Remembering Renata Tebaldi

Note to those who receive new posts via e-mail: You must click on the title of the new post, highlighted above in blue, in order to access moving images and sound.

February 1, 2022 is the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Renata Tebaldi, a revered interpreter of 19^th-century and early 20^th-century Italian opera. We would not want the moment to pass without marking the occasion on OperaPost.

 

Tebaldi was born in Pesaro, a city on Italy’s Adriatic coast. At the age of seventeen she was encouraged to study voice and made her debut in 1944 in the provincial opera house of Rovigo. Her professional career began in earnest in post-War Italy when she was engaged for leading roles in La Bohème, Otello, and Andrea Chénier by the theaters of Parma, Trieste, and Bologna. In May 1946, she auditioned for Arturo Toscanini who tapped her for the prestigious inaugural concert of the reconstructed La Scala, Milan’s opera house devastated during the war. 

 

Tebaldi’s career securely launched, she appeared on Italy's major lyric stages alongside the country’s leading artists. London and San Francisco audiences heard her in 1950. The legendary rivalry with Maria Callas, hyped by the media, began in 1951 when they were together on tour in South America. By the late 1950s, when both had become stars in the United States, the dueling sopranos were pictured separately on covers of Time, attesting to the extraordinary publicity their ostensible feud had garnered.

 

In 1955, Tebaldi made an unforgettable Met debut as Desdemona in Verdi’s Otello.  From then on, New York would be her operatic home, in effect leaving the Milanese field to Callas. Renata Tebaldi’s name promised a sold-out house. But it was not only the voice that captured the public. The soprano’s warmth radiated across the footlights to endear her to Met audiences. She charmed her passionate fans for nearly two decades. In 1973, she said farewell as Desdemona, her debut role. For two years thereafter she was active as a recitalist.

 

We begin with one of Tebaldi’s first commercial recordings, made in Geneva by Decca/London in November 1949. The amalgam of the strong and the sweet, uniquely hers, is already on full display. She sings “In quelle trine morbide (In those soft lace curtains)” from Act II of Puccini’s Manon Lescaut. The soprano’s sustained legato and doleful tone carry Manon’s regret as she compares the luxurious abode of her elderly sugar-daddy to the humble room she had shared with her young lover. The conductor is Alberto Erede.

In 1958, at the height of her fame, and at the powers Tebaldi sang La Forza del destino in Naples. In this clip ( "Pace, pace" from the complete performance, available on YouTube) the soprano meets with astonishing, and perhaps unparalled authority the wide emotional, technical, and dynamic challenges Verdi set for the soprano.

The release of the 1952 album of Madama Butterfly, one of her first complete opera recordings, was instrumental in promoting Tebaldi’s celebrity. During the initial period of copious release of complete operas on long-playing records, she was the prima donna assoluta of Decca/London. Tebaldi’s onstage presence is discernable in this clip drawn from an installment of the regularly televised Bell Telephone Hour (1959). We see her in the opera’s final scene. Before taking her own life, the tragic figure bids farewell to her young son.

On the opera stage in Italy and elsewhere Tebaldi never once sang other than in Italian, whether the text was originally in Italian or not--as was the practice in Italy until the late 1950s. In the United States, that meant that she performed only the Italian repertoire. Her Marguerite (Gounod, Faust), Elisabeth, Elsa, and Eva (Wagner, Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, Die Mesitersinger), and Tatiana (Tchaikovsky, Eugene Onegin), roles she sang early in her career in Italian for Italian audiences, of course, are very much worth your search on YouTube.

Eileen Farrell, 1920-2020: In Celebration

Note to those who receive new posts via e-mail: You must click on the title of the new post, highlighted above in blue, in order to access moving images and sound. 

We remember Eileen Farrell on the centenary of her birth as one of a triad (with Lillian Nordica [1857-1914)] and Helen Traubel [1899-1972]) of the greatest of American-born dramatic sopranos. To that distinction we add that Farrell was arguably the most versatile of singers. For decades, she defined “crossover,” moving comfortably from jazz to pop music and operetta to opera. She sang professionally for six decades. In this post we focus on the all-too-brief ten-year span she devoted to the lyric stage.

Farrell’s idiosyncratic career began in the early 1940s when, after a few months as a member of the CBS Chorus, she was handed a half-hour weekly program of her own, Eileen Farrell Sings. It had a five-season run. Radio listeners were accustomed to hearing classically trained singers such as Farrell in an eclectic repertoire that embraced Berlin ballads, Kern show music, Schubert lieder, and Verdi arias. The quality and size of Farrell’s voice soon won her invitations to perform with major symphony orchestras. Dimitri Mitropoulos chose her for the role of Marie in his 1951 New York Philharmonic concert performance and recording of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck; the following year Arturo Toscanini tapped her for Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis with his NBC Symphony Orchestra.

It was not until 1956 in Tampa, Florida, as Santuzza in Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana, that Farrell finally ventured onto the opera stage. Four years later she was at the Metropolitan in a new production of Gluck’s Alceste. Her career on 39^th Street spanned no more than five seasons and her subsequent roles adhered exclusively to the predictable standard Italian dramatic soprano repertoire, Santuzza, Leonora in La Forza del Destino, Maddalena in Andrea Chénier, and the title heroine of La Gioconda. Her affinity for Gioconda, the lovelorn Italian street singer, is evident in her sumptuous “Suicidio,” with the New York Philharmonic conducted by Leonard Bernstein (1960).

 

Multiple recordings and concert appearances signaled again and again that Eileen Farrell was uniquely suited to Wagner’s most arduous roles. Through YouTube we have access to many of her broadcasts and live performances. Extended excerpts of Tristan und Isolde, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung are testimony to the ease with which her powerful voice swelled above Wagner’s most massive orchestrations.

But, alas, she never sang a staged performance of a Wagner opera. Rumor had it that it was she who refused the opportunity, that she was reluctant to memorize the long roles. There is, however, evidence in the Met archives that, at one point, she declared her willingness to sing Isolde on 39^th Street. Her strained relationship with general manager Rudolf Bing may well have quashed that prospect. For an inkling of what Met audiences missed, here is her 1951 “Liebestod” with the New York Philharmonic conducted by Victor De Sabata.

 

We end this tribute with a track from a 1958 operatic recital, Thomas Schippers conducting London’s Philharmonia. Farrell’s “Ernani, Involami” is a brilliant demonstration of her astonishing technique. She executes the embellishments of Verdi’s aria, the rapid runs, the trill, with the grace of a light lyric coloratura in total command of these inherently bel canto gestures.

 

 

Sleepwalkers

In the current Met revival of La Sonnambula, as heard on March 25, Diana Damrau sang Amina with an instrument that is richer with each passing season, with no diminution of dexterity and comfort in alt, with her customary feeling and energy The two cartwheels she turned during "Ah, non giunge" summed up the joy of the character and of the performer at ease with the physical and vocal athletics of the part. The Elvino of Javier Camarena was the surprise of the evening. His voice is warm, fluent, responsive to a wide dynamic range, comfortable at the top. If his phrasing is a tad less impeccable that that of Flórez in the role (particularly at the beginning) it still reflects accomplished belcantism. The other principal singers were disappointing--Rachelle Durkin a wiry Lisa, Michele Pertusi, a Rodolfo insecure of pitch, woolly of tone. Conductor Marco Armiliato was accommodating, not inspiring.

The Met's first Amina, Marcella Sembrich, starred in La Sonnambula a few weeks after her tremendously successful debut as Lucia in 1883 in the company's inaugural season. Her 1904 recording (on YouTube) of the cabaletta, "Ah, non giunge," documents her fluency, not the renowned beauty of her timbre. In 1910, Elvira de Hidalgo, the future teacher of Maria Callas, sang the role with the company, although only twice. Reviewers were unanimous in their assessments of prodigious technique and shrill timbre, attributes in evidence in her recording of "Ah, non giunge" (on YouTube). The plangency of the Met's next Amina (1916), Maria Barrientos, emerges clearly from her 1920 rendition of the aria. The soprano exploits her phenomenal battery of fioriture in this showcase for coloratura feats and flights, but also rescues the deering-do from mere stunt with taste, personality, charm, liquid tone, and a remarkable command of the messa di voce, the long-held crescendo-diminuendo.

 The Met's next Amina ought to have been Amelita Galli-Curci, the superstar engaged to open the 1921-22 season, the first after the death of Caruso. Galli-Curci had sung the role to great acclaim at New York's Lexington Theatre with the Chicago company on the occasion of Tito Schipa's spring 1920 New York debut. The sensitive noctambulist certainly fit Galli-Curci's gentle persona and the limpid, petal-soft sound for which she was famous. During her nine-season-long Met career, she never sang the role with the company, nor did she include any of its music in her interpolations during the "Lesson Scene" from Il Barbiere di Siviglia. A recording of the Act I duet with Schipa captures what might have been heard at the Met.

 The opera was broadcast from the Met stage in 1933 and 1935 with Lily Pons, the second time with Giacomo Lauri-Volpi. To my knowledge, no transcriptions of these broadcasts are extant.

Before the reawakening of La Sonnambula on 39th Street in 1963 for Joan Sutherland, aficionados had to go elsewhere to hear this trove of melody. The opera had achieved wide recognition when Callas performed it at La Scala in 1955, in a production directed by Luchino Visconti and conducted by Leonard Bernstein. There is no better example of the composer's sublime lyricism than the Act I duet as rendered by Callas and Cesare Valletti, conducted by Leonard Bernstein.

  During the Scala's 1957 trip to the Edinburgh Festival, Callas had to withdraw during a run of Sonnambulas. This then became the first big step in the international career of her replacement, twenty-three-year-old Renata Scotto. She would sing Amina at the Met seven times. My memory of her exquisite phrasing and sweet tone in 1972 is sustained by the transcription of the duet, with Alfredo Kraus, from Venice, 1961.

 

I close this cursory survey of exemplars of Bellinian bel canto with a late-1940s recording of "Vi ravviso," sung with utter scrupulousness to suavity of line by the very young Cesare Siepi, already master of the most beautiful bass voice of his generation.