William Shakespeare and Friedrich von Schiller were
among Verdi’s favorite authors. The Bard of Avon inspired three of the
composer’s librettos (Macbeth, Otello, Falstaff); the giant of German Classicism
and Romanticism provided subjects for no less than four of his operas: Giovanna
d’Arco (Die
Jungfrau von Orleans), I
Masnadieri (Die Räuber [The Robbers]), Don Carlos, and Luisa Miller (Kabale und
Liebe [Intrigue and Love]). Only Don Carlos (known familiarly with its
Italian title Don Carlo) has secured a place in the core repertoire of
the world’s major lyric theatres.
Luisa Miller
premiered just two years before the beloved Rigoletto, Il Trovatore, and
La Traviata, vintage 1851-53. Yetwith its strong narrative and
rewarding roles for five soloists, the operadeserves greater
popularity. Its thrilling
score culminates in a final act among Verdi's greatest creations.
The Metroplitan Opera did not
stage Luisa Miller until 1929; its stellar cast—Rosa Ponselle, Giovanni
Lauri-Volpi, Giuseppe De Luca—was able to earn but a paltry six performances in
two seasons. The opera waited until 1968 to enter the company’s repertoire with
some regularity.
In Act II, in order to save her father, Luisa, a
commoner, is forced to write a letter renouncing her love for Rodolfo, the son
of the ruling nobleman. She prays that God not abandon her. Adriana Maliponte conveys the pathos with fervor, musical precision, and rich tone, capping the aria with a breathtaking cadenza.
Carlo Bergnzi sings the opera’s most famous aria,
“Quando le sere al placido (When in the evening, beneath a starry sky),”
recalling the happiness of Rodolfo's love for Luisa. The tenor’s affinity for Verdi
and command of the requisite style are fully evident in this commercial
recording.
Act III contains one of Verdi’s most touching soprano-baritone
duets. Severely put upon by the local aristocracy, Luisa and Miller, her father,
contemplate a life exiled from their homeland (“Andrem raminghi e poveri, ove il
destin ci porta [We’ll wander, poor, wherever destiny leads us].” Here, from a recording of the complete opera, are Anna Moffo as Luisa and Cornell MacNeil as Miller, both in peak form and sensitive to the pathos of the scene.
Rodolfo, mistakenly believing that Luisa has betrayed
him, poisons himself and his beloved. In this extract from a complete
recording, Luciano Pavarotti and Sherrill Milnes voice the anguish of Rodolfo
and Miller, Montserrat Caballé invests the dying Luisa with ethereal pianissimi.
Luisa’s phrases, lofted heavenward,prefigure the demises of Verdi’s Leonoras in Il
Trovatore and La Forza del destino.
A number of commercial recordings and excellent live
performances are available on YouTube.
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February 1, 2022 is the hundredth anniversary
of the birth of Renata Tebaldi, a revered interpreter of 19th-century
and early 20th-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.
During
the long Covid months of closure, the Metropolitan Opera, in step with so many
other American cultural organizations, announced the measures it would take in
response to the reckoning that followed the death of George Floyd at the hands
of the police. For one, the Met named its first Chief Diversity
Officer. The company announced, too, that it would initiate racial justice
training so as to provide staff with “cultural context” in working with cast
members of color.
But
the conspicuous public relations impact of the Met’s response to the wide reach
of Black Lives Matter and to the criticism of opera companies by Black
artists was achieved through the rescheduling of Fire Shut Up in
My Bones as the opening bill for the reopening of the Met after the
lost season of 2020-2021. Terence Blanchard’s opera had originally been on the
docket not for this year but for a future season. (For commentary of Black
singers on racial bias in opera see the online talk shows hosted by Lawrence
Brownlee, “The Sitdown with LB,” Karen Slack “Kiki Konversations,”and the J’Nai
Bridges panel discussion.)
In
this post, we introduce those of our readers who have not yet heard her to one
of the extraordinary African-American singers of the past who appeared neither
at the Met nor, in fact, on any operatic stage. Such was the case for
Dorothy Maynor. The closest she came to the company was her appointment to
the Metropolitan Board in 1975. As of July 2020, forty-five years later, only
three of the forty-five managing directors on the Met board were Black.
As of that same date, only one of the ten members of the music staff and two of
the ninety-six members of the orchestra were Black.
Dorothy
Maynor (1910-1996) was born in Norfolk, Virginia, the daughter of a
Methodist minister. She graduated from Virginia’s then Hampton Institute,
and then from the Westminster Choir College, Princeton, New Jersey, where she
earned a master’s degree in choral conducting. She then moved to New York
to study voice privately. Her big break came in 1939 at the Berkshire
Music Festival in Tanglewood. There, friends persuaded a reluctant Serge
Koussevitsky, conductor of the resident Boston Symphony Orchestra, to grant
Maynor an audition--upon which he proclaimed her “A musical revelation! The
world must hear her!” Koussevitsky lost no time in arranging that she sing with
his orchestra. In this, her first engagement as soloist with a major
symphony orchestra, she chose a program that demonstrated undisputedly that
hers was the voice of an opera singer, that she had mastered a wide repertoire
and disparate styles: the Baroque “O, Sleep, Why Dost Thou Leave Me”
(Handel, Semele), the Classical “Non mi dir” (Mozart, Don
Giovanni), the late-Romantic “Depuis le jour” (Charpentier, Louise), and
even Brünnhilde’s heroic battle-cry, “Ho-jo-to-ho” (Wagner, Die Walküre). New
York Times critic Noel Straus heaped praise on Maynor for her timbre,
technique, flexibility, musicality, and interpretation.
In
1940, the soprano captured the attention of the record-buying public with her
soaring rendition of Louise’s passionate evocation of falling in love. “Depuis
le jour” became one of Maynor’s signature pieces.
Maynor
made her Town Hall debut to a sold-out house and critical raves in November
1939. She was on her way to concert appearances with America’s most prestigious
orchestras. In February 1940, she won the Naumberg Prize for recitalists, under
30, who had given the outstanding performance of the year at Town Hall. In
December 1940, she became the first Black singer to be heard in the
auditorium of the Library of Congress.
Louise’s
ecstasy could not be more distant from the outpourings of Leonora in La
Forza del destino. Maynor rises to the emphatic outbursts of Verdi’s
beleaguered heroine, strong throughout the range, generous with tone and
emotion, leaving no doubt of her ability to meet the challenges the composer
set for the dramatic soprano. This is a live recording from a 1950 concert; the
San Francisco Symphony is conducted by Pierre Monteux.
At the same San
Francisco concert, Maynor sang, in English translation, the “Song to the Moon”
from Dvořák’s Rusalka. Again, she applies her ravishing timbre
to the aria’s radical shifts of register with the refulgent tone, depth of
feeling, and the musical rectitude that distinguish her.
Dorothy Maynor pursued a full and successful concert career
until her retirement in 1963. In that same year, she
founded the Harlem School of the Arts where she taught and was Executive
Director until 1979.
There is no doubt that hers was one of the foremost operatic
voices of her generation. She regularly programmed arias in her recitals and
her engagements with orchestras, adding demanding excerpts by Spontini and
Weber to the familiar selections from Handel, Mozart, and Verdi. The color line
barred from the opera stage what would have been Maynor’s exceptional Pamina,
Donna Anna, Leonora, and so many other leading roles.
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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).”
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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.
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In our last post, we remembered Licia
Albanese, Met soprano for twenty-six years, from 1940 to 1966, a Puccini
specialist. Albanese died in the summer of 2014. With this post we remember
Carlo Bergonzi, Met tenor for almost as long, 1956 to 1988, and Verdi
specialist. He too, died last summer.
Bergonzi was born in 1924 in the town
of Vidalenzo. In nearby Parma he began vocal study with a teacher who counted
among his remarkable students the soprano Renata Tebaldi. During WWII,
Bergonzi was interned in a German camp for three years. At war’s end, he
resumed his education in music and eventually made his debut as a baritone in
1948, as Figaro in Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia. For several years,
Bergonzi appeared in a variety of baritone parts in Italy’s provincial opera
houses. But he would soon realize that he was in fact a tenor. He made his
tenor debut as Andrea Chénier in Umberto Giordano’s opera in 1951. Two years
later, Bergonzi made his La Scala debut, and in 1955, his US debut at the Lyric
Opera of Chicago. His first Met performance took place on November 13,
1956, the seventh season of general manager Rudolf Bing’s tenure in New York.
As we wrote in our recent history of
the Metropolitan, Grand Opera: The Story of the Met (University of
California Press, 2014), Bing had ushered in what would be an
extraordinary Verdi era with Don
Carlo on the opening night of his inaugural season,
1950-51. Verdi ruled again on opening nights 1951 and 1952 with Aïda and then La Forza del destino. All this was to be expected. Asked
to name his favorite operas, the general manager-designate had ticked off three
Verdi titles, and then just one work by each of seven other
composers. Between 1950 and 1966, Verdi accounted for 25% of
Metropolitan performances, significantly more than the 14% and the 19% of his
two immediate predecessors. Under Bing, Verdi pulled far ahead of
Wagner, the previous front-runner. Verdi also led the pack in the
percentage of new productions, fourteen of fifty-nine. Bing’s predilection
would have mattered little had the company not boasted, year after year, a
cohort of outstanding singers capable of honoring the master’s
melos. Casts that included Zinka Milanov, Leontyne Price, Mario Del
Monaco, Richard Tucker, Franco Corelli, Leonard Warren, Robert Merrill, Cesare
Siepi, and, of course, Carlo Bergonzi, were arguably the best in the world.
Bergonzi’s first
Met engagement was limited to two well-received performances opposite
Antonietta Stella, another newcomer, in Aïda
and, three days later, in Il Trovatore.
He returned the following November to a season-long commitment, a full
complement of eight roles that he shared with the company’s array of leading
tenors, including well-established stars Tucker and Del Monaco, the recently
arrived Daniele Barioni and Giuseppe Campora, and Flaviano Labò and Eugenio
Fernandi, making their debuts. He immediately proved himself a model of musical
refinement in the repertoire of the Italian dramatic tenor, the tenore di forza. His sweet timbre and
shapely phrasing were balm in roles often consigned to singers whose triumphs
were measured predominantly in brilliant tone, in the ringing squillo of stentorian high notes.
Although he also
excelled in the works of Puccini and others, as amply documented in his
extensive discography, Bergonzi defined himself as a Verdi tenor. Late in his
career, he committed arias from all of Verdi’s operas to a single album. At the
Met, he sang Riccardo in Un Ballo in
maschera more often than anyone in the company’s history. In two complete
recordings, with Birgit Nilsson, then Leontyne Price, Bergonzi’s mercurial Kingof Sweden juggles playfulness, passion, and
benevolent authority with characteristic finesse. Here, in a 1967 performance
from Japan, Riccardo, masquerading as a sailor, asks the fortune-teller to read
his future. Master of the aria’s tricky rhythms, Bergonzi shows off both the
legato and the brio that made him the tenor of choice in this wonderfully
varied role.
Second only to journeyman Kurt Baum, Bergonzi sang the role
of Radamès more often than any other Met tenor since the 1940s. In this 1959
recording, cushioned by Herbert Von Karajan’s languorous tempo and the silken
texture of the Vienna Philharmonic, he finds a welcome and rarely heard dreamy
tone for the warrior’s evocation of his “celeste Aïda.”
The wide-ranging line of “O tu che in seno agli angeli,”
from La Forza del destino, is a test
of legato and dynamic control. With appropriately dolorous tone, Bergonzi
conveys Alvaro’s despair, first in the recitative that recalls the sorrows of
his past and the presumed demise of his beloved Leonora, then in the aria, where
he wishes for his own death. This clip is from a live performance, thunderously
received by the 1965 opening night La Scala audience. Below is a third example
of the “covered voice” we heard Bergonzi press insistently, even obsessively,
on the young Verdians he coached a decade or so ago in Barcelona during the Concurso Internacional de Canto Francisco
Viñas.