly uninhibited presence that defined her in the opera house. Alas, her movies predate the 1926 advent of the “talkies.” Here is a clip that weds the soprano’s image to her earlier recording of the “Gypsy Song.”