Singers Remembered, 1: Kathleen Ferrier (1912-1953)

Singers Remembered is Operapost’s series devoted to the most representative clips of artists whose memory is alive for today’s operaphiles.

Kathleen Ferrier’s death from cancer truncated the career of one of the most beloved and admired singers of the 20^th century. International fame came to this British contralto in 1946 when she participated in the premiere performances of Benjamin Britten’s opera The Rape of Lucretia. A favorite of star conductors Bruno Walter and John Barbirolli, her concert tours brought her to America and Europe beginning in 1948. Her sole roles in opera were Britten’s Lucretia and Orfeo in Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice. The repertoire of her song recitals was drawn principally from German lieder, English art songs, and English folk songs. She was a frequent soloist in Handel’s Messiah and in the orchestral/vocal works of Elgar and Mahler. Ferrier’s rich column of sound, evenness of emission, and deep immersion in music and text are haunting. Once heard, her timbre is not forgotten.

Among the many tributes from her colleagues, that of Bruno Walter has been highlighted by biographers: "The greatest thing in music in my life has been to have known Kathleen Ferrier and Gustav Mahler—in that order."

Ferrier was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1951 but continued to sing, often in great pain, until eight months before her death. Her final performance was as Orfeo at Covent Garden in Feb. 1953, conducted by Barbirolli. She had contracted to sing the opera four times, but during the second her femur collapsed. She got through to the end by standing immobile and relying on the cast members to improvise the action. Several hospitalizations were unable to arrest the disease; she died in October.

Here is a recording of Orfeo’s aria, “Che faro senza Euridice (What will I do without Euridice)” taken from a live 1951 performance in Amsterdam, soon after she learned of her cancer diagnosis.

Ferrier’s a cappella recording of the Northumberland folk song, “Blow the Wind Southerly,” documents the richeness of her voice, the evenness of her scale, and her penetration of the text.

Lieder featured prominently on Ferrier's recital programs. This is her moving interpretation of Schumann’s “Widmung (Dedication).”

Known for the wit she was rarely called upon to express in her predominantly serious repertoire, here is her rollicking rendition of Schubert’s delightful “Der Musensohn (The Son of the Muses).

With Bruno Walter conducting the Vienna Philharmonic, “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen (I am lost to the world), is evidence of Ferrier’s strong affinity for Mahler.

 

Youtube has many Ferrier clips. All are recommended. The excerpts from Handel’s “Messiah” are remarkable.

 

 

 

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.

 

 

The Lost Season, December 2020-January 2021: Die Zauberflöte

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New Year’s Eve 2020 promised a gala audience the first night of a new production of Die Zauberflöte and a celebrated conductor in just his second engagement at the Met. The very popular Mozart opera was not to be the abridged English-language version typically offered during the holiday season but the full-length version in German. The director, making his Met debut, was to be Simon McBurney whose staging had premiered in Amsterdam. And the conductor, perhaps today’s most renowned maestro, Gustavo Dudamel, the music and artistic director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and lately announced also as the next music director of the Paris Opéra. The New Year’s patrons would have enjoyed a particularly good view of “The Dude,” as McBurney’s design called for a raised pit.

Although Die Zauberflöte stands high in the list of operas most often performed in the Met’s history—20^th in rank, just after Tristan und Isolde—the company presented this title only sporadically between 1900 and 1942 when, foregrounding the appeal to a young audience and long sections of spoken dialogue, the text was given in English as The Magic Flute. Conductor Bruno Walter lent his prestige and his affinity for Mozart to the project. The fairy tale opera has maintained its place in the Met’s core repertoire since then. Walter led the next new production in 1956. The original German text, not heard since 1926, returned with the highly acclaimed Marc Chagall décor first seen in the opening season at Lincoln Center, 1966-67, conducted by Josef Krips. General manager Joseph Volpe cancelled the production announced for 1991, pleading insufficient time for preparation and borrowed instead David Hockney’s sets commissioned by San Francisco. Audiences and critics adored Julie Taymor’s puppets and masks and George Tsypin’s kinetic, fantastic world in 2004.

The first Zauberflöte excerpt in this post is drawn from a 1966 Berlin concert performance. The Tamino, Fritz Wunderlich, died in a tragic accident just weeks before his scheduled Met debut that very year. His technical and stylistic perfection, along with an exceptionally beautiful timbre, positioned Wunderlich as the foremost Mozart tenor of the post-war generation. In the aria, “Dies Bildnis ist bezaubernd schön (This Image Is Enchantingly Lovely),” Tamino falls in love with Pamina while gazing at her portrait.

In Act II, the evil Queen of the Night beseeches her daughter, Pamina, to murder the virtuous high priest, Sarastro, who presides over a peaceful brotherhood of worshippers. Her daunting aria, “Der Hölle Rache (Hell’s Vengeance),” demands the agility and extended high range of the coloratura soprano (four F’s above high C) and the power of a dramatic soprano. Cristina Deutekom, in a 1971 TV movie, exhibits that rare combination.

Sarastro voices his benevolence in a serene hymn to his temple, “O Isis und Osiris (O Isis and Osiris).” The customary province of the deep bass, the basso profundo, René Pape’s more lyric basso cantante executes the long phrases in an unbroken stream of sound. This 2006 recording is conducted by Claudio Abbado.

The despairing Pamina, believing that Tamino no longer loves her, contemplates suicide in the doleful “Ach, ich fühl's (Ah, I can feel it).” Here, in a performance from the 1956 Salzburg festival, Elisabeth Grümmer, a Mozart-Strauss specialist who sang all too rarely in the United States, spins out the aria in a seamless legato that plumbs the character’s infinite sadness.