Recovering the Forgotten Singer, 1: Florence Quartararo

Recovering the Forgotten Singer is Operapost’s new series devoted to those artists once much admired and now rarely recalled. Some were stars in their time; others left their mark all too fleetingly. Their recorded legacy calls on us to remember them here.

We begin with Florence Quartararo, born in California in 1922.

The young Quartararo’s first big break came in 1945 when Bing Crosby invited her to appear on his Kraft Music Hall radio program. It was, however, a classical venue, a concert conducted by the renowned Otto Klemperer, that launched her career. A Metropolitan Opera administrator who happened to be in the audience was impressed enough to arrange an audition with Bruno Walter. Walter, in turn, recommended her to Met General Manager Edward Johnson.

In January 1946, barely a year later, Quartararo made her debut on Broadway and 39^th Street. Arturo Toscanini sought to engage her for his 1947 NBC broadcast of Otello. But the Met refused to release her from an arduous rehearsal schedule. As a consequence, we have not Quartararo’s recording of Desdemona but that of the uninspired Herva Nelli.  

The regard in which the soprano was held by the era’s leading conductors ought to have been prelude to an important career. Such was not the case. In four seasons with the company, the Metropolitan cast her sparingly, that is in a meager thirty-four complete opera performances, sometimes as replacement for an indisposed artist, or as one of the anonymous Parsifal Flowermaidens.

Quartararo’s debut as Micaela in Carmen was relegated to a student performance. The reviewer dispatched by the New York Times opined “she may be the find of the season... She has a voice of size, range and true lyric quality.” Many of her subsequent notices were equally dithyrambic. On tour in Chicago, her Contessa in Le Nozze di Figaro earned encomiums from the Tribune’s famously exigent critic, Claudia Cassidy: “She sang superbly, with serenity and simplicity and the security that comes from having a wealth of resources in reserve. If that girl doesn't make opera sit up and take notice, I shall desist consulting my crystal ball.”

The Met did not “sit up and take notice.” It could afford its indifference. Quartararo’s repertoire was covered by established company stars Licia Albanese and Bidu Sayão in Verdi and Puccini, Zinka Milanov and Stella Roman in the heavier Italian parts, and in the Mozart roles, Eleanor Steber.

Fortunately, RCA Victor issued disks of arias and duets that preserve Florence Quartararo’s artistry and sound. Most cherished even today is her recording of “Care selve” from Handel’s Atalanta. Prodigious intonation and breath control sustain the love song’s long legato lines.

 

RCA, clearly interested in promoting Quartararo, recorded “Tacea la notte” including its cabaletta, from Act I of Il Trovatore, on a two-sided disk. In this aria Leonora recounts the thrill of her tryst with Manrico, the troubadour. Quartararo delivers the late bel canto phrases with lush tone and precision, and executes the cabaletta’s coloratura embellishments with ease.

 

Quartararo recorded the Act I Tosca duet with Ramón Vinay, another rising star of the mid-1940s. The tenor had just sung the title role of Otello with the NBC symphony, conducted by Toscanini. The Tosca excerpt was included in an anthology of great opera duets later issued by RCA. Here, Quartararo who, alas, never sang the role at the Met, captures the many moods of the Roman diva, her piety, jealousy, seductiveness, and passion.


 

In Spring 1949, Florence Quartararo’s final appearance at the Metropolitan Opera House was her one chance to sing “O mio babbino caro” to Lauretta’s beloved daddy, Gianni Schicchi. That season’s Schicchi was the company’s star bass, Italo Tajo; he was soon to be Quartararo’s husband. The birth of a daughter put an end to her career. She later recalled, Tajo “believed one singer in the family is enough.” Florence retired from the stage in 1953, at the age of just thirty-one. Her recordings, including her Kraft Music Hall arias and her Nedda in a complete Met performance of Pagliacci, can be found on Youtube.

 

 

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.

New York City Opera Reborn, 2: Ottorino Respighi’s La Campana Sommersa

In a post published in March 2015, we wrote of a gala concert at the Rose Theatre, a venue within the Time-Warner complex on Columbus Circle. Here was an occasion to support the rebirth of the New York City Opera founded in 1943 and dissolved in 2013. At the time of the concert, sponsored by the NYCO-Renaissance, it was not clear whether that ultimately successful group, led by Michael Capasso, or another, would inherit the name and the meager remaining resources of the once proud City Opera which had been for decades the second lyric stage of the nation’s cultural capital. 

The relaunch of the company began inauspiciously in January 2016 with a poorly received production of Puccini’s Tosca. Subsequent offerings have, for the most part, shied away from the core repertoire, leaving the canon to the powerful grasp of the Metropolitan. And in so doing, the New York City Opera redux has subscribed to the mission that served its predecessor well for so long.

This season opened with the coupling of the standard rep I Pagliacci with Rachmaninoff’s rare one-act Aleko. There followed Tobin Stokes’s contemporary chamber opera, Fallujah, and a very successful revival of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide. The run of Respighi’s La Campana Sommersa (The Sunken Bell) has just concluded. The season will end with the New York premiere of Peter Eötvös’s Angels in America.

La Campana Sommersa, one of Respighi’s twelve operas, has not been heard in New York in nearly ninety years. It was one of four contemporary premieres that the then Metropolitan general manager, Giulio Gatti-Casazza, presented in the 1928-1929 season, a record the company has not duplicated and that the reborn City Opera can look to for inspiration.

The source of La Campana sommersa was the 1896 play Die versunkene Glocke by the German dramatist, Gerhart Hauptmann. One of the most prestigious voices in early 20^th-century literature, Hauptmann won the Nobel Prize in 1912. At the time of the Met premiere of La Campana sommersa New York was familiar with the theatre of Hauptmann and with the music of Respighi. The composer enjoyed world-wide acclaim in the concert hall. Conductors determined to flaunt a great orchestra in a virtuoso show piece had only to program Respighi. No less a champion than Arturo Toscanini included the symphonic poem The Pines of Rome in his first concert with the New York Philharmonic in 1926, as did Andris Nelsons in his inaugural concert as music director of the Boston Symphony in 2014.

A philosophical fairy tale that foregrounds an interspecies love affair, the plot of La Campana sommersa is reminiscent of Dvořák’s Rusalka. Enrico, a master-forger, injured when his new bell is toppled into a lake by a mischievous faun, regains his health through the mediation of Rautendenlein, a water sprite. He is enchanted by the elfin creature, abandons his wife and children, and forges a new bell and a mountain-top temple for the worship of the Sun and the eternal youth of Humanity. He is gripped by remorse when his children bring him an urn filled with the tears of his wife, who has drowned herself in the lake. As the opera ends, Enrico desperately searches for Rautendelein who bestows a kiss on him as he dies. The subject is rich in vivid contrasts. Human beings share the world with sprites, elves, and fauns; Enrico works with iron and stone, Rautendelein is a creature of the water; responsibility to family and community cede to the desires of the artist; Christianity is at war with Paganism. While the uneven score and murky libretto go a long way towards explaining the opera’s neglect, we were struck by the opulent orchestration and the dramatic force and expressive vocal line of two episodes in Act III. The excerpts that follow are drawn from a 1956 RAI transmission conducted by Franco Capuana.

First we hear the confrontation between Enrico and a Christian curate. The master-forger, his voice echoing his bells, joyously sings of his vision of the new temple. The horrified cleric accuses him of heresy and reminds him of wife and family. The tenor is Umberto Borsò, the bass Plinio Clabassi.

There follows an ecstatic love duet between Enrico and Rautendelein. The soprano is Margherita Carosio, one of Italy’s most popular lyric-coloraturas of the inter-war and immediate post-war periods.

Two complete performances of La Campana sommersa are available on Youtube.

Remembering Licia Albanese

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On March 13, 2015, we attended a concert sponsored by the Metropolitan Opera Guild in memory of beloved Met soprano Licia Albanese (born 1909) and star Met tenor Carlo Bergonzi (born 1924). Both artists died in 2014. We devote the next post to Bergonzi.

This post is devoted to Licia Albanese. The year was 1939. Italian opera singers had been barred by the Mussolini regime from travelling to the United States. A flurry of telegrams housed in the Metropolitan archives documents the negotiations among the Metropolitan, the State Department, the Italian Embassy in Washington, and the responsible Italian government agency. On September 28, a cable from the Federazione Fascista Lavoratori Spettacolo (Fascist Federation of Theater Workers) informed the Met that three singers scheduled to make their Metropolitan debuts that year, and six who had been reengaged, would not be honoring their contracts, among them Maria Caniglia, Mafalda Favero, and Carlo Tagliabue, who had already made successful debuts, and the much awaited Ebe Stignani. The most damaging cancellation was that of Giacomo Lauri-Volpi, whose return after six seasons had been eagerly anticipated. As the Times (Oct. 7, 1939) explained it, several of the singers forbidden to travel were committed to Italian theatres following their tour at the Met; there was concern that increasing international tensions might delay their timely reentry. Of more diplomatic consequence was the eventuality that Italian artists caught in the United States would be marooned on enemy shores should America enter the war. There was nevertheless a good deal of back and forth on the matter over the course of many months. The Italian authorities were sensitive to the propaganda value of italianità at the Metropolitan and were, therefore, reluctant to offend the management; they were also loath to forego the hard currency their nationals would deposit in Italian banks. The Met applied what pressure it could, both at home and in Italy, through numerous intermediaries. One such go-between, the retired soprano Lucrezia Bori, long a U.S. resident and great friend of the company, was asked by Edward Johnson, the Met general manager, to communicate the Metropolitan’s position to the Italian ambassador in Washington: if the nine contracted singers did not come, the management would have no recourse but to redraw the season’s repertoire, with serious consequences for the company and for Italian opera itself. On the other hand, should Johnson receive assurances that the restrictions imposed in 1939-40 would be lifted for 1940-41, he would be favorable to scheduling a greater number of operas by Italian composers than had originally been planned. In May 1940, Johnson received the guarantees he sought from the consul general. In the end, none of the nine came in 1939-40. Only Licia Albanese, who was not one of the nine, was allowed to come.

 

And that was how--a result of an international flap, and something of a fluke—Albanese’s twenty-seven-season-long Met career began. In February 1940, she made a smashing debut as Cio-Cio San in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. She soon became one of New York’s most popular lyric stars. She would spend the war years in the United States, marry Joseph Gimma, an Italian-American lawyer, and become an American citizen.  Her last Met appearance was as one of fifty-seven artists who sang in the farewell to the old Met in 1966. Her “Un bel di’” brought down the house.  To shouts of “Save the Met” from the many in the audience who opposed, as she did, the plan to demolish the 39^th Street theatre, she kissed her hand and bent to touch the stage floor with her fingers. And in the decades that followed, on many, many opening nights at Lincoln Center her voice would ring over the sound of the audience on its feet for the “Star-Spangled banner” as she nailed the high note of “the land of the FREE.”

Albanese followed in the wake of Lucrezia Bori (mentioned above), the company’s reigning lyric soprano in the 1920s through the mid-1930s, and was contemporary with the lyric-coloratura, Bidú Sayão. All three had bright, tangy voices, not voluminous, but with sufficient focus to carry in the large auditorium, to make every word count. We offer below audio clips of each diva, Bori, Sayão, and Albanese, in, “Addio del passato” from Verdi’s La Traviata so that you can make the comparison for yourselves. The dying Violetta, after reading a letter promising the return of her lover, despairs that she will live long enough to see him.

Violetta was one of Bori’s favored roles. This acoustic recording captures the delicacy of her art, her attention to detail. Of particular effect is the phrase “l’amore d’Alfredo perfino mi manca (I have been deprived even of Alfredo’s love)” where the precise calibration of her instrument accommodates the compelling expansion of the line.

Lucky Met operagoers heard Sayão’s Violetta twenty-three times from 1937 to 1949. Sayão infuses the “legato” written into the score with subtle stresses on key syllables. Notice, for instance, the word “mai” in the first phrase, the elongation of the first word in “l’anima stanca,” the various weights with which she utters the repeated “tutto” at the end. She maintains the tonal purity of the line while giving full value to the text.

Albanese performed Violetta a record eighty-eight times with the Met. Her affinity for the role was well recognized when Arturo Toscanini chose her for the 1946 concert rendition of the opera with his orchestra, the NBC Symphony. The transcription of the broadcast was a best-seller in the early lp era. With the imprimatur of Toscanini, Albanese’s performance became the Violetta of choice for a generation of listeners. Here, in the dress rehearsal of the broadcast (you can hear Toscanini’s raspy singing in the background), is the opening of the final act, through the aria.  In an aural image of the vivid physical gestures that were her trademark, Albanese follows the feverish pace of the conductor, audibly snatching breath at the end of phrases, not out of necessity, but in order to convey the physical distress of the tubercular heroine.

 

The Met has seen Violettas with creamier or more prodigious voices, but probably none more moving than Bori, Sayão, or Albanese.

The Met in World War I, 1

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In this post and in one we are planning for later in the month, we add our voices to the chorus of historians of 20^th-century Europe and America, including cultural historians, who have marked the centenary of World War I this year, and this week mark the Armistice of November 11, 1918 that ended the hostilities. 

From 1914 to 1917, the year the United States entered the war, the impact on the Met of the fighting in Europe was limited principally to the difficulties of transporting European artists to New York and back. Passports and safe-conducts were precious commodities. In May 1915, the dangers of ocean travel came home to 39^th Street with the catastrophe of the Lusitania, sunk by a German U-boat.  Only fate and his premature exit from the Met in a huff kept Arturo Toscanini, his wife, and daughters from the passenger list of the doomed transatlantic liner on which the family had originally had reservations.  Two years later, the Met mourned the tragic death of Spanish composer Enrique Granados. On his return from New York following the Metropolitan world premiere of his opera Goyescas, the ship on which Granados and his wife were crossing the English Channel was torpedoed by a German submarine.

While on the stage it was largely business as usual, Met artists were not impervious to the patriotic passions of the time. At the center of nationalist nastiness was the German soprano Johanna Gadski. A fixture at the Met from 1900 to 1917, she had become openly contemptuous of the United States. In spring 1915, coincidentally a day after the attack on the Lusitania, a gala for the benefit of the German Red Cross, a performance of Die Fledermaus not sponsored by the company, was scheduled for the house. The German colors were to be displayed, “Deutschland über Alles” was to be sung, there were to be speeches. The performance took place, but Gadski thought better of singing the anthem, the speeches were curtailed, and the colors were not shown. In the same year, Gadski’s husband, Captain Hans Tauscher, was charged with conspiring to blow up the canal that joins Lake Erie and Lake Ontario; he was acquitted. Gadski herself was alleged to have pronounced publicly that, given a chance, she would have happily blown up New Jersey’s munitions plants. The New York Globe called for Gadski’s ouster from the Met for hosting a 1915 New Year’s Eve party at which fellow German Otto Goritz, a Metropolitan baritone, was reputed to have sung a parody in celebration of the Lusitania disaster. 

Gadski’s reputation as a stalwart Wagnerian is substantiated by her recordings. Her warm timbre is far more phonogenic than that of most dramatic sopranos of the era. Her voice is remarkably well-schooled, solid throughout the range, even capable of agility. She is responsive to the text and has the means to utter Wagner’s expansive phrases with no hint of strain. One of the most breathtaking moments in Die Walküre comes in Act III: Brünnhilde bestows on the pregnant Sieglinde the broken sword that Siegfried, the future hero, will reforge; Sieglinde rapturously responds with gratitude and pledges to save her unborn child. Gadski, like many Wagner sopranos sang both roles, in separate performances of course. Here she takes on the successive phrases first of the Valkyrie, then of the expectant mother. The recording was made in May 1917, just one month after Gadski’s final performance at the Met. 

A versatile member of the company, Gadski was by no means limited to the German repertoire. A quarter of her nearly 500 performances were in Italian roles. In the long list of sopranos who have sung Aïda with the Met, she stands fourth, with two more to her credit than Leontyne Price. This recording reveals the full body of Gadski’s voice, her affinity for Verdi, and the assured manner that easily surmounts the difficulties of the Act III aria, “O patria mia.”

On April 2, 1917, during a performance of the American composer Reginald De Koven’s The Canterbury Pilgrims, the audience was electrified by the news that Woodrow Wilson had appeared before Congress to call for a declaration of war against Germany. Late editions of New York papers circulated from hand to hand in the boxes. In the audience was the recently recalled ambassador to Berlin James Gerard. He stood to exhort the crowd to cheer the President; from another box came a shout for cheers for the Allies and the United States Army and Navy. The orchestra struck up “The Star-Spangled Banner.” As Act IV began, mezzo-soprano Margarete Ober, “one of a dozen German stars [more accurately, two stars and a handful of comprimarios] on the stage at the time, had the leading part with Mr. [Johannes] Sembach in the final scene. She was singing a phrase of the Wife of Bath when she stopped and fell full length upon her back, striking heavily on the floor. Sembach and [tenor] Max Bloch lifted her, but she sank again, and the two men carried her out through the stage crowd, considerably to the detriment of the Wife of Bath’s bridal gown” (Times). The cast sang on without her to the opera’s end. In the years of America’s neutrality, 1914-1917, Ober and her German compatriots had had no problem singing with French and British colleagues, nationals of countries with which Germany was at war. Nor was there any serious threat of anti-German feeling affecting the repertoire. 

That would quickly change.

Post-script: Reginald De Koven

The Canterbury Pilgrims was the only opera by Reginald De Koven performed at the Met. His other opera, Rip Van Winkle, had its premiere in Chicago. Neither had long shelf lives. An influential critic, De Koven was also a prolific composer of operettas, many of them successful in the late 19^th century and beyond. His music is remembered, if dimly, because an aria, “O promise me,” from his Robin Hood (1890), became a standard sung at countless weddings for many generations. Louise Homer, principal Met contralto from 1900 to 1918, delivers the melody with rich yet finely focused tone.