Burzio likes to spring huge, impulsive-sounding surprises. She begins “Umile ancella” very quietly, at a slow tempo, and establishes a firm, sculpted line through the opening phrases—we could be listening to a Classically oriented singer. She fills out the upper-middle arc of “genio creator” at a perfectly controlled full voice, and draws out the rallentando for “ai cor” with her tensile pianissimo, then picks up a little steam for “Del verso io son l’accento“—so far, nothing interpretively unconventional, though uncommonly well executed. But now, on the way down, she plunges headlong into chest on the G-flat of “l’ac-cen-to,” keeps pouring it on and pressing forward through “l’echo del dramma uman, il fragile strumento” (and if the voice was indeed “enormous,” we can imagine the effect), and finally builds a smoky, vibrated “vassallo della man,” holding the whole drawn-out phrase, F above middle C included, in chest.  When she arrives at her little list of character qualities (“mite, gioconda, atroce”), she describes them not merely with changes in loudness and weight, but with color and impetus, sweeping ferociously up a quick portamento to the fortissimo A-flat of “atroce,” with an effect unlike that of any other singer. She finishes the aria under total control of dynamic and pitch, with an unusually long-held pianissimo upper G before the final A-flat, full at first, then melting briefly away.

Similarly, in “Poveri fiori,” Burzio etches a balanced, legato line and holds it under guidance, but is able to use the bite in her vocali chiare to make the ultimate effect at “oggi morenti,”  and her mastery of register definition to fulfill “bacio di morte, bacio d’amor.”  At the octave leap between G’s for the first “Tutto è finito!” she makes a unique effect by holding on the lower note through almost the whole bar, then springing upward on the sixteenth-note upbeat—it’s not just despairing, and certainly not self-pitying, but vehement, and at least in the moment makes you realize Cilèa should have written it that way.

I can’t always tell you why Burzio makes her selections. In terms of the verbal text, some of the ones in “Umile ancella” don’t make a lot of sense. Yet they feel compelling. I am fairly certain, though, that they do not arise from technical necessity. Time and again in her recordings, she demonstrates that her instrument is functionally complete and in excellent balance, and then, as if carried away, breaks in on the structure. In her work we can hear a three-way tug of war among her grounding in Classical style and technique, her instinct for Romantic effect, and her impulse to overthrow both in favor of the raw, visceral cry we think of as veristic. In Adriana’s arias, these tensions hold together and serve the material; in Norma’s, not so much. And of course Burzio was an afflicted person, aware from early on of the heart condition that eventually ended her life, and of a nervous excitability that exacted a toll in performance. (She spoke of the dangers of the verismo roles. But it appears that all roles underwent veristic transformation for her, so instead of imposing a Classical discipline on her system, they simply added heightened technical demands to her workload.) She shared much with her sisters of the theatre, Adrienne, Rachel, Duse—women who in their time made influential stylistic breaks in efforts to cut through to a new truthfulness. With Adrienne and Rachel she shared the fevered premonition of a short life, and we should remember that our stage heroine stereotype of the passionate, emotionally hungry young woman with an ailment of the heart or of the lungs, however romanticized, had real-life models.