Chapter Three
The beginning of the nineteenth century saw the dawn of the Age of Grand Opera. Like any other period of history, there was no neat chronological division of the art of singing, but there were various influences swirling around that put pressure on artists to adapt to changing times. As we have seen, the static state of opera and of singing of the previous two centuries would no longer do. The reasons for this were manifold.
1. Political changes. The whole fabric of society was forever altered by the American and French revolutions, the Napoleonic wars, and the upheavals of 1848, which saw the establishment of national consciousness, especially in Italy and Germany. Political ideas about the worth of the individual gave rise to poetic and literary works in the birth of Romanticism, which lessened interest in “magnanimous tyrants,” Greek gods, pastoral scenes, and perukes and knee-britches. There was headier stuff for composers to write about—madness, the outcasts of society, Gothic tales, tubercular courtesans, and Norse legends.
2. The growth, in both size and efficiency, of the orchestra. Even Mozart was considered by older artists, like Catalani, as writing accompaniments that “do not constitute a guard of honor for the melody, but rather a police escort.” What would they have thought of the music of Wagner, where the voice becomes rather like an obbligato, with the essential drama occurring in the orchestra? Another factor contributing to the more brilliant sound of the orchestra was the gradual rise in pitch.
3. The extinction of the institution of the castrati. The last of the great musici was Giovanni-Battista Velluti (1781–1861) for whom Rossini wrote Aureliano in Palmira and Meyerbeer Il crociato in Egitto.
4. The rise of the “singing actor.” There had been artists, like Pacchierotti, who were renowned for the emotional depth of their singing, but they were only “acting with the voice.” This was an indispensable requisite for the lyric artist, to be sure, but the new trend was to invest the character with naturalistic movement, gesture, make-up, and costume, which contributed to a more realistic portrayal.
5. Monumental changes in vocal technique, especially that of the male singer and the emergence of the normal male singer in leading roles and the identification of voices with dramatic archetypes; that is, the tenor as young romantic lead, the baritone as villain, brother, or friend, and the bass as father, sage, or king. The male soprano or alto as a military hero would seem curious and anachronistic by 1825.
6. The development of special vocal categories to cope with the increasingly divergent demands of the music. Such specialties as hochdramatisch Sopran or tenore robusto were unknown until the middle of the nineteenth century.
7. The progressive assumption of control of performance by the composer and his supposed representative, the star conductor. No longer would the singer and composer be considered as equal partners, but the performer (instrumental as well as well as vocal) would gradually assume the role of devoted acolyte to the holy composer’s wishes. This progression is not necessarily evil, but it did put an end to spontaneity as well as curbing admitted abuses by the artists. Beethoven and Rossini were the chief architects of this trend. Rossini wrote in 1851, “A good singer should only be the conscientious interpreter of the composer’s ideas, endeavouring to express them as effectively as possible and to present them as clearly as they can be presented. . . . In short, the composer and the poet alone have any serious claim to be regarded as creators.”1 Much later on, Verdi complained about the credit for Otello given to the two “creators” of the lead roles, Victor Maurel and Francesco Tamagno. He wrote ironically, “Well, well, so Otello is making out without the great singers who created the principal roles. I was so used to hearing of their glory that I thought Otello was ascribable to them alone. You are stripping me of an illusion when you say that the Moor can go over without benefit of stars.”2
The Age of Bel Canto spanned roughly two hundred years, and we can say that the same is true for the Age of Grand Opera, for we are still in it. The repertoire of the opera houses (and symphony orchestras) is still largely made up of nineteenth-century masterpieces. As far as opera is concerned, vocally speaking, there was no place for composers to go after the works of Richard Wagner, because the limit of human vocal power and endurance was reached in Tristan und Isolde in 1865 and Der Ring des Nibelungen in 1876. There will surely be other developments in style and idiom in the future, but no more can be asked from the unamplified human voice than these gargantuan works.
Today we tend to think of Rossini as an opera buffa composer, but his real importance was in the development of the dramatic opera. As a student, he was called Il Tedeschino (the little German) for his preoccupation with Haydn and Mozart, and, even then, some of the singers in his first opera, La cambiale di matrimonio (1810), complained that his orchestra was too obtrusive. In such works as Tancredi, Otello, Semiramide, and especially William Tell, Rossini led the way toward the future. Wagner himself told Rossini that there were musical ideas in William Tell that anticipated his own theories, and Verdi castigated the Parisians for their failure to wholly appreciate the opera.
THE DIVAS
Giuditta Pasta (1798–1865)
It is curious that Rossini did not understand nor appreciate the artist who literally created the special category of Dramatic Soprano. Stendhal did. In his Life of Rossini, when Pasta was only twenty-five, he devoted an entire chapter to her. Stendhal, ever the champion of spontaneity, wrote:
If Rossini were once fully convinced of the perfect intelligence, moderation, and good taste, of which Madame Pasta gives ample evidence in her own fiorature; if he could once grasp the principle that no ornamentation is so sure and so effective as that which springs from the spontaneous invention and emotional response of the singer, I cannot see how he could fail to be cured of his apprehension, and so once more entrust the delicate art of embellishment to the inspiration this truly great singer.3
Unfortunately Rossini never took this excellent advice and Pasta had to make do with the works of minor composers like Mayr, Paisiello, and Pacini. Only when her powers were declining did she encounter younger composers who understood her genius, for Pasta was the first Norma and La Sonnambula of Bellini, and Donizetti wrote Anna Bolena for her. Sometimes in the history of singing, the transcending genius of an artist is capable of transforming a work beyond the intent of the composer into something much greater. For example, in our time Jon Vickers has changed the role of Peter Grimes into a far more dramatic opera through sheer vocal and theatrical power. Pasta transformed Giovanni Simone Mayr’s pallid Medea into something “magical and fearful,” in Henry F. Chorley’s words. Many have compared Pasta’s talent with that of Maria Callas, who manifested the same burning intensity in her impersonations.
Giuditta Pasta was born Giuditta Negri of Jewish parents in Saronno, near Milan. She received a conservatory education in Milan and made her debut at eighteen, not an unusual age in those days. She appeared in Italian provincial theaters, married a tenor named Pasta, and made her way to Paris, where she had little success and even became one of Catalani’s “puppets.” Dissatisfied with her singing, she withdrew for a time for further study and returned to the stage in Venice in 1819. This time she attracted great attention. She then appeared at the Théâtre-Italien in Paris, swept all before her in Verona, and became the greatest star of her time on her return to Paris in 1822. She defended her title for ten years against all comers in an era that boasted a galaxy of luminaries, including Maria Malibran, Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, Henriette Sontag, and Giulia Grisi.
Pasta could not be more different from the example of Angelica Catalani. She is described as being small in stature but with a queenly bearing, with dark eyes and fine features. Her singing was well adapted to the long lines of Bellini’s melodies, in contrast to the vocal fireworks of her predecessor. Ignaz Moscheles (1794–1840) described Pasta’s singing, “Veiled at first, the voice later breaks forth triumphantly like the sun breaking through a fogbank.”4 This leads one to believe that her attacks were not sufficiently developed and depended upon the tension of performance for her vocal cords to close properly. Be that as it may, she was unquestionably a great singer:
Figure 3.1. Nineteenth-Century Divas. Clockwise from top: Mlle. Mars (Anne Francoise Hyppolyte Boutet—actress), Maria Malibran-Garcia, Mlle. Georges (Marguerite-Josèphine Weimer—actress), Giuditta Pasta, Laure Cinti (Cinthie), and Henriette Sontag.
Madame Pasta’s voice has a considerable range. She can achieve perfect resonance on a note as low as bottom A, and can rise as high as C-sharp, or even to a slightly sharpened D; and she possesses the rare ability to be able to sing contralto as easily as she can sing soprano. I would suggest, in spite of my atrocious lack of technical knowledge, that the true designation of her voice is mezzo-soprano.5
The creator of Norma showed a genius for embellishment. Fétis said, “she was but a moderate musician, but she instinctively understood that the kind of ornaments introduced by Rossini could only rest a claim for novelty on their supporting harmony; and she therefore invented the embellishments in arpeggio which were afterwards carried to a still higher pitch of excellence by Malibran.”6 Once Pasta settled upon an ornament, she never changed it, even after twenty years. In this she foreshadowed modern singers, who are never allowed flights of momentary inspiration for improvisation and so work everything out beforehand.
It was in her acting that Pasta could be considered the progenitor of all dramatic sopranos. The Paris correspondent of the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung offered this review of Pasta in Paisiello’s Nina in 1824:
Not only did this enchantress hold her listeners spellbound; she herself was so seized and carried away that she collapsed before the end. She was recalled, and duly appeared, but what a sight! Too weak to walk alone, supported by helping hands, more carried than walking, tears streaming down her pale cheeks, every muscle in the expressive face in movement, and reflecting as touchingly as her singing, the depth of her emotions! The applause rose to the highest conceivable pitch—and she fainted!7
Pasta, like Callas, was said to have to fight a recalcitrant instrument her whole career. Taking the above description of her performances into account, one can easily understand how such dramatic intensity could take its toll on the ability of the performer to control the voice. Method acting is not for opera singers! Zinka Milanov once gave this advice to a young singer: “Don’t act darling; it’s bad for the voice!”
People have frequently sounded Madame Pasta’s friends as to who taught her her craft as an actress. The answer is—no one! The only instruction which she has ever received has come straight from her own heart, from her own acutely sensitive reactions to the most delicate nuances of human passions, and from her admiration, so boundless as to verge upon the limits of absurdity, for ideal beauty.8
Pasta, like many other divas, tarried too long on the stage. Like Patti, she found ways to compensate for deficiencies when her powers were waning. She was incapable of giving less than all of her strength and vitality in a performance. Pauline Viardot attended a performance with Chorley of scenes from Anna Bolena in 1850 when Pasta was fifty-two. Her voice was in ruins and she was not presented to her best advantage in costume or hair dressing. Chorley reported that:
a more painful or disastrous spectacle could hardly be looked on.
The first scene was Ann Boleyn’s duet with Jane Seymour. The old spirit was heard and seen in Madame Pasta’s “Sorgi!” and the gesture with which she signed to her penitent rival to rise. Later she attempted the final mad scene of the opera. By that time, tired, unprepared, in ruin as she was, she had rallied a little. When, on Ann Boleyn’s hearing the coronation music for her rival, the heroine searches for her own crown on her brow, Madame Pasta wildly turned in the direction of the festive sounds, the old irresistible charm broke out; nay, even in the final song, with its roulades and its scales of shakes ascending by semitones, the consummate vocalist and tragedienne, able to combine form with meaning—the moment of the situation with such personal and musical display as form an integral part of operatic art—was indicated; at least in the apprehension of the younger artist.
“You are right!” was Madame Viardot’s quick and heartfelt response (her eyes full of tears) to a friend beside her; “You are right! It is like the Last Supper of Da Vinci at Milan—a wreck of a picture, but the picture is the greatest in the world!”9
The ornaments and embellishments used by Pasta have passed into the realm of tradition and have been unconsciously used by generations of singers who have essayed the great dramatic Bel Canto works that she created. These alterations have been collected by Luigi Ricci, Estelle Liebling, and others and are available to singers who wish to seek them out.
Maria Malibran (1808–1836)
Maria Malibran passed like a starburst through the operatic firmament of the Age of Grand Opera. She was only twenty-eight when she died, a victim of a fall from a horse. Malibran, born Maria Felicita Garcia, was the eldest child of Manuel Garcia I and born to the stage. The name Malibran came from a short-lived marriage to a French banker. Malibran’s debut came in 1825, and her success was immediate. After an apprenticeship with her father’s company, which included a trip to New York, she became an international star. From 1830 on, Malibran received the adulation of crowds of worshippers, including drawing her carriage through the streets, strewing her path with flowers, and announcement of her arrival in Venice with a trumpet fanfare.
Malibran was like Pasta in many ways. They were both mezzo-sopranos (some say that Malibran was a contralto) but they had wide ranges and were able to sing the great dramatic soprano parts of their day. Each was reckless of personal cost in their portrayals on the stage, but Pasta had a more queenly bearing, while Malibran exuded a feminine vulnerability, and her excitable temperament was given to audacious improvisation in both music and stage business. These portrayals were criticized as being “over the top” by some more pedantic critics, but her many fans included Mendelssohn, Chopin, Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti and Liszt. There are many legends about Malibran; one of them is that she had a premonition of her own death and so “burned the candle at both ends” by living her life at a frantic pace. Her many accomplishments, besides her vocal and histrionic feats, included painting, composition, playing the piano, and an extraordinary facility with languages.
Figure 3.2. Maria Malibran.
Maria Malibran had been schooled (harshly) by her father and so was a better singer than Pasta, although her voice remained somewhat intractable. Her steely will power had to give way to periods of enforced vocal rest. Donizetti complained that her “voicelessness” contributed to the failure of the premiere of Maria Stuarda in 1835. No better example of the spirit of Romanticism can be found than that of Maria Malibran in her daring, courage, impulsiveness, ambition, and reckless abandon. Five months after her tragic accident, she insisted upon singing in a concert in Manchester, though still unwell. She collapsed and was carried into her room, where she was bled and died of “nervous fever” on September 23, 1836.
Pauline Viardot-Garcia (1821–1910)
Michelle Ferdinande Pauline Garcia, youngest daughter of Manuel Garcia I, was known to the world as Pauline Viardot. Her sister, Maria Malibran, is better known because of her brilliant success, legendary life, and early death. However, Pauline was perhaps the most brilliant of the Garcia family. As a child she was very intelligent, learned languages “as if at play,” and was equally adept as a portrait painter. She was an accomplished pianist and accompanied the lessons in her father’s studio at the age of eight. She always felt that she profited from this experience more than the students did. Three of these exercises will be found at the end of this book.
Figure 3.3. Pauline Viardot-Garcia.
Viardot first appeared as Desdemona in Rossini’s Otello in 1839. She was engaged for the Théâtre-Italien by the impresario Louis Viardot, whom she subsequently married in 1841. At the Théâtre-Italien she appeared with all the vocal stars of the day, including Persiani, Grisi, Lablache, Tamburini, and Rubini. Viardot was a mezzo-soprano who had a voice of over three octaves in range. She sang an incredible variety of parts, including Orphée in Berlioz’s version of Gluck’s Orfeo, her greatest accomplishment. They included Desdemona, Cenerentola, Rosina, Norma, Adalgisa, Arsace, Amina, Romeo, Lucia, Maria di Rohan, Ninette, Leonora (La Favorita), Azucena, Donna Anna, Zerlina, Rachel, Iphigénie, Alice, Isabelle, and Valentine. She created the parts of Fidès in Le Prophet of Meyerbeer and Sapho, written for her by Gounod, as well as the Alto Rhapsody of Brahms and the Liederkreis, Op. 24, of Schumann.
In addition Pauline Viardot was a composer (as was Malibran), publishing collections of original songs and vocal exercises and several operettas. After 1871 she devoted herself to teaching in Paris, numbering among her pupils Marianne Brandt, Désirée Artôt, and Anna Maria Orgeni.
Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient (1804–1860)
One of Malibran’s devoted fans was the originator of a very different kind of vocal tradition—that of the hochdramatisch Sopran, the dramatic soprano of the German repertoire. Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient was also a theater child; her mother was a celebrated actress and her father a baritone well known for his portrayal of Don Giovanni. Wilhelmine’s musical education came from her mother, who had been an opera singer for ten years before moving on to the legitimate theater. Wilhelmine Schröder made her debut at the age of sixteen as Pamina and the next year she sang Agathe in Der Freischütz under Weber’s direction. He is quoted as saying “She is the best Agathe in the world, and surpassed anything that I had conceived for the role.”10 Then, in 1822, she appeared in a revival of Fidelio and transformed the role of Leonore into the dramatic vehicle that we are accustomed to today. Beethoven was present at the first performance and promised to write another opera for her. Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient (her married name) was much more actress than singer. She excelled in “declamatory song” but was not very successful in florid music. Chorley said, “her execution was bad and heavy. There was an air of strain and spasm throughout her performances.”11 But Schröder-Devrient, like Pasta and Malibran, had the reckless romantic air of abandon about her. Although she was not nearly the singer that they were, her unique style of acting and declamatory singing made a great impact upon the audience. One could make the statement that, while the two previous ladies were “acting singers,” Schröder-Devrient was the first “singing actress.” Like Malibran, she insisted that her private life should not be bound by convention, was married three times, and had numerous affairs. She always felt that her calling had been to represent German music and that her efforts had largely been in vain. She was wrong.
There was one member of the audience of Fidelio in 1829 who was so profoundly influenced by Schröder-Devrient’s art that he rushed out to write her a letter solemnly stating that from that day his life had acquired its meaning and that, if he should ever amount to anything in the world of art, she would be responsible for that success. That romantic dreamer was Richard Wagner. He wrote, “Whoever remembers this remarkable woman at that stage of her career will testify to the almost demoniacal warmth radiated by the human-ecstatic achievement of this incomparable artist.”12 Wagner went on to write Adriano in Rienzi, Senta in Der fliegende Holländer, and Venus in Tannhäuser for Schröder-Devrient. Thus began the line of great German dramatic sopranos—Amalie Materna, Lilli Lehmann, and in our day, Kirsten Flagstad and Birgit Nilsson.
Figure 3.4. Lilli Lehmann as Brünnhilde in Wagner’s Die Walküre.
THE ART SONG
We pause in our narrative of the Age of Grand Opera to consider another development that occurred during this time—the advent of the art song, specifically the German lied. It has been estimated that lieder make up eighty percent of the world’s great art song literature. This is not to slight the Italian and French composers, but, as we have seen, they were occupied with opera for three hundred years. Prior to the nineteenth century, song literature was largely made up of folk songs sung by ordinary people engaged in daily activities of work and play. Songs were considered trifles, even in Mozart’s time, and were only poor relations of opera. It is significant that, excepting Beethoven, the great song composers of the era—Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, and the like—were not successful opera composers. The song recital was still conceived as an intimate event, to be performed for a circle of friends in someone’s drawing room. The Schubertiades, featuring songs written for Schubert’s friends, and the Liederabende at the Schumanns’, were typical of the song performances of this time. These composers would probably have been astonished at a Winterreise given in a place like Carnegie Hall.
The song recital devoted to a single artist was still rare throughout the nineteenth century. Most concerts featured opera singers who would offer a few songs and arias, and the rest of the bill was filled out with assisting artists, such as violinists, pianists, or secondary singers for duets or other ensembles.
An die ferne Geliebte of Beethoven was really the first song cycle and began the elevation of the art song to the realm of high art. Two of the artists we have mentioned were early pioneers in the presentation of the art song for the concert going public. The first was Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, who, when she could no longer sing the dramatic roles she was famous for, championed the songs of Beethoven, Schubert, and Schumann in recitals. Some critics complained that her singing was more acting and declamation than real singing, but, to my way of thinking, this repertoire is very dramatic, and her performances would have been infinitely preferable to the precious attitudinizing of some lieder specialists. The other was Adolphe Nourrit, who was also a dramatic artist. Nourrit introduced many of Schubert’s songs in his own translations to the French public. At his funeral, Chopin softly played Schubert’s Die Sterne on the organ of Notre Dame.
THE EVOLUTION OF THE MODERN TENOR
There were two divergent streams of operatic music in the nineteenth century. The music of Donizetti, Bellini, Rossini, and the early Verdi continued the traditions of Bel Canto, mining the possibilities of florid music to express strong dramatic situations, and dominated by melody and the vocal line. The other, which Wagner called Musik der Zukunft (Music of the Future), gave more importance to the orchestra and new harmonic ideas. Verdi was once asked what he thought of Wagner. He very aptly replied: “We are the children of Palestrina while Wagner is the child of Bach.”
The Italian vocal tradition for the tenor voice was carried on by an extraordinary group of high tenors that were called contraltinos or haute contres. The list includes Giovanni Ansani (or Anzani), the two Davides—Giacomo and Giovanni, Andrea Nozzari, Giovanni-Battista Rubini, and Manuel Garcia I. Many of these men were taught by the castrati and sang for a public accustomed to hearing heroic parts sung by male sopranos and altos. I am of the opinion that the extraordinarily high parts of these operas were negotiated by the use of the narrow passaggio and the Vowel Register, a name given to it by Berton Coffin. I do not believe that the sound was like that of present day falsettists, who are called countertenors, but rather that it was a slender, full-voiced sound that was never allowed to spread into a baritonal quality. In physical terms, this means that the vocal cords vibrate upon their full length, but use only the edges rather than their full thickness. Juan Diego Flórez and Alfredo Kraus are modern tenors who use such a technique.
Figure 3.5. Giovanni Battista Rubini as Arturo in Bellini’s I Puritani.
Giovanni-Battista Rubini (1795–1854)
The first of these virtuoso tenors to achieve international fame in a manner comparable to the castrati and the prima donnas was Giovanni Battista Rubini. Far from being a new kind of dramatic tenor, Rubini was the last of the line of great male singers of the Age of Bel Canto. He had much more in common with Pacchierotti than he did with Duprez. Even sharing the stage with volatile actresses like Pasta and Malibran, he never bothered to act much. Rubini did all his acting with his voice and his musical imagination. From his first appearance in La Cenerentola in Paris in 1825 he was hailed as the “King of Tenors.”
Rubini’s voice extended from E of the bass clef to B of the treble, in chest notes [mixed register], besides commanding a falsetto register as far as F or even G above that. A master of every kind of florid execution, and delighting at times in its display, no one seems ever to have equaled him when he turned these powers into the channel of emotional vocal expression, nor to have produced so magical an effect by the singing of a simple pathetic melody, without ornaments of any kind.13
Rubini used strong contrasts between forte and piano to great effect and “he was the earliest to use that thrill of the voice known as the vibrato.”14 I take this last to mean that fast vibrato, so disconcerting to some modern listeners, that is characteristic of the singing of Fernando de Lucia (1860–1925), Allesandro Bonci (1870–1940), and Aureliano Pertile (1885–1952). This “thrill of the voice” was used to suggest strong emotion by great Italian artists and is not a vocal defect.
Rubini began his career in the operas of Rossini but became immortal as the tenor of Bellini. The long high-flying vocal lines of La sonnambula, I puritani, and especially, Il pirata were exactly suited to the Rubini’s vocal talents. Indeed, Rubini lived in Bellini’s house during the composition of Il pirata and sang the arias as they were being composed. Also, Donizetti’s success came only after Rubini had created the role of Lord Riccardo Percy in Anna Bolena in 1830. There have been few tenors since who could do justice to these operas. During the height of the Romantic era, several pianists like Anton Rubinstein and Franz Liszt stated that they had learned to phrase at the piano from listening to Rubini sing. Rubini and Liszt even toured together. In our time Vladimir Horowitz stated that, in his youth, he listened to recordings of great singers instead of pianists.
Manuel del Popolo Vicente Garcia (1775–1832)
Henry Chorley said of Rubini: “The tradition of his method died with him.”15 Nothing of the kind can be said about Garcia, the founder of an illustrious family of singers and teachers whose roots ran back to Porpora and whose influence is still very strong among singers and teachers of the twenty-first century. Garcia, “one of the most dynamic musical personalities of all time,”16 was not only a great tenor, but a teacher, composer, actor, conductor, and impresario. His daughters, Maria Malibran and Pauline Viardot, were also his pupils and counted among the outstanding singers of the nineteenth century. His son, Manuel Patricio Rodriguez, the fountainhead of modern vocal pedagogy, passed along his father’s precepts in his monumental books on the vocal art.
Figure 3.6. Manuel Garcia I.
Garcia Père was well known all over Spain as a singer, composer, and conductor by the time he was seventeen. In 1808 he made his debut in Paris and within a month he was the first tenor of the Théâtre-Italien. Stendhal says that he was remarkable for the “astonishingly assured quality of his singing.”17 In 1811 he traveled to Naples, where he met Ansani, who no doubt taught him secrets of the Porpora school of velocity. Rossini, in the first opera of his Neapolitan period, wrote one of the principal roles in Elizabetta for Garcia, and in 1816 he created the role of Almaviva in the immortal Barber of Seville. Nozzari sang the premiere of Otello, but Stendhal says that Rossini actually composed it for Garcia. He was unstinting in praise of Garcia’s interpretation, which shows that Garcia was a man of the theater as well as merely a superb singer: “Garcia, as Otello, shows unusual powers, not only as a remarkable singer, but as a considerable tragic actor; no-one could show a finer grasp of every thread in that infinitely subtle web of thought and feeling which goes to make up the violent and impassioned character of Desdemona’s lover.”18
In late 1816 Garcia left Naples for London and from there went to Paris. This trip was probably why he did not sing the premiere of Otello. While he was in Paris he became a member of Catalani’s troupe. Annoyed at Catalani’s management, he returned to London at the end of 1817. For the next several years he traveled back and forth between Paris and London, presenting his own operas as well as Otello, Il barbiere di Siviglia, and other warhorses.
In 1825 the Garcia troupe, which largely consisted of his illustrious family, brought Italian opera to New York for the first time. After a season in which he presented no less than eleven new operas, the troupe (except Maria) set out for Mexico City, where they produced eight new operas. On the way back, they were robbed of the entire proceeds of the Mexican season, including £6,000 in gold. Returning to Paris, Garcia was again at the Théâtre-Italien and devoted himself to the establishment of his famous singing school. Besides his own illustrious family, Garcia numbered among his pupils Henriette Méric-Lalande, and Adolphe Nourrit. In 1820 Garcia published his Exercises pour la voix, which includes difficult lessons he learned from Ansani and which was the basis for his son Manuel II’s work. Garcia also composed seventy-one Spanish, nineteen Italian, and seven French operas.
Adolphe Nourrit (1802–1838)
When Rossini moved to Paris in 1825, he began to compose Grand Opera, not for his former stalwart tenors, Nozzari, Giovanni Davide, or Manuel Garcia, but for a new kind of dramatic tenor—a singing actor named Adolphe Nourrit. Rossini was challenged by the necessity of changing his style to suit the French and mastering the niceties of the French language. In this he was helped by Nourrit, who was an exceptionally cultured and intelligent singer. In return, he gave voice lessons to Nourrit. Rossini must have been a very good singer, for he actually sang a duet from Il matrimonio segreto, by Domenico Cimarosa, with Catalani and “Largo al factotum” from Il barbiere di Siviglia while accompanying himself, in a concert in London in 1824. Wagner could also sing excerpts from his own music dramas. It would be well if modern vocal composers were trained singers; perhaps then some contemporary compositions would be more singer-friendly.
Adolph Nourrit was the son of Louis Nourrit (1780–1831), who had been the leading tenor at the Opéra in Paris, until replaced by his son in 1826. Adolphe was a brilliant actor, a good poet, a fine musician, well read, curious, a librettist of ballets, and a student of theatrical history. Besides his work with Rossini, Nourrit was the prize pupil of Manuel Garcia I. This schooling made it possible for him to cope with Rossini’s and other composers’ newly dramatic operas. Rossini wrote Néoclès in The Siege of Corinth, Aménophes in Moïse, Le Compte Ory, and Arnold in William Tell for Nourrit, who also sang the earlier Otello. Other composers were eager for Nourrit to create parts in their operas. Donizetti wrote Polyeucte for him; he was the first Masaniello in La Muette de Portici and Gustave in Gustave III, by Auber. Meyerbeer composed two of the most famous roles in the tenor repertoire—Raoul in Les Huguenots and Robert in Robert le Diable for him and he was the first Eléazar in La Juive of Halévy. Raoul and Eléazar were parts that were identified with Caruso, but Nourrit’s voice did not have the baritonal timbre of the great Italian. His high tones were taken in what Rossini approvingly called head voice. (In these pages we will use Berton Coffin’s nomenclature—Vowel Register.) He was very comfortable with the high-flying tessitura of William Tell; there have been few tenors since who can say the same. However, the nature of the dramatic parts written for him repudiates the idea that his voice was like a modern countertenor (falsettist). Caruso made a record, Magiche note,19 where he sings successively G, A, B, and C. The final two notes are in a mezza voce that is called voce finta (feigned voice). This kind of sound can be swelled out into a full loud tone, and the mastery of its connection to the full voice is the reason for the stress on the messa di voce exercises in earlier times. I believe that this is the sound that Nourrit used for his highest notes. His friend Gustave Chouquet stated that “He used his falsetto with great skill, and was very energetic without exhausting his powers.” It must be remembered that, in Nourrit’s era (to quote Bassini), “The word falsetto, I am aware, is often applied to those peculiar tones in men, which are produced in imitation of women’s tones—or, in a more general sense perhaps, to the highest regions of the human voice [. . .]. But this is not the theoretical signification of the word: in theory all are falsetto tones which are not produced from the chest.”20
Garcia described in detail the technique of the male voice that had been in place for centuries up to his time:
The falsetto (a term which is commonly misapplied and confounded with the head voice) is generally the more veiled of the two [chest and falsetto], and requires a greater expenditure of air. The two registers, in their lower notes, set in vibration the entire length of the glottis; and as we have observed, the gradual ascending of the sounds in the vocal scale causes the cartilages to come more and more into contact, the vibration being effected by the tendons alone. By the latter, the glottis forms, in tenor voices, between mi3 and do4, the notes called by some musicians the mixed-voice, or mezzo petto; and in the female voice, those called head register, which is placed an octave higher; both of them are produced exclusively by the vocal tendons.21
Gilbert-Louis Duprez (1806–1896)
Apparently, Nourrit was able to produce the Mixed Voice up as high as B natural (about the same as the present B flat), but resorted to the Vowel Register Feigned Voice for his higher notes. Gilbert-Louis Duprez did not. Duprez was a small-voiced lyric tenor with a dramatic temperament who created the part of Edgardo in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor in 1835. Duprez was engaged to sing Arnold in William Tell in 1837 and learned to force his lower voice up to encompass the high Cs in that opera. He called this technique voix sombrée. This produced a stentorian but forced sound, and, like any other dangerous circus act, he created a sensation at the Opéra. Nourrit was mortified. He had cultivated a tasteful, refined style that emphasized nuance, involved vivid dramatic visual representation of the character, and gave true attention to making every syllable of the text poetic and powerful. Now Duprez began to sing the repertoire that Nourrit had created with attention only to the high notes and the amount of sound that he was pouring forth.
Nourrit, unwilling to share the applause with Duprez, resigned his position at the Opéra. He was still popular with the public and on his last performance received the greatest ovation that had ever been given in Paris. However, nothing would dissuade him. He went to Italy and was received well there. He even tried to learn the voix sombrée and took daily lessons from Donizetti, who apparently succeeded in destroying all the nasal resonance in his voice. But Nourrit felt that the new technique deprived him of the virtues that had given him such success in Paris. He wrote to a friend:
Figure 3.7. Gilbert-Louis Duprez.
“I hope, that with time I might be able to regain those fine nuances which are my true talent, and that variety of inflection which I had to renounce in order to conform to the exigencies of Italian singing.” After his debut there he wrote again: “In truth, with the Italian inflection that I have cultivated, I have only one color at my disposal, and I find myself falling into precisely those errors for which we reproach the Italians.”22
Nourrit was now unable to use either technique successfully. He fell into a state of despondency, and his naturally excitable nature began to show signs of mental illness. On March 8th, 1839, one of history’s greatest dramatic tenors jumped to his death from the window of his hotel in Naples. It is curious that Donizetti, in the last years of his life, was also subject to fits of depression and abstraction. He died in 1848.
It is a great irony of history that the art of singing, created and nourished by the Italians for hundreds of years, should have been summed up and then changed by two Frenchmen, Adolphe Nourrit and Gilbert-Louis Duprez. However much attention is given to Duprez with his do di petto, he was not the originator of the voix sombrée or “covered top voice.” That “distinction” belongs to an Italian tenor, Domenico Donzelli (1790–1873), who created the role of Pollione in Norma. As we have seen, the low tenor category goes back at least to the time of Handel. Donzelli was known for his fire and passion and was one of Rossini’s dearest friends. Pleasants says that he was the finest of the Rossini Otellos. Rossini also wrote a part for Donzelli in Torvaldo e Dorliska in 1815. Donzelli sang up to high A in full voice “never resorting to falsetto,” as a Viennese correspondent reported, while Chorley said that he sang with “a rich and sonorous sound.”23 Because this baritonal quality was not subject to flights of coloratura extravagance like his colleagues Nozzari, Davide, and Garcia, Donzelli relied on large sound and theatrical fireworks. He was really a modern singer and one of the first of a long line of dramatic tenors leading from Fabri through Nourrit; Duprez; Mario (1810–1883), Meyerbeer’s tenor; Enrico Tamberlik (1820–1889), the first to add the high C to “Di quella pira” in Verdi’s Il Trovatore; Josef Tichatschek (1807–1886), the first Tannhäuser; Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld (1836–1865), who originated Tristan; Jean de Reszke (1850–1925), the outstanding and most versatile tenor of the latter part of the nineteenth century; to Caruso, Melchior, and Jon Vickers.
Nourrit’s nemesis, Gilbert Duprez, should not be cast as the villain in the tragedy of Adolphe Nourrit’s death. He was a well-schooled singer who was engaged by the Paris Opéra to sing Arnold in Rossini’s William Tell in 1837. Desperate men resort to desperate measures. Duprez knew that his voice was inadequate for the demands of this high-flying dramatic part, so he adopted the technique of the voix sombrée. He recorded his experience in Souvenirs d’un chanteur, “It required the concentration of every resource of will power and physical strength. ‘So be it,’ I said to myself, ‘it may be the end of me, but somehow I’ll do it.’ And so I found even the high C which was later to bring me so much success in Paris.”24 This event was a real fork in the road for male singers and signaled the divergence of their voices into categories, such as tenore di grazia, basso cantante, Verdi baritone, and the like.
Initially, the beauty of Duprez’s voice and the novelty of the “chesty” high Cs swept away all competition. The voix sombrée was tailor made for Grand Opera and Duprez was the toast of Paris. His career at the Opéra only lasted for eight years, but during those years he also created the principal tenor parts in Halévy’s La Reine de Chypre and Guido et Ginevra, Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini, Auber’s Le lac des fées, Donizetti’s Les martyrs, La Favorite, Dom Sébastien, Lucie de Lammermoor, and Charles VII, Rossini’s Otello (in French), and Verdi’s Jerusalem (a translation of I Lombardi). In addition to these parts, he also sang Nourrit’s repertoire—Auber’s La Muette de Portici, Meyerbeer’s Robert le Diable and Les Huguenots, Von Flotow’s Stradella, and, of course, William Tell.
Duprez certainly changed the course of vocal history with his do di petto, but it came at great cost to himself. Berlioz and others criticized him for singing flat and dragging the tempo, which are usually sure signs of a voice that is being forced. Because of the excessive heaviness and pressure of his voice, Duprez could never sing with nuance or coloratura. Even his famous high C was not appreciated by everyone. Rossini said: “That tone rarely falls agreeably on the ear. Nourrit sang it in head voice and that’s how it should be sung.” It struck his Italian ear, he observed, “like the squawk of a capon whose throat is being cut!”25
Meyerbeer passed over Duprez to cast Gustave Roger as John of Leyden in Le Prophète in 1849, and Duprez’s days of stardom were over. He continued to sing with the vestiges of his voice, compensating for his loss by vehemence and histrionics. Roger heard him in Otello in 1849 and wrote, “Duprez, today, electrified us all. What daring! A terrifying old lion! How he hurled his guts in the audience’s face! For those are no longer notes that one hears. They are the explosions of a beast crushed by an elephant’s foot.”26
The voix sombrée is still with us. Enrico Caruso was the most successful practitioner of this art, but Caruso’s physiology was tailor-made for this back vowel-dominated technique and, more importantly, he was a master of the breath. The major resonator for the back vowel is the mouth, and Caruso’s mouth was cavernous. He believed that his throat was very large at all times and, when shown an x-ray photograph of himself singing the dark [A], he refused to believe that it was a picture of his own throat. Many tenors since Caruso’s time have shipwrecked in attempts to emulate the great Italian’s vocal quality, especially that of his later years. Caruso had some vocal troubles during his career and was only forty-eight when he died. Of course his legend only grew because of his untimely death, and perhaps he was spared the spectacle of a vocal decline like Duprez’s. However, I like to think that his native wisdom would have informed him when it was time to go. One thing is certain; there will never be another like Caruso. Other tenors of the present era who utilized the voix sombrée were Franco Corelli and Mario del Monaco. Both had great but not notably long careers.
NOTES
1. Francis Toye, Rossini: A Study in Tragi-Comedy (London: Heinemann, 1934) 256.
2. Henry Pleasants, The Great Singers (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966) 247.
3. Stendhal, Life of Rossini, 1823 (London: Calder, 1956) 362.
4. Pleasants, The Great Singers 143. Mosceles was a famous pianist, composer and teacher.
5. Stendhal, Life of Rossini 364.
6. Groves Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 3rd ed., vol. 4 (New York: Macmillan, 1935) 80.
7. Pleasants, The Great Singers 143.
8. Stendhal, Life of Rossini 375.
9. Pleasants, The Great Singers 146.
10. Pleasants, The Great Singers 155.
11. Pleasants, The Great Singers 156.
12. Pleasants, The Great Singers 152. Pleasants cites Wagner’s Mein Leben for this quote.
13. Groves vol. 4 466.
14. Groves vol. 4 466.
15. Pleasants, The Great Singers 134.
16. Stendhal, Life of Rossini 503.
17. Stendhal, Life of Rossini 168.
18. Stendhal, Life of Rossini 101.
19. From Goldmark’s La Regina de Saba [La Reine de Saba] in 1909 (Nimbus Prima Voce, NI7803 CD).
20. Carlo Bassini, Art of Singing (Boston: Ditson, 1857) 6.
21. Manuel Garcia, The Art of Singing, Part I (Boston: Ditson, c.1855) 7.
22. Pleasants, The Great Singers 164.
23. Pleasants, The Great Singers 160.
24. Quoted in Pleasants, The Great Singers 166.
25. Pleasants, The Great Singers 167.
26. Pleasants, The Great Singers 169.