In Memoriam: Rosalind Elias and Gabriel Bacquier

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In our last post (http://operapost.blogspot.com/2021/04/the-met-in-time-of-pandemic-unfinished_0866050429.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Operapost+%28OperaPost%29) we noted that in May 2020 the Met mourned the passing of two stars of a previous generation. Here, in gratitude for their many wonderful performances, we remember Rosalind Elias (March 13, 1930-May 3, 2020) and Gabriel Bacquier (May 17, 1924-May 13, 2020).

Rosalind Elias

Only the fabled Louise Homer (1871-1947) sang more often at the Met as a leading mezzo-soprano than did Rosalind Elias. Thirty-five seasons, fifty roles, and 687 performances underpin Elias’s place in the company history. She made her 1954 debut as one of the nearly anonymous warrior maidens in Act III of Die Walküre. During her first three seasons Elias took her turn as a supporting player, a comprimaria. Some of the secondary characters assigned to her afforded extended dramatic and vocal opportunities (Suzuki [Madama Butterfly], Siébel [Faust], for instance), but most parts were brief (a Peasant Girl [Le Nozze di Figaro], a Flower Maiden [Parsifal]). It was not until opening night 1957 that Elias had her big break. She was cast as Tatiana’s sister, Olga, in a new production of Eugene Onegin. And later in the same season she was tapped for the pivotal role of Erika in the world premiere of Vanessa. In fact, Samuel Barber wrote the score’s most memorable aria to suit Elias’s voice--wide-ranging, with an identifiably dusky timbre, powerful enough to convey the young woman’s nervous energy and depth of emotion. “Must the Winter Come so Soon” became a favored audition piece for mezzo-soprano. Here is Elias in the original cast recording of Vanessa.

Erika put Elias on the path to major assignments--opening nights, new productions, world premieres. And core mezzo parts such as Cherubino (Le Nozze di Figaro), Dorabella (Così fan tutte), and Laura (La Gioconda) continued to come her way. But she was at her best in Vanessa and Werther. In this recording of scenes from Massenet’s opera, the lovelorn Charlotte gives way to the tears she has long suppressed. The warmth and doleful sound of Elias’s lyric mezzo serves the stifled ardor of the Goethe/Massenet heroine as it did the neo-Romantic idealism of Barber’s Erika.

Gabriel Bacquier

One of very few post-War French singers to achieve stardom with international opera companies, Gabriel Bacquier came to New York in 1964 following engagements in Vienna, Milan, London, and major European festivals. In eighteen Met seasons he made 123 appearances. It was no surprise that a leading French baritone would debut as the High Priest in a new production of Samson et Dalila. But despite his French roots and early experience on French stages, Bacquier would specialize in the Italian repertoire, and most often as Tosca’s nemesis. His Scarpia is a subtle hybrid of delicacy and brutality. His fatal face-off with the Roman diva is laced with practiced elegance and unbridled lust. We hear Bacquier at his peak, in a live performance from the Opéra.

Later in his career, Bacquier found a home in the buffo manner. He was memorable as Donizetti’s Don Pasquale and he made a star turn out of the irascible Fra Melitone in La Forza del destino. The aria that follows is excerpted from a role that, alas, he never sang in New York. The riotous conclusion of Act I, Scene 1 of Verdi’s Falstaff bristles with the baritone’s physical and tonal energy as the “fat knight” trumpets his cynical definition of “Onore (Honor).”

 

 

Tosca: Set and Gesture

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In the years surrounding the advent of the twentieth century, when staging/direction became a hot topic in operatic debates, Tosca became the hottest item, at least at the Met, in the raucous tug-of-war between the traditionalists, at one extreme, and the devotees of European Regietheater, at the other. And when Peter Gelb kept his early promise to drive Franco Zeffirelli’s beloved dinosaur into extinction, the tug-of-war devolved into a pitched battle. Zeffirelli’s Tosca, newborn in 1985 and still kicking in 2006, was supplanted in 2009 by Swiss Luc Bondy’s severe riposte to his predecessor’s opulent decors and astounding scenic gestures. Bondy’s parry was drowned in boos that reverberated in furious notices. The noisy reception of those seated in the orchestra and the galleries, and even on Lincoln Center Plaza staring at the giant screen, could not be ignored. The audience was quick to exercise the prerogative of booing that is the signature privilege of operagoing (see our article, “Boo Who?” in the New York Times, September 26, 2009). 

The Tosca pendulum has swung once again. This year’s new production, directed by David McVicar (it can be seen “Live in HD” on January 27, 2018), returns to a conventional evocation of Roman sites and to the conventional gestures of the well-worn melodrama. Principal among the familiar trappings is, arguably, the knife with which Floria Tosca stabs Baron Scarpia to death, a moment fans await with anticipation at every performance. When and how will the soprano eye and wield her weapon?

No Tosca is better remembered at this riveting juncture than Maria Callas who, on November 25, 1956, performed the murderous act before an extraordinary public. Millions of spectators were witness to her gesture when she appeared live on U.S. network television. The Callas Tosca was so newsworthy that Ed Sullivan, host of the most popular variety show, allotted a full sixteen minutes to the Greek-American singer and Canadian baritone George London for the Act II duel-to-the-death of the antagonists. The video clip below preserves the crackling encounter of these two singing-actors, as compelling today as it was more than a half-century ago. Tosca has agreed to the police chief’s proposal to free her lover in exchange for sexual favors. To steady her nerves, she drinks a glass of wine; her hand grazes a knife; she understands what she must do; she hesitates, then plants the weapon in his heart. Callas is in her most incisive voice as Tosca hurls her fury at the dying Scarpia.

Eight years after the Ed Sullivan segment, in 1964, near the end of her operatic career, Callas sang Tosca in a Zeffirelli production mounted for her at London’s Royal Opera. Her baritone was longtime colleague Tito Gobbi. Here, again, are the final moments of the Tosca-Scarpia clash. The lascivious Scarpia, writing the deceptive safe-conduct pass for Tosca and her lover, eroticizes his quill pen. Callas has further refined her resolve to attack her nemesis. She sees the knife, stares fixedly at the blade, and at the last moment, she turns to deliver the fatal blow.

The power of these familiar bits of stagecraft, executed with so much conviction and originality by Callas, George London, and Gobbi, put to shame Luc Bondy’s directorial eccentricities: Scarpia kissing a statue of the Virgin on the mouth in Act I; three prostitutes ministering to Scarpia’s pleasures in Act II; Tosca remaining onstage at the end of Act II rather than making her stunning exit, in tandem with Puccini’s musical cues.

Due in large measure to the widely publicized feud between world-class divas Callas and Renata Tebaldi, opera in general and Tosca in particular enjoyed a high media profile in the late 1950s. The title role figured prominently in the repertoires of both stars. Tebaldi, costumed as Tosca, made the cover of Time (November 3, 1958) in celebration of her Met opening night in the Puccini work; Callas had her own Time cover (October 29, 1956) just prior to her New York debut.

We have chosen Tebaldi’s rendition of Tosca’s famous aria. “Vissi d’arte (I lived for art)” offers a contemplative interlude amidst of the unremitting tension of Act II. Why, the distraught heroine asks, has God so unjustly rewarded her devotion and good works? Among the legendary interpreters of Tosca was Maria Jeritza. She owed her 1922 meteoric ascension to New York stardom to a stunning invention: she sang “Vissi d’arte” face down on the stage floor. In 1975 it was Magda Olivero’s turn. She tracked the arc of the music: first bent backwards over a divan, she stood and reached her full height as the climactic phrase attained its peak, then fell to her knees as she begged for Scarpia’s mercy (see our posts of September 9 and September 16, 2014). Still, most sopranos rely on minimal gesture and let Puccini do his work. This is Tebaldi’s way. She intones the broad swaths of the composer’s melody with the famously warm timbre that serves the fervor of Tosca’s prayer. The clip that follows is drawn from a 1959 U.S. television program.

Magda Olivero, 1910-2014

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Just yesterday, we learned of the death at 104 in Milan of the fabled Italian soprano, Magda Olivero.

We first heard Olivero's astonishing voice in her 1940 recording of the Traviata aria “É strano . . . Ah, fors’è lui” and its cabaletta “Sempre libera.” Here it is.

And we first heard Olivero live in Florence in 1966 in Francesco Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur, and then in Newark, New Jersey in 1970 as Tosca. It was not until 1975 that she made her Met debut, again as Puccini’s Roman diva. The company had scheduled twenty performances of Tosca for 1974-75. The last of the seven sopranos to undertake the title role that season was a late replacement for Birgit Nilsson. At the urging of Marilyn Horne, who had heard her in Dallas, Magda Olivero made her Met debut at sixty-five, an age at which leading sopranos, if not long retired, have lost not only their high Cs, but their appetite for the Act III leap from Rome’s Castel Sant’Angelo.

Olivero had made her Italian debut in 1932; by the late 1950s, she had an international following of fervent fans thanks to recordings, mostly pirated. Beginning in 1968, U.S. audiences in Dallas, Kansas City, Hartford, Newark, and even at Lincoln Center’s Philharmonic Hall, received her rapturously. In her three Met performances, uninitiated patrons must have wondered at the prolonged ovation that greeted her entrance. They soon understood why so many in the audience shouted so loudly and long. With rock-solid technique, Olivero's hollow middle and lower registers and vibrant upper produced a uniquely expressive and, yes, beautiful sound. Then there were her vocal feats—the ability to swell and diminish a phrase on an endless stream of breath, the clean attacks of high notes, in particular the fearlessly held high C in Act III as Tosca relates her triumphant murder of Scarpia. Voice and technique were wedded to an uncanny command of the body. Fending off the violence of Ingvar Wixell, an excellent Scarpia, Olivero found herself sprawled on an Empire bench, her head and torso bent sharply back. In this contorted position, she began “Vissi d’arte.” Slowly she rose with the arc of the music, was finally upright at the aria’s climax, then on her knees for the next phrase, her plea for mercy. Here is the Act II aria in a 1960 Italian television video where she is allowed less freedom of movement than she had in the theatre. 

On April 18, 1975, her last Met appearance (she sang Tosca on tour in 1979), Olivero amazed and alarmed the audience at her final curtain call. Answering the relentless cheers and applause, and the throng pressing forward on the orchestra floor, she edged along the narrow lip at the base of the proscenium to touch the outstretched hands of her admirers. A misstep would have plunged her into the pit. With this gesture, Olivero conveyed what made her unique: she sang and acted as if her life depended on it.

Olivero’s signature role was Adriana Lecouvreur. Here she sings Adriana’s entrance aria from a 1965 Amsterdam performance. Like Tosca, Adriana is an actress, but in this case, a legendary star of the Comédie-Française in the 18^th century. Rehearsing backstage, she begins by declaiming a few lines, then finds their proper expression in song, not as the histrionic thespian but as the humble handmaiden of creative genius.

World War II and the Met Roster. Those who Did not Come: 2. Germaine Lubin

This post, the second in the series “World War II and the Met Roster,” is centered on the French dramatic soprano Germaine Lubin, whose anticipated Met debut, like that of Tiana Lemnitz, the subject of the last OperaPost, did not come about. This opportunity lost, there would not be another. 

In 1939, Lubin was engaged for the 1940-41 Met season for performances that included the company premiere of Alceste.  Her agent, Erich Simon, wrote to the management on March 8 of that year that his client was prepared to sing several Wagner heroines (Isolde, the Walküre Brünnhilde, Sieglinde, Elsa, Elisabeth, Kundry, but not Sieglinde or the Götterdämmerung Brünnhilde), and a variety of French roles.  The signed contract spanned the period January to April 1941, and guaranteed fifteen performances at $400 per performance. 

Lubin cancelled just a few weeks before she was scheduled to make her debut in the Gluck opera. There is reason to question the sincerity of her apology to general manager Edward Johnson: “I am heartbroken that it is impossible for me for the moment to leave occupied France. Let me hope I will be able to sing at the Metropolitan Opera next season.” In The Shameful Peace: How French Artists and Intellectuals Survived the Nazi Occupation, Frederic Spotts finds implausible Lubin’s claim that the German ambassador in Paris “would not give her a passport.” Lubin may by then have been unwilling to sing in New York. In a 1963 interview, she makes plain her contempt for the United States:  “I have sung everywhere. Except in America where I refused seven invitations. I don’t regret it.”  To the interviewer’s interjection, “Still, the Metropolitan Opera is a highly regarded venue,” she responded, “Yes, for dollars. I wouldn’t exchange Bayreuth for the Metropolitan.”

Just before the war, Lubin had sung in Berlin and Bayreuth. Through her great friend, Wagner’s daughter-in-law Winifred, she established relations with highly placed figures of the Third Reich, including Hitler. He so admired her Isolde that he had her sit by his side at a post-performance dinner. The episode and her enthusiastic response to the Führer would come back to haunt her. And among Lubin’s intimates was Vichy head Maréchal Pétain.  Her post-war destiny was sealed when she sang Isolde in Paris with the troupe from the Berlin Staatsoper, the only French artist in the cast.  On that occasion the swastika hung over the grand staircase of the French national theater.

At the liberation in 1944, Lubin was arrested, and in 1949 she was condemned to “dégradation nationale” (the loss of political, civil, and professional rights) for a period of five years.

Although Lubin’s performances in Tristan und Isolde contributed to her undoing in the reckoning of her collaboration and fraternization with the enemy, at the time they were career triumphs. Hitler’s assertion that he had never heard a better Act II Isolde was no doubt merited. In a recording reported to be from a live performance from Bayreuth in 1939, we discern the qualities that put Lubin in the front rank of dramatic sopranos: a sumptuous voice that blooms at the top, a homogeneous sound throughout her range, total command of dynamics. Her legato and clear articulation of the musical line are marks of a singer equally at home in Wagner and in the exposed 18^th-century style of Gluck. We hear her power as she rides effortlessly over the orchestral surge; she scales her huge voice down to a perfectly poised pianissimo at the climax. Lubin does honor to what she called “le rôle des rôles.”

 

In this French-language recording, Lubin’s dulcet pianissimo caps her reading of “Vissi d’arte,” or, “D’art et d’amour.” Musically accurate, without exaggerated effects, she infuses Tosca’s prayer with credible religious fervor.

There is no doubt that with Lubin, the Met’s 1941 Alceste would have found greater favor with critics and public. The title role fell to Australian soprano Marjorie Lawrence, who had shared roles with Lubin at the Opéra in the 1930s. A tempestuous Wagnerian, Lawrence in Gluck was reviewed with reservations. She was indisposed at the time of the Saturday matinee broadcast; her replacement, American Rose Bampton, acquitted herself admirably, but with signs of strain. Bampton’s commercial recording of one of Alceste’s arias finds her in peak form, equal to the rigors of the high-lying final phrases.

Unfortunately, this track has been removed from Youtube.

 

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