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TLS 7.6.1: Patrick O'Connor: Breathing tricks
THE PRIMA DONNA AND OPERA, 1815-1930. By Susan Rutherford. 394pp. Cambridge
University Press. Pounds 55 (US $99). - 978 0 521 85167 X.
In her autobiography, Men, Women and Tenors, published in 1937, the American
soprano Frances Alda (at one time the wife of the Metropolitan Opera's
manager, Giulio Gatti-Casazza), had this to say about the modern prima
donna: "Audiences today are more critical of a singer's appearance than they
used to be. They demand not only that the singer shall sing well, but that
she shall look lovely and be an actress, too". As Susan Rutherford shows in
her stimulating new book, The Prima Donna and Opera, 1815-1930, this was a
subject for composers, critics and the public throughout the 115 years on
which she has chosen to concentrate.
This is not an anec-dotal history of famous singers, but an attempt to
define what it meant to be a prima donna, as well as a look at the way the
stylized figure of the female singer was used by novelists and essayists.
There had been, of course, many great prima donnas during the eighteenth
century. (In 1786, Mozart's librettist, Gottlied Stephanie, parodied their
vain antics in Der Schauspieldirektor, where Mademoiselle Silberklang
declares: "Every artist strives for glory, / Longs to hold the stage alone,
/ Were it not for this urge, / Art would not advance at all".) But in her
introduction, Rutherford explains her choice of period. It covers all the
major operas of Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi and Puccini in Italy; the
rise and fall of Grand Opera in Paris, and the transition from the old
Singspiel and opera seria in Austria and Germany to the age of Wagner and
then of Strauss. The gradual changes in the way opera singers approached
their music and roles, and what the public expected of them, were affected
by the enormous upheavals in compositional style -by 1930 the same soprano
would have not only Beethoven's Leonore from Fidelio in her repertory, but
also Marie in Berg's Wozzeck.
The received perception of the artist altered swiftly as well. In the 1800s,
Rutherford writes, the terms "virtuosa" and "prostituta" in Italy "were
interchangeable"; by the middle of Queen Victoria's reign, the famous
singers of the day were welcome guests at musical parties at Windsor, and on
one occasion the Queen herself joined Giovanni Battista Rubini and Luigi
Lablache in a trio from Die Zauberflote. By 1890, the most famous diva of
all, Adelina Patti, was able to have a castle built for herself in Wales,
with not only a private theatre, but a railway line to deliver the guests to
her door. Yet by 1930, Ernest Newman could write: "The plain man finds it
hard to take people seriously about whom so much vulgar nonsense is talked .
.. . . The modern prima donna, for commercial reasons, has come down into the
crowd".
Rutherford's opening chapter, "Sirens and songbirds", looks at the prima
donna as a figure in nineteenth-century literature. An ode by Ferdinando
Pellegrini, addressed to the contralto Marietta Alboni (known unkindly later
in her career as "the elephant that swallowed a nightingale"), claimed that
she had been sent to assuage the poet's grief with her "portentosa voce
celeste".
George Du Maurier's Trilby, George Moore's Evelyn Innes, E. T. A. Hoffmann's
Councillor Krespel, James Huneker's Painted Veils, and even Gaston Leroux's
The Phantom of the Opera, are all shown as "male-authored novels" which were
concerned to "subdue the rebellious and subversive siren". The story in
which Rutherford takes the closest interest is a little-known polemic of
1844 by Benedetto Bermani called "The Life, Death and Transmigration of the
Prima Donna Assoluta". In this he pinpoints all the traits that would come
to be associated with the prima donna in the popular imagination, including
"affectation, limitless demands, honourable and insolent eloquence when
speaking of one's triumphs".
Bermani's fictitious heroine is called Clelia and has all the worst
attributes of her type, "she acted deplorably on the stage, but was full of
life and seduction at other moments". In all these fictional characters,
Rutherford sees "a particularly puzzling phenomenon" at work. If, as she
writes, the mid nineteenth century was an era in which "social, cultural,
political and educational" indoctrination worked to restrict women's "access
to the public domain", what are we to make of the prima donna, whose success
meant "financial independence and sexual freedom"?
One of the restrictions imposed on women throughout the Victorian age was
the corset. There is a fascinating passage in her chapter on "Superdivas and
superwomen" in which Rutherford suggests that the singers' need for freedom
of breath also contributed towards a greater awareness of the harm done to
women by wearing tightly laced undergarments. The Yankee diva Lillian
Nordica wrote that "singers are usually healthy, for that is one of the
first requirements; the great amount of oxygen of which they make use tends
to expand and develop the body".
Although a life on the stage was considered not much better than one on the
streets, Hazlitt describing the "Opera Muse" as a "a tawdry courtesan", many
women from respectable society became accomplished singers and enjoyed
careers of a kind, performing in private houses, and even sometimes in
public. Berlioz wrote approvingly of the Berlin "Academie de chant",
composed largely of amateur singers, noting that "society ladies do not
think it at all demeaning to sing in a Bach oratorio". There was even a lady
tenor, one Josephine Geale, who sang duets with Jenny Lind at one of Charles
Villiers Stanford's Dublin concerts, before an audience that included the
Queen.
The chapter on "Tutors and tuition" includes some hair-raising accounts of
training methods employed by dubious experts, most of which resulted in
young singers losing their voices. George J. Vandeleur Lee, said to be one
of the models for Du Maurier's Svengali, claimed that he could transform a
singer's technique in twelve lessons -for ten guineas. Dreadful procedures
to enlarge the mouth, increase the strength in the stomach muscles (one
pupil of Mathilde Marchesi used to balance thirty bricks on his abdomen),
were followed by Manuel Garcia's controversial "laryngoscope". In all this
pursuit of perfection, and quack scientific jargon, the occasional clear,
sensible opinion is heard.
George Bernard Shaw wrote to Viola Tree, "Don't you know that the people who
know how to sing may be divided into those who taught themselves, and those
who were taught - like De Reszke and myself -by their mothers?" Very few
great singers made good singing teachers, and the same Jean De Reszke was
said to have been sent "the cream of Europe and America and turned out
nothing but skimmed milk".
When discussing audiences and their changing tastes during the century,
Rutherford makes the good point that "early ottocento spectators watched
opera as we watch television, with a mixture of casual interest and
concentration, interspersed with conversation, food, and visits from friends
and acquaintances". There was also an element of voyeuristic fascination: it
is difficult to overestimate, for example, the thrill and shock that
audiences enjoyed from seeing their prima donnas dressed as men. Rutherford
notes that the Code Napoleon introduced a law forbidding women to wear men's
clothing. But in the opera house this seems to have had no effect at all, as
throughout the nineteenth century, on both sides of the Atlantic, nearly
every prima donna at some point donned tights and boots to appear in one of
the numerous travestie roles. Is it true, as Michel Poizat claims in The
Angel's Cry (1992), that "voices that appear transsexual (high male voices,
low female voices) hold the greatest fascination for the listener"? If so,
the combination of such deep-voiced prima donnas as Colbran, Malibran and
Schroeder-Devrient with the much lighter tenors admired in the 1800s -David,
Nourrit, Rubini -must have been sensational.
Rutherford surmises that the origins of this "glorious confusion of sexual
identity" lay partly in what she calls "adherence to notions of the ideal".
In her last chapter, "The singing actress", she attempts to compare the
influence of such figures as Pauline Viardot, Patti and Mary Garden
(Debussy's first Melisande). Her sometimes rather sweeping generalizations
may confuse readers not familiar with the minutiae of operatic history, as
she too often juxtaposes characters and anecdotes from quite different
times. Certain key figures are absent; for instance, there is no mention of
Hortense Schneider, creatrice of many of Offenbach's greatest works, and
surely the supreme prima donna of the Second Empire. Malvina Schnorr von
Carolsfeld, the first Isolde, and Euphrosyne Parepa-Rosa, pioneer in touring
opera in the United States during the 1860s, might also have been
considered. Nevertheless, Susan Rutherford's research is wide ranging and
well annotated -the notes and bibliography take up more than eighty pages.
If the book has an overarching thesis, it is one of sheer admiration for the
achievements of these sometimes notorious, occasionally ridiculous but
frequently brave and resilient women.
Mary Garden claimed that men were just a diversion from the real thing, her
career. "When I sit and think that I can be alone in this world, that I can
go into my bedroom and sleep alone, it gives me a shiver of freedom. That is
my ecstasy, that knowledge of freedom." |
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