Melba as Marguerite in 1896 |
Listening
to Dame Nellie Melba’s records we hear a voice which is rather white, but could
be described as silvery. With a bit of imagination we can, perhaps, appreciate
that live she might have sounded like a description of her voice written in
1931 by the veteran American critic W.J. Henderson; remembering her
Metropolitan debut when "the voice
was in the plenitude of its glory" he said her voice "has been called silvery, but what does that
signify? There is one quality which it had which may be comprehended even by
those who did not hear her: it had splendour. The tones glowed with a star-like
brilliance. They flamed with a white heat." At the time of her
European debuts, she impressed critics with her rare beauty of tone and finish
of technique. She is most associated today with roles such as Ophelie (Hamlet) and Marguerite (Faust). (Listen to her on Youtube as Gounod's Juliet)
But
what is puzzling today is that she attempted it at all. In all of Melba’s
studio recordings and in the live recordings of her 1926 Covent
Garden farewell (when she was in her mid 60’s) she retains the
same apparently light silvery tone, notable for its clarity and bell-like
purity. Though I have heard Brünnhilde sung by a number of different voice
types, I cannot even begin to imagine what Melba must have sounded like as Brünnhilde
and at first sight, you wonder whether she could have been audible at all.
But
before we dismiss this out of hand, we must consider the changes that have happened
in the musical world since Wagner’s operas were premiered.
Melba
was born in 1861; Wagner’s Ring Cycle was premiered at the Bayreuth Festival in
1876, when Melba was 15. So Melba grew up in a world where the performance
tradition of Wagner’s music was new. In the mid 19th century the
increase in the size of opera houses and concert halls meant that there was an
increased emphasis on singers’ power at the expense of agility and less
emphasis on coloratura. Wagner did not really invent the dramatic soprano, but
he accelerated a trend that was already happening; though it must be borne in
mind that his own performances, with the famous Bayreuth covered pit, must have put less
pressure on the singers than subsequent Ring cycles in opera houses where the
pits were open.
So
our first point must be that to many singers of Melba’s generation, Wagner
sopranos were a new, perhaps rare, breed and the notion of a singer of other
dramatic roles singing Brünnhilde might not have been as laughable then as it
is today.
And
Melba did undertake dramatic roles; she was not just a canary, after all Tosca
was in her repertoire. But the recording process of the time was not kind to
soprano voices; Caruso’s success was partly due to the fact that the primitive
recording technology loved his voice. By comparison his soprano colleagues
sound pale and wan. Not only must we take much on trust when listening to these
early sopranos, but the recording process just does not really give us an
accurate picture of how large the voice might be.
Partly
this is down to the recording technology. It is worth bearing in mind Dame Eva
Turner’s anecdote about her early Aida
recordings where, in the triumph scene, she had to be placed behind the whole
chorus and orchestra as otherwise her voice was just too powerful for the
recording equipment. Listening to this recording today, you get very little
feeling for the hugeness of Turner’s voice; power and passion yes, but it is
harnessed to a securely focussed voice. We know from later recordings and from
live experience that Turner’s voice was large and we must bear in mind that she
was originally engaged by Toscanini for Ring performances at La Scala. Even
though the 1920’s recording techniques had improved since Melba’s pre-war
recordings, we do not completely feel the size of Turner’s voice.
But
another issue that we also bear in mind something I touched on above, the focus
of the voice. If you listen to many early 20th century singers,
something that many have in common is focus, a laser like clarity and purity.
This focus is a stylistic issue, post 2nd world war singers are less
likely to have it and other styles of vocal production are more common. But a
focussed voice can carry great power and still sound deceptive on record; our
ears are more attuned to hearing loudness in terms of the greater amplitude of
the spread voices of the modern age.
Consider
a singer like Kirsten Flagstad who sang for the first 18 years of her career
only in Scandinavia and sang everything from
opera to operetta and musical comedy. Her training gave her a secure, focussed
voice which retained its clarity when she started singing Wagner. One wonders
what the recording technology of Melba’s day would have made of Flagstad’s
voice.
Isabel
Baillie is, perhaps, the English singer most associated with purity, clarity
and focus. But she too had her Wagner moment, singing Act 2 of Tristan and Isolde in a broadcast.
Famously, Sir Hamilton Harty heard the broadcast and informed her that he would
no longer work with her if she persisted in sing Wagner. Again, it is a
surprise to us that she attempted it at all, even though the producer of the
broadcast was looking to prove a theory about Isolde being a role for a lyric
soprano. The tenor on that broadcast was Walter Widdop. Widdop was a Wagner
tenor with an international reputation but he ran this career in parallel with
singing Handelian oratorio. His Messiah
was probably rather heavier and slower than we would consider nowadays, but I
suspect that few contemporary Siegmunds posses the sort of clear, focussed
voices that would enable them to do a similar feat.
Similarly
Lilian Nordica, the dramatic soprano who had expected to sing Brünnhilde in
1896 in New York
when Melba took her place, was a renowned dramatic soprano, the first
non-German to sing all three Brünnhildes and Isolde. In fact, it was hearing
Nordica sing Elsa that caused Melba to add the role to her repertoire. But Nordica
continued to programme a wide repertoire of roles ranging from Valentine (in Les Huguenots) to Violetta and even the
Queen of the Night (a role she dropped towards the end of her career).
But
before we get all romantic about how voice production has changed and how
wonderful these old voices were, we must consider the final change that has
happened to the musical world. Simply, orchestras have got louder, much louder.
During
the first half of the 20th orchestral power increased significantly; strings
have replaced metal with gut and the bores of brass instruments have increased,
with a commensurate increase in power. At the forefront of this revolution was
Arturo Toscanini as these instrumental changes were allied to his campaigns to
increase technical skill, discipline and professionalism within the orchestra.
So,
in the end, we must probably decide that the
past is another country, they do things differently there. We can never,
securely re-capture the sound that Melba made when she sang Brünnhilde at the
Metropolitan Opera; too much has changed in nearly a century.
I
realise that these musings are a very personal view. Undertaking
generalisations is always a risky business; there are probably discs out there
which could be made to contradict me. But I think that too little consideration
is given to the way that singers of the past produced their voices. So, in an
age when we are starting to explore Wagner on period instruments, it is worth
bearing in mind that without a radical change in the way singers vocalise,
these explorations will only bear limited fruit.
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