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Cathy Berberian could sing anything. And did. She was born in North

Cathy Berberian (1925-1983)

Attleboro, Massachusetts in 1925. By 1950 she was a Fulbright Scholar in Italy and had married composer Luciano Berio. She became Europe’s leading exponent of new vocal music Her curiosity about music all music, seemed to be insatiable. As a child she had studied Armenian folk music and dance. Her career and her life in music were all about variety.

It’s hard to categorize Cathy Berberian. I suspect that was her intent. She had a lovely mezzo soprano voice, but in the era of Callas and Tebaldi it was not a voice to stand out on its own.  Berberianwas  perfectly capable in Bach and Mozart. Her Montevedi was sublime. Listen to the simple beauty of tone mixed with drama in the great Lamento d’Arianna, which she recorded with Nikolaus Harnoncourt

Berberian was a chamber music and an actress. She was a personality who sang. Her voice lacked the amplitude to ride over a large operatic orchestra, but as a recitalist. a chamber musician, a saloniste she had no peers. Her collaboration with Berio was fantastic and survived their 1964 divorce.  Berberian was his muse, for a time his wife and the mother of his daughter Cristina.  On stages and in studios throughout the world Cathy Berberian was a lot more than a composer’s wife.  She recorded Monteverdi operas and Bach cantatas. She wrote her own theater pieces.  Stripsody uses onomatopoeia and reflects her love of comic books.  Her recital programs embraced Purcell, Stravinsky, Villa-Lobos, you name it.  (Elegy for JFK was written for her).  She loved spectacle, costumes,  jewelry and all things theatrical. Here she is with a fearless performance of Xango by Villa-Lobos

Cathy  Berberian died suddenly of a massive heart attack in her hotel room in Rome in 1983. She was preparing for a concert honoring the memory of Karl Marx! (How’s that for variety!) For twenty years in Europe as vocalists go there was Cathy Berberian and there was everybody else.  Her artistic heirs would be  Massillon Ohio’s Jan di Gaetani who was a close contemporary (1933-1989) and today, Dawn Upshaw.  But really there was nobody like Cathy Berberian.

If you’d like to know more, here’s part of a documentary called Music is the Air I Breathe. This clip features interviews with Berio, Harnoncourt, the Swiss tenor Eric Tappy, Cathy’s daughter Cristina, and the lady herself

–Christopher Purdy

I don’t really know Lotfi Mansouri personally. We had a few joint appearances on the lamented Texaco-Opera Quiz back in the day, but I was a lowly student and he was running the San Francisco Opera. Born in Iran, Mansouri settled in California as a young man and began a career in opera as a stage director, impresario, producer, teacher and now author. His memoir Lotfi Mansouri, An Operatic Journey is new from Northeastern University Press. Lotfi spent years working with Dr. Herbert Graf in Zurich and Geneva and served as General Director of the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto before going to San Francisco. The book is a lively read about a life in opera, complete with the Shah and Carol Burnett.

Lotfi and I caught up recently on the phone from his home in California.

Remembering Sir Charles Mackerras, and early days with two great

Lotfi Mansouri and Carol Burnett

colleagues, Lotte Lehmann…and Carol Burnett!

Here’s the great Lotte Lehmann (1888-1976) She was a profound influence on Lotfi Mansouri and on generations of artists.

It was hard to leave Iran as a very young man. It was harder to leave Iran when you are a successful professional who returned at the behest of the Shah, back in 1971

Lotfi Mansouri was a prime mover behind the development of opera Titles (surtitles, subtitles, cap titles, what  ever you want to call them).  He talks about this development and the controversy around really making opera accessible, plus his years in Toronto and San Francisco

Then for fun, I asked Lotfi to “free associate” with some famous names: Sutherland, Pavarotti, von Stade….

Lotfi Mansouri with Dame Joan Sutherland 'The Merry Widow'

Don’t miss Lotfi Mansouri, An Operatic Journey, new from Northeastern University Press. Lotfi takes numbers and names names but makes clear his love for opera and its people.

Thanks for the chat,Lotfi. It was great to catch up!

–Christopher Purdy

This is turning out to be a good year for new books on a music. Here are a few that have come across my desk recently. I’ll be coming back with interviews with Norman Lebrecht and Lotfi Mansouri-and all of these books will be discussed in more detail.  Read on, look for these, and enjoy!

Why Mahler Matters: How One Man and Ten Symphonies Changed Our World by Norman Lebrecht-October 5 publication date

Reading Lebrecht’s latest book on Mahler-preceded by Mahler Remembered is a terrific complement to letting this music seep into your life.  Lebrecht’s writing style puts the reader firmly into Mahler’s Vienna, New York, Hamburg, Dresden or Bohemia, and gives a vivid portrait of a brief life of struggle, the highest of highs and the most miserable of sorrows. To me an indication of a book’s success is whether or not I’m compelled to go out and listen, really listen to the music being discussed. Lebrecht had me reaching for the Mahler symphonies and songs anew with each chapter. The book contains a biographical sketch interspersed with conversations and observations from the present day. (The author’s upstairs neighbor in London was a guest at Mahler’s weeding in 1902!) Vivid descriptions of Mahler’s rather grimy birthplace give way to an author’s visit 150 years later.  Lebrecht’s gift for combining a modern sensibility with music written 100 years ago will, I assure you, at least interrupt your life long enough to be buried in this music. Go ahead, wallow. Weep, laugh, rage and wallow.

P.S. Lebrecht particularly admires Klaus Tennstedt’s performances of Mahler’s music:

Lotfi Mansouri: An Operatic Journey (Northeastern University Press) Iran born Lotfi Mansouri came to Southern California-Carol Burnett was a class mate and show-buddy- and went on to direct both the Canadian Opera Comp[any in Toronto and the San Francisco Opera.  He is an unashamed populist. None of the deconstruction  regie-theater here. Mansouri shows what can be done on the operatic stage when the score is respected, and when opera is staged to tell the story. The book is filled with witty and endearing reminiscences of Sutherland, Pavarotti, Scotto, and a host of greats, almost greats and would rather forget ‘ems. I’ve seen a lot of Mansouri’s productions and I can tell you what nobody ever went away bored.  Nor will you with this richly entertaining book about an art form, and a number of people dearly loved by the author.

The Genius of Valhalla, The Life of Reginald Goodall by John Lucas (Boydell PRess)

This is a reprint of a 1993 biography called Reggie: The Life of Reginald Goodall. I write about Goodall elsewhere on this blog. My buddy, the late soprano Rita Hunter had the triumphs of her career as his Brunhilde in the Ring in London and they fell out, one swearing to having nothing ever again to do with the other. This seemed to be a pattern. Goodall (1902-1990) was born in England and raised in Canada and Springfield Massachusetts. He conducted the first performances of Britten’s Peter Grimes and The Rape of Lucretia. The ‘Valhalla’ of Mr. Lucas’s title represents less Wagner deities than the attic lavatory in the Royal Opera House where Goodall meticulously rehearsed his singers. He had rather lowly positions at Covent Garden for many years. His performances of the Ring with the Sadler’s Wells Opera (now the English National Opera) in the mid 1970s made Goodall world famous. This production was issued on CD as were later performances of The Mastersingers, Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal. Goodall was magnificent at the architecture of Wagner, spinning out the long, unbroken lines at slow tempi that threatened to sag and disintegrate but never did.  Listening to a Goodall performance is like watching a treacherous high wire act-with Wagner’s music at its most magnificent.  For all that, Goodall could be a nasty, moody man.  He admired Sir Oswald Mosley and was rumored to have embraced anti -semitism.  I’ll bet it was difficult to be his friend,  much less an artist in his charge. But with other artists and conductors of the time, at least in Wagner, Goodall had many colleagues, but few peers.

Franco Alfano: Transcending Turandot by Konrad Dryden (Scarecrow Press)

Musicologist Dryden has already written biographies of Riccardo Zandonai and Ruggero Leoncavallo. To these he adds a study of Italian composer Franco Alfano (1875-1954) Alfano gets a bad rap. He deserves a lot more acclaim than the grudging footnotes he earned for completing  Turandot after Puccini’s death in 1924. Depending on who you ask,  Alfano was either begged or threatened to complete Turandot, after which re received lttle praise. It was further claimed he was Puccini’s pupil when in fact Alfano was a fifty year old man and well regarded composer in his own right.  His career never really recovered fromTurnadot. European audiences did embrace his operas Cyrano de Bergerac (a recent vehicle for Placido Domingo) and Resurrection, based on Tolstoy’s novel which became a late career triumph for Mary Garden and an early outing for the astonishing Magda Olivero. As he did with Leoncavallo and Zandonai, two other fine composers whose achievements were eaten up by the huge successes of Puccini, Konrad Dryden gives Alfano new stature and new respect.

Terrence McNally’s play Master Class tells the story of Maria Callas’s

Maria Callas (1923-1977)

public classes given at the Julliard School in New York in 1971 and 1972. After several workshops, the play opened on Broadway in 1995 starring the great Australian actress Zoe Caldwell.  Hers was a powerhouse performance- a lady who played Euripides should find Callas a breeze. To this day, Master Class has proven irresistible to fifty-ish actresses who can be stylish, direct and sexy. Caldwell was succeeded on Broadway by two similar powerhouses, the late Dixie Carter, and Patti Lupone. This TV clip from New York 1 in 1996 gives a taste of Lupone’s performance. She went from Eva Peron  (Evita) to Maria Callas to Mama Rose (Gypsy). Withal, I imagine La Callas was more daunting:

Your humble servant damned near got bounced out of Lexington (MA)

High School in February 1972 for running off to New York on the 6 a.m. Greyhound out of Park Square to see two of these classes. I paid my $5 (a fortune!) and went in. I didn’t know one did not approach icons for autographs.  Callas was surrounded by maids, cops and poodles but I marched right up and said hello, and she gave me a signed picture that is on my office wall as I type these words. The classes I saw would never have made a full length play. They were classes. Callas was coaching the 20 somethings Julliard singers. She only got testy if people were unprepared. When applause broke out she would say, “Well, we’re all wonderful, but no applause, okay?” What I noticed and what Patti Lupone catches perfectly was the New York of Callas. This was a dame from a tough neighborhood in Washington Heights, who could greet DeGaulle backstage at the Paris Opera as he bent to kiss her hand, and yell “Lay off, willya!?!” to pesky reporters.

Faye Dunaway came through Columbus a few years ago with

Master Class. People flocked in because she was Faye Dunaway. Fair enough. It was worth it to see Bonnie Parker and Mommy Dearest-but of opera and vocal terms used in the play Dunaway knew little. She was playing dress up with Maria Callas. Rumor had it Dunaway owned the film rights, but so far, no film.  Rumor also has it that these rights have passed on to Sohpia Loren and now to Cher.  Well, why the hell not? If she could endure Sonny for all those years…..

The most recent production of Master Class I know about was a few months ago at the Kennedy Center in Washington, with Tyne Daly. Here’s a segment from the Kennedy Center production introduced by playwright Terence McNally:

Rita Moreno too has done the part but everyone who saw her claimed

Dixie Carter WAS Callas.

The play is a fun read, and is clearly not meant to be a recreation of months of master classes. Again, those would hardly make a play.  Terence McNally and I were guests together a number of times for Texaco Opera Quiz-. He wrote this play with superb dramatic skill and love for the art form. And listen, if Cher does the movie,  good on her!

Let’s give Maria Callas the final words and notes.  No doubt this is how she would want to be remembered.   Norma, Act 1, Paris 1964. Maria Callas died in 1977.

–Christopher Purdy

Frederica von Stade sings Melisande in Debussy’s Pelleas et Melisande, with Richard Stilwell and Jose Van Dam, conducted by Herbert von Karajan, on this week’s Saturday on Stage-Saturday afternoon at 1.30 WOSU 89-7 FM.

(I feel like I’ve written too many obituaries here lately. This is a farewell of a different, happier kind.)

Mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade is ending her performing career later

Frederica von Stade aka "Flicka"

this summer. According to her website (http://www.fredericavonstade.com) after a busy season of concerts,  “Flicka” will give two performances of Despina in Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte at Chicago’s Ravinia Festival as  a high spirited good-bye. This after a forty year career that began with small parts at the Met and went on to collaborations with Solti, Karajan, Bernstein, virtually every important conductor of her time, and appearances in opera and concert…well…everywhere.  Her repertoire ranged from Monteverdi (my favorite Flicka performance, as the abandoned Penelope in Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria) to Kern’s Showboat, to music inspired by and written for her by Jake Heggie and Dave Brubeck to name two. Frederica von Stade was so closely identified with Mozart’s Cherubino-thanks to her big break via Sir Geog Solti in the early 1970s-that productions of Le nozze di Figaro were unthinkable with out her.  See what I mean:

I treasure memories of von Stade (oh, okay-she is universally known as ‘Flicka’ so what the hell) of Flicka’s Cherubino,  likewise her Octavian in Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier-unforgettable performances with Elisabeth Soderstrom and Kathleen Battle on tour in 1983. Likewise her Charlotte in Massenet’s Werther is seared into my brain forever.

Here’s a bit of an interview I did with Flicka back in 2004, as she was preparing to sing with the Columbus Symphony:

What always came through in Flicka’s singing came through chatting as well. Her humanity. “A voice is a person” int0ned the wonderful tenor Peter Pears many years ago. “A violin is a violin played by a person, but a voice is a person.”  Flicka has a sure sense of self-she is well aware of her own gifts-but that awareness is far less important to her than her own exploitation of those gifts to benefit others. This is a completely unselfish-as opposed to selfless-artist.  She spoke with me so enthusiastically about working in schools and day care centers close to her home in California. At her 2004 Columbus visit she brought some young artists with her, eager to give them experience on her nickel. Nobody who has heard Frederica von Stade sing Mozart’s horny Cherubino or the sensual, sophisticated melodies of Poulenc, nobody who has heard her desperate and sex -starved cries of “Torna, deh torna Ulisse!” will accuse this lady of being dull or unworldly. She turns her attention and her luscious voice to the attention of the words and music, hoping to leave the public better off than when they came in.

Many (many!) years ago I had a college roommate who fell madly in love  with Flicka. I bought her very first solo LP, a French aria program .  He stole it and we heard this playing all through the house, day and night

“Nobles Segineurs, salut!” from Les Huguenots by Meyerbeer. This brings back nice memories:

And one more time, Offenbach’s delightfully tipsy Perichole

Vixen or virgin, girlfriend or trollop, saint or sinner, Flicka sang ‘em all. It is her performing career that seems to be ending. I suspect we have not heard the last from this warm and generous lady. Look for her where children need a champion, where the arts need a warrior and where the world needs cheer.

–Christopher Purdy

Serenata presents an all Brahms tribute to Maureen Forrester, Saturday July 3 at 1 PM

The wonderful Canadian contralto Maureen Forrester died on June 16th,

Maureen Forrester (1930-2010)

just a few weeks short of her 80th birthdays. She had been in declining health for several years.

Now, about the term ‘contralto’. Maureen Forrester was not a mezzo soprano. She did not have the edge or bite to her sound to excel at the great mezzo heroines of Verdi.  I suspect too, that her ebullient personality would have made them a tough sell for her. The contralto is the lowest female voice. Forrester’s was rich and gorgeous without being ponderous. These tend to be ’slow’ voices. Think melted chocolate rather than champagne. Here’s Maureen Forrester singing Mahler’s Urlicht (Primal Light)

Hear that? It’s a voice that wraps around you. You can’t fake a sound like that.  In my opinion, its God’s gift.

I used to think of Forrester as a very serious lady. Think again

She sang everything. Bruno Walter made her his protege in the 1950s and with him she became the world’s preeminent Mahler singer.  She recorded Handel operas when no one else was. She commissioned a lot of fine new music from Canadian composers. She sang Bach and Vivaldi. Her recording of the Verdi Requiem with Ormandy is a winner. She raised five children. Her 1986 memoir Out of Character is written with humor and insight and details what became a messy private life. It’s a great read, especially for a young artist. It shows that the life of an artist costs.

Think of Maureen Forrester when you want to remember an artist at home with Monteverdi,  Mahler and Rogers and Hammerstein-I’m told her Bloody Mary in South Pacific was a honey of a performance. I remember her as the sinister old Countess in Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades.  She was too intelligent to play an old harridan. Forrester reminded us that this ancient character was once called “The Venus of Moscow”

Her later years were not easy. Her decline was long and terrible. Happily, there’s a wonderful legacy of recordings and videos. Wrap that voice around you the next time you think your life is going down the tubes. Up you’ll come!

–Christopher Purdy

The opera blogs and list- servs have been ranting on overtime for the past

Linda Watson and John Treleaven

two weeks following the backstage drama in Los Angeles’ new production of Wagner’s Ring  des Nibulengen.  Producing these four music dramas is the grandest and most expensive test for any opera company.  A failure can bankrupt an organization, driving audiences away for decades. A success can provide benefits for years:  audiences filled with Wagner groupies, serious respect from press and whatever international critics are left, merchandising down to the calendars and tea  cozies, and an energetic peg (pegs?) on which to hang photos,  news and gossip for more than a few news cycles. The Ring has significant merchandising value, and if you don’t mind risking your underwear and possibly worse, a successful production is  the way to go towards raising the profile, creating buzz and attracting donors.

Los Angeles seems like a good town to host this feast of gods, Valkyries,

Achim Freyer

dwarfs, incest and fallen heroes.  Placido Domingo (yes, that Placido Domingo) General Director  of the Los Angeles Opera (and of the Washington Opera, and of Operalia, who continues to sing and conduct about four times a week on three different continents at the age of-officially-69-and following cancer surgery) decided some years back that Los Angeles needed to have a Ring.  He approached George Lucas to design and direct, and after a few month flirtation the mind behind Star Wars walked.  Undeterred, Domingo next approached Baz Luhrmann,  of Moulin Rogue and a world famous staging of La boheme. No go.  Then he called Achim Freyer.

I only know about Achim Freyer what I read (recently) in the papers. He is an acclaimed visual artist in Europe. I don;t know how much opera production he has done.  No matter.  He brings an important visual sense to the four Ring operas. Look for yourself:

Look, the days of beefy guys running around in bear skins and ample ladies with winged helmets are gone, gone, gone. I doubt today we can really replicate the great voices who wore those skins and helmets once upon a time:  Kirsten Flagstad, Lauritz Melchior, George London, Hans Hotter, Jon Vickers, Birgit Nilsson. These greats are in Valhalla themselves-except for Mr. Vickers. My bookshelves groan under the weight of broadcast recordings of these giants going back sixty years. But they are gone. What to do now?

Now, you train the orchestra-always the leading element of any Wagner opera-to high magnificence, and  you make certain to engage the audience visually.  You have a superb conductor like James Conlon, Music Director of the Los Angeles Opera.  Doing this presupposes that the rich grandeur of Wagner’s music is taken care of. In opera what’s first, words or music? In Wagner, music. Period. And yes the music in Wagner is long and yes the drama meanders and often becomes ridiculous. The Ring, to me, lacks the catharsis, the delayed organism written into Tristan. Today’s audiences need  a little help.

Anyone looking at the youtube clip can see that Freyer’s visual sense is stunning. Whether or not he uses the visuals to complement the music and tell the story is hard to gauge in snips out of context.

The controversy? Two of the singers went to the pres with concerns over the staging. The Los Angeles Times reported on May 15 that soprano Linda Watson (Brunnhilde) told Freyer to “just play one of my CDs.” Tenor John Treleaven (Siegfried) spoke of twisted ankles and injuries sustained working on the sharply raked stage.  (Angled stages  can be murder for the feet and lower back-the back muscles are essential in supporting the voice to be heard over Wagner’s orchestra). Both Watson and Treleaven are fine artists with years of experience in their roles, and as you can imagine Brunnhildes and especially Siegfrieds are pretty rare.  Most can jut get through their roles.  These two bring a lot more skill and talent than that to their performances. And Watson is a looker-which helps.  Have a look at another clip–from Freyer’s Los Angeles bound production of Siegfried,  with Ms. Watson and Mr. Treleaven

Here’s the problem. The scenes,  for all the light show stuff still seem pretty

John Treleaven so you can see his face

dark.  Herbert von Karajan did his own lighting for the Ring . He demanded fifty lighting rehearsals (ka-ching!).   One critic wagged, “I could have gotten it that dark in one!”  Achim’s  singers are often masked, denying the audience any facial expression and muzzling the artists.  The singers, the actors, the artists become incidental to the visual effects, not the integral parts of the drama as conceived by Wagner. And an emphasis on lighting is nothing new. Bayreuth in 1890 was awash in kerosene lamps.  Wieland Wagner’s  Parsifal in 1950 enthralled the opera world with its lighting effects,  made necessary by a lack of lumber and materiel in post war Germany.

Long are the fights and rants since Ms. Watson and Mr. Treleaven went

Linda Watson as Brunnhilde in happier times

public.  They have not been replaced as of this date and neither has Mr. Freyer.  The Classical Singers message board is ferrying opinions (http://www.nfcs.com) The readers feedback page of the LA Times make the singers out to be heroes or crybabies.  Watson and Treleaven spoke bluntly of concerns for their own safety.  No doubt a director not interested in character development and on -stage relationships based solely on words and music doesn’t help.  So it would seem.  LA Opera board members have criticized the two singers.  Last year, before all this brouhaha, Freyer said that singers concerns on stage “are not my problem.”  Placido Domingo, who sings Siegmund in Die Walkure has stayed out of it. He has not supported his singers publicly and he has not dissed Mr. Freyer. This Ring staging on his watch costs a reported $32 million. He needs to sell tickets. Controversy is good for ticket sales. Do the math.

I’ll sign off with one more video clip. Brunnhilde in Die Walkure would never so appear today, but the voice…Kirsten Flagstad! A voice like that would be immune to any staging, light shows, darkness or whatever.

You tell  ‘em, girlfriend.

Wagner’s Ring cycle with Placido Domingo, Linda Watson and John Treleaven, conducted by James Conlon, opens at the Los Angeles Opera on May  29.

–Christopher Purdy

If you lived in Paris in 1902 and picked up any one of the many daily

Mary Garden as Melisande, 1902

newspapers you would have read the following on or about May 1 of that year:

Some said it was the musical event of the greatest importance. Others said disrespectfully that it was just a practical joke.

(There is)  the power of the orchestral sonorities, along with monotnous psalm-singing.

Today or tomorrow Debussy’s score will be recognized for what it is. It’s a matter of time, just a little time.

You must go see this work, for it represents a type that will probably be unique

Eventually, even the Chicago Tribune weighed in

All of the artists were excellent, but it is Melisande who takes hold of you.

Claude Debussy’s opera Pelleas et Melisande has been considered the

Claude Debussy (1862-1918)

UN/opera or Uber/opera since its first performance, at the Opera-comique in Paris on April 30, 1902.  Melsiande had been created by the Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck in his play of the same title published in 1893.  Maeterlinck, the father of symbolism on the stage, the master of word painting where words did not always follow their literal meaning, the writer who blurred reality just enough  and who worked in the ‘timeless’ sense of drama,  became a sensation with the first staged production of his Pelleas.

The play and the opera are both set in the mythical kingdom of Allemonde, in a time gone by. Melisande, one of the wives of Bluebeard,  has escaped a life of rape and torture and is found in a lonely wood by Prince Golaud. The  prince marries her and takes her home to his sad, crumbling kingdom, a place of darkness, of great trees and caves , and occasional bursts of sunlight and the sea.  Melisande and Golaud’s young half brother Pelleas find a mutual attraction.  Pelleas is eventually killed by Golaud, and Melisande dies after giving birth to a daughter. All of this is expressed in sparse, if direct language where the very silences between the characters seems like the protagonist.  Pelleas is about a silent world, interrupted.

Gillian Opstad has written a new book, Debussy’s Melisande that examines both the play and the opera through the lives of three women. Georgette Leblanc (1869-1941) was a Belgian actress and singer who was Maeterlinck’s mistress for many years.  She claimed to be the author’s muse and the inspiration for Melisande herself.  It was Leblanc who performed the play on the grounds of her home in France, and she later sang the opera in Boston.  Mary Garden (1874-1967) was Debussy’s first Melisande. Maggie Teyte (1888-1976) was the second, inheriting the role in Paris when Mary left for America in 1908.

Of the three,  Mary had the most sensational career and Maggie did very well with some stops and starts.  Both were professionally active for over

Mary Garden, Debussy's first Melisande

thirty years. Maggie Teyte gave her last recitals, her voice little impaired in 1955 and the age of 67.  Mary Garden knew well how to court publicity and was a favorite of the American press until she long after she retired from singing.  (Lecture tours and a sensational if fictitious autobiography kept her busy at her 80th birthday).  She was “good copy” complete with her views of giving women the vote (she was for it) marriage (against) and lovers (So-so.  ‘I had little passion for men and no need”).  Her performances onstage were deliberately provocative. One critic wrote of her Salome “Miss Garden wallowed around like a feline on a bed of catnip.” She said later that her compatriot Andrew Carnegie disapproved of Charpentier’s Louise -Mary’s first big success in 1901-”because he disapproved of free love. But he did like Faust.”  In fact, Mary was thrown on stage for the first time of her life mid performance of Louise in Paris, and the next morning she was famous.  “I was never a bit nervous in my life” she told reporters. “And I have no patience with people who are.”

It took some sangfroid indeed to be the first Melisande.  Georgette Leblanc

Georgette Leblanc with Maurice Maeterlinck

expected to be given the role-she was sleeping with the playwright after all. Albert Carre of the Opera-comique dismissed Georgette following her “shocking” portrayal of Carmen (where was his knack for publicity?) Maeterlinck stormed off saying that music mattered not at all to him and that Debussy could do what he wanted. What’s between the notes in Debussy’s score can be as rich and as evocative as the text and notes themselves.  Nothing like this had been attempted before in the Paris beginning to recover from Wagner. One of Opstad’s many interesting points is Debussy’s approval of Mary Garden’s Scots accent, making her Melisande more of an outsider than ever before.

Claude Achille Debussy (1862-1918) was large, randy and  seemingly

Maggie Teyte c. 1901

dangerous.  He approved of Mary Garden at once.  “Je n’ai rien a lui dire” he said after the early rehearsal. “I have nothing to tell her.”

Here’s Mary singing Melisande song in the Tower, from Act III, recorded in Paris a year after the premiere. What I did not expect from this clip are the scenes from Mary’s 1917 film of Thais, shot at Samuel Goldwyn’s estate in Fort Lee, New Jersey in the winter of 1917.  The movie was a disaster, a joke. It comes AFTER the singing in this clip thankfully. Don’t be distracted from the clear of beauty of Mary’s voice, and its almost childlike simplicity, recorded 107 years ago:

Mary remains a favorite among opera lovers over forty years after her death. There are recordings, films (funny or not) scandal (faked or not) and her very real and important accomplishments in  French opera: Melisande, Carmen, Faust, Le jongleur de Notre Dame, Cleopatre, not to mention Salome (in French), Tosca (French or Italian as the mood took her) and Fiora in Montemezzi’s L’amore dei tre re (Italian).  She said the one regret of her life was not singing Kundry in Wagner’s Parsifal, and Virgil Thomson wanted her for his opera with Gertrude  Stein, Four Saints in Three Acts. Richard Strauss hoped she would sing Octavian in Der Rosenkavalier, but Mary, not missing a beat said, “It would have bored me to make love to a woman.”

Opstad’s book brings Georgette Leblanc back to life.  She was considered

Georgette Leblanc as Carmen. A scandal!

little more than a comely diseuse, well connected because of Maeterlinck who bullied her way into a few performances of Carmen and Melisande with only a bit of a voice. Not so. Leblanc was accomplished singer who to the end of her days embraced new music, not only of Debussy but by Auric, Honegger, Ravel and Poulenc.  She was a published author with books for children and two memoirs to her credit. She was in demand as a recitalist for years and she too had a knack for publicity-remember, her Carmen disgusted the secretaires of the Opera-comique and caused her to be fired from the company–a dismissal that made the front pages.  Like Mary Garden, Georgette  tried her hand in film later in life, and like Mary Garden the results are best forgotten.  But Georgette was no dilettante.  She ended her life in poverty, abandoned by Maeterlinck after twenty years, the Maeterlinck who professed to be indifferent toward music and seemed long to be indifferent to Georgette! But Georgette went on with her concerts and finally sang Debussy’s opera herself, after appearing in several of Maeterlinck’s plays. She appeared in two other operas based on Maeterlinck’s work, Paul Dukas’s Ariane et Barbe-bleu and Fevrier’s Monna Vanna.

Georgette Leblanc made a few recordings and I’m sorry not to have access to them. Mary Garden recorded a little, not as much as her great fame leads you to expect. Its interesting to compare the first two Melisandes, Mary Garden and Maggie Teyte in the same melodie by Claude Debussy, Beau soir. The setting sun turns the rivers rose..”.elle a la mer, nous au tombeau” (she to the sea, we to the tomb)

Here’s Mary Garden in 1929, with Jean Dansereau at the piano:

Now, Maggie Teyte, accompanied by Gerald Moore, recorded in 1944

Maargaret Tate was born in 1888. She changed the spelling of her last name

Maggie Teyte in the 1940s

to ‘Teyte’ to make it easier for the French to pronounce. Teyte was an exquisite artist whose career was interrupted by marriage and changing tastes. But she persevered, often with help. Her career was revived splendidly in the 1930s when a fan in New York financed a series of recordings of Debussy melodies with Teyte and Alfred Cortot.  She had learned her craft from the great tenor Jean de Reszke-and when presented to Debussy  in 1908 the composer sighed “Mon dieu, une autre ecossaise”-another Scottish girl (Mary Garden was born in Aberdeen-Maggie was pure working class English).  Teyte claimed that Debussy had very little to say to her-but he must have approved of the young woman’s talent and musicianship. Maggie Teyte gave 19 performances of  Melisande  in Paris. The opera haunted her the rest o her long life though she seldom had the opportunity to sing it. There were a few performances in London. Then, at sixty (!) Maggie Teyte sang Melisande with the New York City Opera. By this time she was singing  “bleeding chunks” of the opera in recital…taking all the roles: Melisande, Pelleas, Golaud, the elderly Arklel, the child Yniold and the mother, Genevieve.  Here’s Maggie at the Town Hall in New York on January 15, 1948, singing Act III sc. 1 of the opera . Golaud has sent Pelleas and Melisande into a forbidding cave to search for Melisande’s lost wedding ring. The cave is terrifying, and at the sight of three beggars, the couple runs away

Gillian Opstad follows each of the three Melisandes through marriages, scandal, same sex relationships, triumph, poverty and music. They have in common this ethereal creature of Maeterlinck’s.  Some maintain that Melisande is a child, a victim. Virgil Thomson has an interesting take:

“  The tension of animal magnetism is the basic drama of this opera. For Melsiande, beneath her reticence, is a flame that consumes…the play of her unrivaled libido against the fixitries of a well-bred French family reveals character in each instance.  It turns Golaud, her husband, repeatedly to violence.  It lights the fires of passion in his half-brother Pelleas, a young man easily enough inflamed.  ”

Passion each of these ladies had. Mary Garden, for all her press worthy

Mary Garden

deceits, love with a Turkish pasha, diamonds from the Shah of Persia, never married and traveled with her mother or one of of her sisters. Maggie, after two disastrous marriages,  turned to women in her old age, as did Georgette.  Both were rumored to have had “illegitimate” children and both were assumed to have bedded Debussy. Mary may have. Maggie said only,  “I was not his type.” All loved Melisande and none ever recovered from her. Debussy’s Melisande knits together three extraordinary lives and careers with the creation of one ethereal character who passeth understanding.

Because I suspect she would insist upon it, we give the last word to Mary Garden. Included in this clip is a 1961 interview for the BBC.  Mary is 87 years old. She talks of Debussy and of Melisande-who she had created sixty years earlier:

Debussy’s Melisande by Gillian Opstad is published by the Boydell Press. It’s a great read if you love music and opera, and even if you don’t.

–Christopher Purdy

The Metropolitan Opera presents Rossini’s Armida with Renee Fleming and Lawrence Brownlee (and five other tenors!)  live in HD from the stage in New York, this Saturday May 1 at 1 PM. See it in Columbus at Crosswoods, Worthington or at the Lennox Cinemas. See also http://www.metopera.org for more information.

Grand opera is neither for the shy nor the prissy (contrary to rumor).

Rossini as they saw him...

Sorceresses seducing Christian warriors with lots of vocal fire-and more- were made for Gioachino Rossini (1792-1868).  Armida, completed in November, 1817,  is the 22nd of the 39 operas composed by Rossini between 1810 and 1829. It’s sobering to remember that although the composer lived to a ripe old age, dying rich and retired in the arms of his mistress in Paris, his active career lasted just under twenty years! Rossini was known to have suffered from gout and depression later in his life, leading Marilyn Horne, the outstanding interpreter of his music in recent years to opine, “Who knows what would have happened with a little lithium?”

Armida in 1817 saw Rossini back in Naples, where his operas Elisabetta (that would be Elizabeth I of England in a wild pageant ignorant of history) and Otello, the latter topped by Verdi generations later but Rossini’s version is not to be ignored (magnificent third act), were premiered. The roguish impresario Domenico Barbaja held sway in Naples and Rossini had affection for the old bandit. Barbaja had mentored the young composer and seen him on to a number of early successes, always pocketing the best share of the proceeds (impresarios died either very rich or very poor-no middle ground).  But Barbaja had quite the nose for talent, and he it was who brought Rossini together with the  prima donna Isabella Colbran, whom the composer bedded and eventually married–or was it the other way around?  No matter.

The fact is that Isabella Colbran (1785-1845) was known for her sensational

Isabella Colbran

mezzo-soprano voice with a healthy respect for onstage operatic melodramma and a gift for fioratura.  Rossini in 1817-aged 25!-was considered the world’s finest operatic composer since the death of Mozart, ahead of both Beethoven and Cherubini-and was grudgingly admired by both of those composers.

The period between 1815-1820 saw the premieres of Il barbiere di siviglia, La gazza ladra, and La Cenerentola-three spirited comedies where Rossini could even be heard to compose laughter, and perfected his famous crescendo ensembles, where the entire company, usually in the midst of some potentially embarrassing-not fatal-chazerei would express mutual dismay and resolution with joking asides beginning with a whisper and ending with several bangs.

Armida, despite a few elements of the ridiculous,  is hardly a comedy. The source is Torquato Tasso’s poem of the crusades, Gerusalemme Liberata which in 1817 would have been familiar to the opera audiences from Handel’s Rinaldo, Haydn’s Armida and Gluck’s  Armide (Dvorak composed an Armida in 1904).

What’ s to resist? Tasso was widely admired in 1817–The story concerns the high-glam sorceress Armida, who goes about enchanting a retinue of knights during the crusades-they don’t say which one-spiriting them away to her enchanted island in a grand chariot drawn by rams-a device stolen by Wagner fifty years later for Fricka, the Queen of the Gods, who is a lot less fun than Armida. Her affections settle on Rinaldo, who is eventually rescued from her evil, enchanted, pagan clutches by his BFFs Carlo and Ubaldo. Pay attention: Armida requires a sexy dramatic soprano with a wide range and lots of coloratura. She needs the breath for Rossini’s exquisite long lines, the agility of his coloratura fireworks, lots of stamina, great presence and call me sexist but it helps if she’s a looker. If you’re going to go around seducing knights during the crusades it helps to have something in the va-va-voom department.

And the knights? They mix the love smitten (Rinaldo) the heroic (Goffredo) the faithful (Eustazio) the fiery (Gernando) and the loyal (Ubaldo and Carlo). That’s right. This opera requires six, count ‘em six tenors. (Off stage I’ll just bet they all act like bros with lots of high fives, while one waits for the other to choke mid the plentiful high Cs).  Rossini loved Madame Colbran as long as her voice held out, and he did love his tenors. Otello has four leading tenor roles-and some of his operas written for big voiced Italian mezzi en travesti were later reworked for tenors singing in French.

The Met premiered Armida just a few weeks ago. The May 1 Armida to be

Lawrence Brownlee

seen in movie theaters across the world is the sixth of eight performances. Renee Fleming’s beauty and box office clout make her a natural in the tile role. No crusader is going to resist her and she can sing the bloody thing.  Our tenors are Lawrence Brownlee,  Barry Banks,  Kobie van Rensburg, Jose Manuel Zapata, Yegische Manucharyan and John Osborn.  Covering these roles is a sensational young tenor from OSU, loved by us all as Michael Szezniak and soon to be known to the world as Michele Angelini. Write his name down.

Rossini loved to self borrow and wasn’t above filching a good tune from elsewhere. One of the loveliest moments in Armida is the Act I ensemble beginning “Or che faro?” (What do I do now?) Any first year voice student plows through Tomasso Giordani’s exquisite little song, Caro mio ben

Here’s what Rossini makes of this tune in Armida

(Renee Fleming, Donald Kaasch, Carlo Bosi and Ildebrando d’Arcangelo)

Another great moment is the trio for tenors in Act III as Ubaldo and Carlo attempt to tear Rinaldo from Armida’s arms:

(Gregory Kunde,  Bruce Fowler and Jorio Zennaro)

But no kidding, the biggest razzle dazzle in a an opera filled with forward momentum, allegri and long sweet vocal lines is the ultimate seduction, Armida’s aria in Act II, D’amor al dolce impero.  In 1952 Armida had its first production  in 100 years, in Florence, starring the 28 year old Maria Callas,  fat, corseted and banana curled within an inch of her life. Who cared? That big, dark, troubled voice tossed off Armida as if it were a school yard rhyme:

(Maria Callas, Florence May Festival, April 26, 1952, Tullio Serfain conducting)

Mary Zimmerman is the stage director for our May 1st Met extravaganza. She’s the delight of several and the despair of many, as she ignores the wishes of Donizetti and Bellini in previous Met outings (La sonnambula set in Manhattan’s Soho circa 2006 compete with cell phones) but the sets at least promise gargantuan butterflies and a feast for the eyes. Renee Fleming is very much a looker with a voice, if not always a temperament, to match. And then there are our tenors, led by Ohio’s Lawrence Brownlee, quickly making his name as a tenore di grazia par excellence.  The Met’s Armida promises to be a riot, in both good and controversial ways.  Don’t miss it!

–Christopher Purdy

The great Italian soprano Magda Olivero turns 100 on March 25th.

Magda Olivero

She is reported to be cheerful, in good health, still singing and living in Milan surrounded by admiration. I imagine her birthday will be an Event in Italy. Olivero is the last link we have to the Italian opera composers of the 20th century. If she barely missed Puccini (she was fourteen when he died so who knows?) she worked closely with Pietro Mascagni, Francesco Cilea, Franco Alfano and Riccardo Zandonai.

It is a bit of a misnomer to identify Olivero has a verista as it is to pigeonhole these composers as exponents of verismo. “Truth”, the verismo movement in opera, began in the late 19th century, and while it was Italian heavy it included operas in French and German and has its roots in the novels of  Zola and Balzac. Verismo was meant to depict every day life in immediate language-the vernacular. Thus music was a bit sidelined and opera singers of this period were valued for the primacy of the words.

Olivero was made for this.  Her singing voice was almost beside the point. It retained a thready, rather hollow tone. She had all the notes and she was intensely musical, but if you want great lush singing, stick with Tebaldi and Leontyne Price. Olivero could tear your guts out with a look . What I love about her singing is absolute commitment to the drama.  Don’t believe me? Here she is at age 83 singing the aria Io son l’umile ancella. This comes from Francesco Cilea’s opera Adriana Lecouvreur-a work closely associated with Olivero.  She retired early, in 1941, eight years into her career, after her first marriage.  Cilea asked her to return to sing one more performance of Adriana for him.  Alas, he died before the performance, but in 1950 Olivero returned to the stage.  Over forty years after this “comeback” she was still going strong. Listen to the firm line, the fine sense of pitch and the complete mastery of the text. And listen to the control and the exquisite pianissimo. These from a woman in her 80s.

Olivero was all aobut text. She took what voice she had and fitted into the dramatic situations as she understood them. She could be humble, imperious, charming, demented and simple. She had no fear. Her Tosca in Boston was heavily made up but at the end she leaped a good ten feet into the air and went flying-at age 66-none of this looking for the mattress and mincing around. Her B flat at the final “Avanti a dio” is still bouncing off the walls near Fenway Park.  (I write about this Tosca elsewhere on this blog.  Search Magda Olivero)

She made her debut at the Met in April of 1975.  She sang Tosca:

They yelled and screamed when she came on, causing Jan Behr, the

Magda Olivero, Tosca, Met 1975

conductor, to stop the music and wait until the excitement subsided.  They broke into arias wiTh bravos…At the end there was a twenty minute ovation for the lady. It was one of the longest ovations in recent Metropolitan history…Singers of Miss Olivero’s day  were taught to convey mood and expression so that the last person in the balcony could know what was going on. The bad artists went about it silent move style.  The good ones, like Miss Olivero, moved hands, shoulders, body in one grand, fluid line.  It was history come to life last night as the soprano, despite her age, gave us a feminine, fiery, utterly convincing Tosca.  Vocally things were even a little better than anticipated.  Holding herself back, pacing herself like the experienced artist she is, Miss Olivero got off some amazingly strong high notes…Miss Olivero must necessarily represent the art of singing rather than singing itself.”–Harold C. Schonberg, New York Times, April 4, 1975

Here’s Vissi d’arte from the belated Met debut:

By 1975 Olivero had sung in Dallas, San Francisco, Philadelphia and Newark. She had a cult following in the states-an enormous one-and in those days before downloads and with few commercial recordings you had to really want to see he r. And many many people did.  She did the Met tour as Tosca in 1979, with Pavarotti-who was reverential and who wept at the ferocious curtain calls granted the lady (I was there). By this time,  Olivero had been singing professionally throughout Europe and South America since 1933:  she sang operas by Monteverdi, Mozart, Verdi, Puccini, the aforementioned veristi plus Wagner a’l'italiana.  She made Adriana Lecourvreur play like Beethoven in a way even Tebaldi never approached.

Here’s an encore from Magda Olivero.  Puccini’s O mio babbino caro from Gianni Schicchi . She’s a youthful 52 here, at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam in 1962:

Happy birthday Magda Olivero e grazie. Vissi d’arte, indeed!

–Christopher Purdy