Remembering Renata Tebaldi

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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.

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.