I ran Charles a quite interesting documentary called The Art of Singing, compiled by a company called NVC Arts in 1996 and purporting to show the history of opera singing in the 20th century as documented on film —though it really only showed the first two-thirds of the 20th century: it came to a screeching halt in 1964 with Maria Callas and Tito Gobbi in a bit of Act II of Puccini’s Tosca. The film begins with a montage of famous singers’ faces set to Enrico Caruso’s 1907 recording of “Vesti la giubba” from Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci and then shows clips from one of the two feature films Caruso made. I’ve seen it referred to elsewhere simply as My Cousin but the NVC Arts people gave the title as My Italian Cousin, and it cast Caruso in a dual role: as a world-famous Metropolitan Opera tenor and his hayseed cousin from Italy who comes to the U.S. to see him. The finale features Caruso singing “Vesti la giubba” and the original director, Edward José, actually had Caruso lip-synch to his record of the aria as he shot the scene. The distributor, Paramount, instructed theatres to install a phonograph and play Caruso’s record while the scene unreeled so, in 1916 (a decade before the advent of talkies), audiences would get to see and hear the great tenor on screen. Unfortunately, the experiment fell victim to the two obvious problems — the difficulty in synchronizing sound and picture and the even greater difficulty, before electric amplification existed, of making the sound loud enough to fill the theatre. The makers of this documentary chose not to try to synchronize Caruso’s image with his record; instead they had a silent movie-style orchestra play an instrumental version of the aria. The next clip was actually a French short from 1913 using an experimental sound process to synchronize actors lip-synching to one of the recordings of the sextet from Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor that featured Caruso.
Then we finally got
into some recordings from the talkie era — which Caruso missed by about five
years — including Vitaphone shorts of Giovanni Martinelli singing “Celeste
Aïda” and the quasi-operatic pop song “Torna a Surriento.” Oddly, he was way too mincing in the Aïda aria — the fact that his costume made him look like
the little teapot short and stout didn’t help, nor did his expansive, hammy
hand gestures — but sang “Torna a Surriento” (in a set supposedly representing
a gondola in Venice) with visceral power and authority. (If they wanted
Martinelli in opera they should have run his first Vitaphone short, an overwhelming performance of —
you guessed it — “Vesti la giubba” which was shown at the public debut of
Vitaphone in New York on August 6, 1926; when Turner Classic Movies presented
their reconstruction of this program I wrote, “Martinelli’s segment is by far
the best of the opera scenes; his voice rings out beautifully and it’s clear he
has some idea of what he’s doing dramatically — a pity they didn’t give him
another aria to fill out his segment to a full reel!”) The next sequence was
Martinelli’s great rival at the Met in the 1920’s, Beniamino Gigli (both had
been signed after Caruso’s untimely death in 1921 left the Met management
scrambling for a superstar tenor to replace him), in a stylish performance of
“Ombra mai fu” from Handel’s Serse
— the period-instrument fascists would probably have their little hissy-fits
about what Gigli did to this piece (the source is probably one of his popular
films from the late 1930’s and early 1940’s and the scene represents a radio
broadcast; he’s backed by a chamber orchestra and a quite prominent, visually and audibly, organ) but he lavishes his honeyed lyricism
on it and for once he’s restrained emotionally (in later opera arias he was
great but tended to overact — in 1927 he did a Vitaphone short of the end of Cavalleria
Rusticana and tore the music to tatters; 13
years later when he made his complete recording he was much more disciplined,
though I suspect that was because composer Pietro Mascagni was conducting the
recording himself and read Gigli the riot act.)
Next up was another lyric
tenor, Tito Schipa, doing a lovely version of “M’appari” from Flotow’s Martha (a standard repertory opera in the first half of the
20th century before it almost completely disappeared, leaving behind
only this aria and Flotow’s lovely setting of the folk song “The Last Rose of
Summer). Afterwards we got our first non-tenor, baritone Giuseppe di Luca, in
another surprisingly mincing performance of “Largo al factotum” from Rossini’s The
Barber of Seville. I suspect the producers
were constrained by what actually got filmed — di Luca’s signature role was
Rigoletto and I’d much rather we had some of that on film (his records as the jester are overwhelming)
— but he seemed miscast as Figaro even though he was in excellent voice and
managed the staccato patter of the aria quite well. After di Luca we got a very strange clip that appears to be the only
audio-visual record of soprano Luisa Tetrazzini; shot well after her
retirement, she’s shown first listening to Caruso’s recording of “M’appari” from
Martha and then singing along
with it, an odd but quite moving tribute to her deceased colleague. Then
there’s a clip from the quite interesting 1934 British musical Evensong, starring Evelyn Laye as a great soprano who makes
it big and then stays too long at the top, continuing to sing even after her
voice has got quite worn and her name no longer packs the box-office punch it
once did. We don’t actually get to hear Laye sing on this compilation (even
though she anticipated Jeanette MacDonald in being both a great singer and a
quite good on-screen movie actor); instead we see her warming up for a
production of Puccini’s La Bohème
and having a diva hissy-fit over the fact that the mezzo singing Musetta is
being billed right under her with her name in just as big letters. Then we hear
the mezzo rehearsing Musetta’s waltz — and she’s the real-life Spanish mezzo
Conchita Supervía, two years before her tragic death in childbirth, singing the
hell out of the piece and making it clear just what Laye’s character is so
worked up about. (When Charles and I watched Evensong complete I found myself wishing that Warner Bros.
would have picked up the remake rights and shot a U.S. version; if they had
found her a suitable voice double the lead role would have been quite good for
Bette Davis.)
Just about everything in the Art of Singing compilation up to this point seems like a warmup
once we come to the next two clips, the “Habañera” and “Chanson bohème” from
Bizet’s Carmen (annoyingly shown
in reverse order) as sung by Rosa Ponselle with piano accompaniment in a 1936
screen test she shot for MGM. One wonders why they didn’t sign her — probably
because she was 40 years old, a problematic age to continue a movie career and
a virtually impossible one for a woman to start one; also they had Jeanette MacDonald under contract
and the year before she had rocketed to superstardom in Naughty
Marietta, her first film with baritone
Nelson Eddy — because she’s utterly overwhelming on screen. The two bits are
separated by an interview with Ponselle in which she says she particularly
liked the part of Carmen because she got to be wild, and for the first time in
this documentary we’re seeing a singer not only giving her all on screen but
showing off the charisma and dramatic power that must have wowed audiences who
got to see her live. Since it was only a test (though they got a brilliant
cinematographer to shoot it — William Daniels, Garbo’s favorite) Ponselle got
the rare privilege of actually being able to sing on camera instead of having
to pre-record her vocal and then lip-synch to it on screen. Mad magazine once lampooned the whole idea of
pre-recording in their parody of The Sound of Music, which opened with Julie Andrews dancing around the
mountaintop and rows of monitor speakers all around her, and the words of her
song were, “I’m not singing now, I am pre-recorded/I’m just mouthing words I
have sung before/And how does it feel to be singing nothing?/It’s an awful
bore.”
There’s a later sequence of Risë Stevens singing “My heart at thy sweet
voice” from Saint-Saëns’ opera Samson and Delilah, from the 1941 MGM musical The Chocolate
Soldier (in which she was tried out as an
alternate partner for Nelson Eddy), and she recalled that though she made the
pre-recording at score pitch, on camera she was instructed to sing it an octave
lower so the motions of the face while singing wouldn’t contort her looks and
she’d be as glamorous as possible — and what the sheer act of singing can do to
distort an otherwise good-looking person became all too obvious in a later clip
of Leontyne Price performing, what else, “O patria mia” from her signature
role, Verdi’s Aïda. After
Ponselle’s overwhelming performance we get a clip of Richard Tauber singing
Schubert’s “Serenade,” a quite lovely performance (though there’s some
distortion in the sound quality) shot to make it look like he was accompanying
himself even though he almost certainly wasn’t (he was probably miming to a
pre-recording he’d made with a professional pianist). Then there are a couple of
clips of Feodor Chaliapin, one from a silent movie he made in Russia based on
Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera The Maid of Pskov and one from his film of Don Quixote, made in France in the 1930’s with German expat G.
W. Pabst directing and songs specially written for the movie by Jacques Ibert.
After that we get to see the
(in)famous film clip from the Paramount musical The Big Broadcast of
1938 featuring Kirsten Flagstad on a
papier-maché mountain crag, waving a spear around like a baseball bat and
singing Brünnhilde’s Battle Cry from Act II of Wagner’s Die Walküre — introduced by, of all people, Bob Hope in his film
debut. Flagstad is in absolutely spectacular voice — later she’d have trouble
with her upper register, but it was clear and amazing here — but the clip is
emblematic of the way opera singers got thrown into popular entertainments
then. In some ways that’s better than the way they’re treated now, firmly
ghettoized into their own teeny-tiny chunk of the entertainment industry
(unless someone like Luciano Pavarotti breaks out of the ghetto and becomes a
full-fledged member of the celebriati); at least in the 1930’s the big record companies and movie studios
gave enough exposure and publicity to classical music that it communicated the
message that if you wanted to be a well-rounded person you should like this!
After the Flagstad clip, Lawrence Tibbett was shown in a
clip of the “Toreador Song” from Carmen,
taken from his 1935 musical Metropolitan — the first official release from 20th Century-Fox and a
box-office disappointment, though the clip is absolutely galvanic and Tibbett
looks considerably sexier than he did in Cuban Love Song five years earlier (in which he looked like James
Cagney had suddenly developed a first-rate baritone voice). It was the first
clip since Ponselle’s that actually gave the experience of the intensity and
charisma the performer must have projected on stage, and it makes one wish (I
promised Charles I wouldn’t do too many what-if’s in connection with this
movie, but here’s one I can’t resist) that some enterprising studio had filmed Carmen complete with Ponselle in the title role, Charles
Kullmann as Don José, Tibbett as Escamillo and the fine, underrated soprano
Marion Talley as Micaëla. In case you’re wondering why I picked only American
singers for my dream cast, it’s because my fantasy includes doing Carmen in the original Opéra-Comique version with spoken dialogue, and persuading the
studio “suits” there’d be a market for it by doing it in English translation.
“That way it’s just a musical —
only with fantastic music!” I can imagine the producer saying to get it
green-lighted. After Tibbett’s incredible Toreador Song, there was a short
scene from the 1942 MGM short We Must Have Music — which has been shown several times on Turner
Classic Movies, mainly because Judy Garland sings its opening song (though that
part of it wasn’t included here) — as a lead-in to the clip of Risë Stevens
singing the Saint-Saëns Samson et Dalila aria “Mon Coeur s’ouvre à ta voix” and explaining that she was obliged
to sing it a full octave down on set when she was synchronizing to her
pre-recording of the aria so she would still look glamorous and her face
wouldn’t get those contortions that are inevitable when one sings, especially when one sings those thrilling high notes that are
one of the big appeals of opera. After that there was another excerpt from an
MGM musical, Luxury Liner (1947),
with Lauritz Melchior singing “Winterstürme” from Wagner’s Die
Walküre to piano accompaniment (and, like
the Tauber clip, it was made to look like Melchior was accompanying himself
even though he pretty clearly wasn’t), with soprano Marina “Nina” Koshetz
looking on — elsewhere in the movie they do the big soprano-tenor duet from Act
III of Aïda but it was obvious
the makers of The Art of Singing
wanted to showcase Melchior’s unparalled chops as a Wagnerian. (This was also
noteworthy as the first clip in the entire show that was in color.)
Then there
was another color clip, from the Sol Hurok biopic Tonight We Sing, featuring Ezio Pinza playing Feodor Chaliapin singing the Coronation Scene from
Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov — and,
much to my surprise, singing it in the original Russian instead of Italian, the language the Met
traditionally gave Boris in ever
since Toscanini conducted the U.S. premiere there in 1913. (Pinza’s surviving
Met broadcasts of Boris are in
Italian, as is his album of excerpts from Boris on Columbia.) Perhaps because he was playing
Chaliapin, he learned at least that scene in the original — quite possibly
phonetically (according to Irving Kolodin’s book The Opera Omnibus, Pinza never learned to read music; instead he
memorized all his parts by ear). Then there came 12 minutes or so of sheer
transcendence: Charles Laughton hosting an NBC program called Producer’s
Showcase and introducing Renata Tebaldi and
Jussi Björling in Act I of Puccini’s La Bohème from “Che gelida manina” on, leaving out the
outbursts from the other Bohemians between the two big arias and the final duet
but otherwise giving us three of the most emotionally charged “numbers” in all
opera with two of the greatest voices of all time. Björling wasn’t much to look
at — he was yet another tenor built like a fire hydrant — but once he opened
his mouth he created the romantic spell Puccini expected this music to cast,
and Tebaldi was every bit his equal, her voice radiant with young love and both
of them restraining the music,
working their way to the big climaxes instead of starting at 11 and telling the
audience, “You see how loud I can belt it out?” The final bars of “O soave
fanciulla” were a bit disappointing — NBC’s sound engineers decided to create
the diminuendo artificially by
putting an echo on Tebaldi’s and Björling’s voices instead of letting the
singers do it on their own, which they would have been perfectly capable of
doing — but that didn’t lessen the magic. Indeed, this 60-year-old clip (though
its date wasn’t specified) not only flashed us back to the days when the major
media companies still thought they had a public-service obligation to put
something other than tiresome but profitable banality on the air, it also
showed (in comparison to the earlier clips from movies) how much visual
representations of opera gain when the singers are actually performing in real
time instead of lip-synching to pre-recordings.
Just about anything after that extraordinary (and quite
long!) Bohème sequence might have seemed
an anticlimax, and what did come next was Victoria de los Angeles singing a
Spanish song by Manuel de Falla from her BBC-TV debut in 1962. (Ironically, it
was de los Angeles, not Tebaldi, who was Björling’s partner on the 1956
complete Bohème, conducted by Sir
Thomas Beecham, which is one of my two all-time favorite recordings of this
much-recorded opera; the 1974 Karajan version from Vienna with Pavarotti and
Freni is the other.) Afterwards came Joan Sutherland in a spectacular rendition
of the Queen’s cabaletta “O beau pays” from Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots — and as uneven as Meyerbeer’s operas (especially
his last three, Les Huguenots, Le Prophète and L’Africaine) are,
with passages of surpassing beauty alternating with pieces that sound like
movie music for Cecil B. DeMille, it still seems a pity that Mendelssohn’s reputation has recovered from Wagner’s
anti-Semitic assaults on him while Meyerbeer’s hasn’t. Then came the clip of
Leontyne Price singing “O patria mia” from Aïda, which became her signature role because she was the
first African-American singer to become a star singing leads (Marian Anderson
was a contralto and therefore doomed to supporting parts — and she was more
interested in a career as a concert singer anyway — and two quite good Black
singers preceded Price in leading soprano roles in mainstream operas,
Mattiwilda Dobbs and Gloria Davy, but they never made it to superstardom and
Price did) and therefore a lot of opera company directors figured, “She’s
Black, Aïda’s Ethiopian, let’s cast Price as Aïda!” (Price got fed up with
being typecast that way but she accepted it with enough grace that when she
retired from opera in 1985, she chose Aïda for her farewell performance at the Met.) The clip shows off Price’s
star quality; I remember seeing her in Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf
Naxos in San Francisco in 1977 and she
dominated the stage even though the staging required her to make her entrance
with her back to the audience. That
is stardom.
Then there was the next extended performance in the show, a U.S. TV
debut for Bulgarian bass Boris Christoff — who must have sorted out his
immigration problems by then (because he was from a socialist-bloc country the
U.S. immigration authorities had rejected his visa application when Rudolf Bing
tried to hire him to sing Philip II in the Met’s 1950 Don Carlos — plus ça change, plus ça même chose) — singing the final scene from Boris
Godunov with Nicola Moscona as Pimen and,
praise be, a real boy instead of a superannuated mezzo in drag playing his
pre-pubescent son and heir, Fyodor. I’ve never cared that much for
Christoff; he was a great singer
but he way overacted (so did Chaliapin,
but he was sui generis — still,
my favorite Borises are the subtler ones like Alexander Kipnis, Mark Reizen and
Martti Talvela). Next up was Magda Olivero’s “Vissi d’arte” and the Act III
duet (with an unidentified tenor) from Puccini’s Tosca — Olivero was interviewed at several points in the
program about other singers’ careers as well as her own, but unfortunately the
version we were watching contained neither subtitles nor voice-overs for her
Italian-language comments; and a narrator in English talking about how
remarkable it was that she made her Met debut without giving the non-cognoscenti a hint about just what was so remarkable about it:
she made it at age 65 after an up-and-down career in which she had made a big
splash in Italy in the late 1930’s, made a few recordings (including singing
Liù in the first commercial recording of Puccini’s Turandot), retired in 1941 to get married and came back in
1950 after the death of her husband and at the behest of the composer Francesco
Cilèa, who wanted to hear her sing the title role of his opera Adriana
Lecouvreur one last time before he died. In the 1950’s she rebuilt her reputation in
Europe and by the late 1960’s she was being hailed as the last exemplar of the
true verismo singing style; she
continued to perform live until 1981 and she’s still alive today at age 103.
(In the degrees-of-separation department: Harvey Milk’s last public appearance
was at the San Francisco Opera to watch Olivero in Tosca in November, 1978 — two days before Milk was killed.
I was at that performance too, and it was a night to remember even without that
macabre aftermath.)
They first showed newsreel or TV footage of her arriving in Lisbon in March 1958 to sing the famous “Lisbon Traviata”; then they showed what was described as “newly discovered footage” of the Lisbon Traviata itself (the “Parigi, o cara” sequence, synched to the broadcast recording released in 1980, obviously shot by someone who smuggled a home movie camera into the theatre and did the best s/he could) and finally a clip from the famous complete Act II of Tosca with Callas and Tito Gobbi filmed for the BBC in February 1964. It remains one of the most intense performances of this music ever given — though the narration for The Art of Singing mentions neither Gobbi nor Alfredo Kraus, Callas’s partner in the Lisbon Traviata excerpt (a pity since they too were among the major voices of the 20th century!) — but I’d fault the producers of this film for excerpting “Vissi d’arte” and the dialogue with Scarpia immediately preceding it because the aria shows all too clearly Callas’s vocal weaknesses this late in her career, especially those notoriously wobbly high notes that her detractors seized on and her admirers felt they had to apologize for. Frankly, the high point of this performance (which I have on an EMI DVD release) is the very ending — the final confrontation between Tosca and Scarpia, her murder of him and her contemptuous dismissal, “È avanti lui tremava tutta Roma” (“Before that all Rome trembled”). As I wrote about that film when I screened it “complete,” “Most singers — even Callas on some of her surviving recordings — scream this out like Anna Magnani, who actually played Tosca in a 1948 film, or rather played an opera singer at once singing and living the opera’s plot during the Nazi occupation of Rome in the latter part of World War II; here Callas tosses off the line with a kind of breezy contempt that works better than the usual melodramatics.” That is what we Callas fans (and I definitely count myself as a Callasophile, not a Callasophobe, though that doesn’t stop me from appreciating the lovely, radiant singing Renata Tebaldi did in her clip on this show; just as jazz fans can like both Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald, why can’t opera fans like both Callas and Tebaldi?) love about her: her questing spirit, her willingness to look at every moment of every role afresh and look for the dramatic truth behind the music instead of just singing it the way the divas of a previous generation did (though there were singing actresses of Callas’s stature well before her: to name three of whom we have enough records to support their reputations, Geraldine Farrar — who I’m rather startled to see was not represented here since she became a major star in silent films! — Mary Garden and Rosa Ponselle). It’s a bit disappointing that the show cuts off here in 1964 — though one can readily imagine both how nightmarish and how expensive the negotiations would have been for the rights to include the superstars of the most recent past, including Pavarotti, Domingo and Carreras, whose “Three Tenors” mega-concerts were game-changers in restoring the popular appeal of opera and its practitioners.
