Rosa Ponselle: Becoming an (American) Diva

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In the first of our recent posts on Vincenzo Bellini’s Norma, we included the magisterial aria, “Casta diva,” sung by Rosa Ponselle. Her Met debut is one of the astonishing Cinderella stories in the performance history of opera. And from that dazzling start she went on to become one of the unforgettable vocal artists of the last century.

Opposite the world-famous tenor Enrico Caruso in the Met’s very first performance of Verdi’s La Forza del destino (November 15, 1928) was a twenty-one-year-old soprano who had never had a voice lesson--let alone sung on an operatic stage. She had been born Rosa Ponzillo in Meriden, Connecticut in 1897 to parents who had immigrated from Caserta, very near Naples, Caruso’s home town. The first musician in a non-musical family was her beloved sister Carmela, ten years Rosa’s senior, who, discovered by the church organist, had studied music and eventually moved to New York to make her living as a café singer.

In the meanwhile, Rosa sought work as a pianist in local nickelodeons and occasionally as a singer in movie theatres. At age nineteen, she joined Carmela in New York. Together they formed an act promoted as “Those Tailored Italian Girls,” mixing popular songs, Broadway show tunes, and operatic arias. The sisters, both endowed with dark, smooth, flexible voices, were immediate hits and were soon propelled to the pinnacle  of the vaudeville circuit, the Palace, where they commanded top dollar.  Here they are in “Comin’ Thro’ the Rye,” recorded in December 1919.  In this rendition, the familiar song becomes a vehicle for voices of operatic power exercised in authentic bel canto style. Note, in particular, the interpolated virtuoso cadenza redolent of Bellini.

But Ponslle aspired to a grander stage some blocks down Broadway from the Palace. In May 1919 her agent arranged for an audition with Caruso. She sang “Pace, pace” from La Forza del destino, in anticipation of the upcoming premiere of Verdi’s opera that fall. The great tenor, duly impressed, introduced her to the Met’s general manager, Giulio Gatti-Casazza. That she fainted during “Casta diva” did not discourage Gatti from contracting her for six operas (in only six months) for the 1918-1919 season, at $150 a week, considerably less than her fee touring in Keith’s vaudeville shows. She sang more than twenty times in five works, all of which she had to learn, including two Met firsts and a world premiere.

Here is Ponselle in “Pace, pace,” the glorious aria from her debut role. Still in love with Alvaro, the perpetrator of her cruel destiny, the solitary, penitent Leonora begs for peace. In this 1928 recording, at the peak of her career, Ponselle, ever alive to her character’s despair and agitation, varies dynamics and sustains phrases with rock-solid assurance and her accustomed tonal splendor. The crescendo and decrescendo of the opening note have rarely been matched.

Also in 1928, Ponselle recorded the last moments of La Forza del desino with her frequent superlative collaborators tenor Giovanni Martinelli and bass Ezio Pinza.

Staging Cavalleria and Pagliacci Now

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The last of the six new productions of the Met’s 2014-15 season, Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci, opened on April 14,  2015. In general, critical response to these recent investitures has weighed heavily on the side of disappointment. Not one of the lately unveiled stagings can be said to have enjoyed the enthusiastic consensus of reviewers. Briefly then: The reception of The Death of Klinghoffer was mostly positive, that of Le Nozze di Figaro, cool at best. The notices of Iolanta/Bluebeard’s Castle were mixed; those of The Merry Widow and La Donna del lago, negative; and those of Cavalleria and Pagliacci, primarily so. And only Mozart’s treasured comedy and the Mascagni/Leocavallo hugely popular double bill were reinvestitures of core repertoire favorites that often find themselves subjected to particular scrutiny, especially when they propose significant rereadings of the work.

In our previous post, we tracked the controversy over departures from conventional settings of the core all the way back to the 1951 Pagliacci. We argued that the heated operatic debate of the present day had its origins in the reception of a last-minute addition to Rudolf Bing’s inaugural season.

Not surprisingly, given that the April productions are new, staging was front and center in the reviews of Cav/Pag. And since the productions they replaced were signed by Franco Zeffirelli, the comparison with the Zeffirelli aesthetic, beloved by many of the public and detested by almost all critics, would inevitably come to the fore. “In the beginning, say 1970, there was Franco Zeffirelli. He turned Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci, the eternal verist twins, into a pair of kitsch spectaculars. Audiences applauded the scenery” (Financial Times, April 15, 2015).

Zeffirelli’s long association with the Met began with his ecstatically received 1964 Falstaff and ended with his much derided 1998 La Traviata. Between the two, there were ten others, including his 1970 Cav/Pag. Managements have been wary of angering  Met patrons by shelving his sets with nonchalance. Only La Bohème and Turandot survive. As Peter Gelb put it some years ago:  “I promised the Met subscribers when I first came on board—well, I didn’t promise anything, but I did say that there were two iconic Zeffirelli productions, Bohème and Turandot, and that the other Zeffirelli productions are going to be replaced. A lot of these things are just sitting there like lead weights, so there is a lot of catching up to do” (New Yorker (Oct. 22, 2007).  He has been good to his word. The Zeffirelli Falstaff, Tosca, Traviata, and Carmen are history.

And now so too are Cavalleria and Pagliacci. Zeffirelli deployed much of the action of Cavalleria on a monumental church stairway that filled half the stage; realistic housefronts with balconies and views of the hill town framed this meticulous slice-of-life rendering of a bright, colorful Easter Sunday in Sicily. 

Eschewing the slightest hint of the picturesque that floods the Zeffirelli version, even in the religious procession, the David McVicar/Rae Smith production drains the stage of the specificity of the quotidian, of color and light.

 Cavalleria rusticana (model), Metropolitan Opera, 2015

Displacement here is not of place or date--the action transpires as is prescribed in a Sicilian village circa 1880--but of time. The artistic team turns day into night (some have observed that the darkness signals not mass on Easter morn, but midnight mass). A revolving platform repositions again and again a patriarchal community of subjugated women and swaggering, predatory men, the better to give  relief to the drama of individual betrayal. Santuzza, victim and ultimately avenger, is repeatedly set apart from the black-clad villagers whose codes she has broken.

Many of those glad to bid farewell to Zeffirelli’s obsessive pictorialism, including reviewers who missed few opportunities to put him down, were disappointed by its replacement, spare or not. The Times was irritated by the over-active platform, the New Yorker found the staging “relentlessly grim,” the Observer thought that it “bombed on just about every level.” Only the Wall Street Journal gave a thumbs up. With caveats about the lighting and the male dancers who mimed Alfio’s horses, we thought the show compelling in its abstraction, particularly as it transformed the lengthy genre scenes of village life into comments on the opera’s social/sexual politics.

For Pagliacci, McVicar and Smith moved the action forward from 1865 to 1950 and from Calabria to Sicily. We are alerted that the two operas take place in the same southern Italian town square by the imposing stone walls that enclose both narratives. There, the unity ends.

As it happened, the square, neon lights, and stalled truck of the McVicar/Smith Pagliacci turned out to be more naturalistic than Zeffirelli’s rocky outcroppings, stunted tree, and big sky. 

Pagliacci, Metropolitan Opera, 2015; Patricia Racette, George Gagnidze

The new version added a three-man vaudeville team. The intervention of the trio into the prologue (one of several inventions) violated the expository, deeply human and complex import of the baritone’s aria. While the press, in general, was amused by the antics, for us the slapstick of the play-within-a-play went too far in making the critical contrast between farce and melodrama. For this post, we have chosen two clips that demonstrate the power of music and text when the performer rather than the production is the primary site of meaning.

Lawrence Tibbett sings “Si può?” (If I may)” in this scene from Metropolitan (1935), the fifth of six feature films he made between 1930 and 1937. Tibbett, who had a successful career in Hollywood simultaneously with his Met stardom, is captured here at his extraordinary prime, reaching out to the audience with gestures as subtly inflected as his phrasing and the colors of his voice. The charisma of the singer and the purpose of the character are perfectly joined.

Giovanni Martinelli sings “Vesti la giubba” in this 1926 Vitaphone short. The aria is forever associated with Enrico Caruso, the tenor who holds the Met record for performances of Pagliacci. Martinelli became the company’s Canio after Caruso’s premature death. As you will hear, he favors an unusually slow tempo. Sustaining astonishing tension with astonishing vocal energy, the tenor gives the tragic density of the short piece its full due.