Sixty years ago, as I was just beginning my critical semicareer with a few reviews for Opera News, one of my first assignments was to head up to Connecticut for a production of Handel’s Deidamia at the Hartt College of Music. In prospect, the main attractions were two. First, this would be a chance to check out the rear-projection scenic system of Dr. Elemer Nagy, of which I’d heard enthusiastic report as to its adaptability for small opera companies and educational institutions. Second, it would be a rare opportunity to see a fully staged Handel opera, albeit with student performers plus a ringer or two. Deidamia was Handel’s last opera, and not a terribly representative one—a pastoral/satirical tale concerning Ulysses’ recruitment of the young Achilles (disguised as a girl on the island of Skyros under the protection of King Lycomedes—never mind) for the assault on Troy, and erotic complications with the eponymous heroine, daughter of said king. It’s light entertainment of the most accomplished sort, with a bittersweet ending. The performance was well prepared, Dr. Nagy’s designs were charming and atmospheric, and I enjoyed the occasion.

Not a month later, the pièce de résistance in my first package of records to review for High Fidelity was none other than the then-recently discovered Tetide in Sciro of Domenico Scarlatti. Same island, same characters, same story! But with a few variants, and in the far different tone of the true opera seria, of the chamber variety. This was a performance on the Westminster label by the Angelicum forces of Milan, severely cut and with midlevel Italian singers, but certainly dedicated and accomplished enough to give us an idea of the work’s effect. And one year after that, I encountered another, later, opera seria (in form, if not in tone), Paisiello’s Il Re Teodoro in Venezia, as staged by Boris Goldovsky at Tanglewood with a cast that included Sherrill Milnes and Justino Diaz.

Taken as a fourteen-month slice of a young devotee’s experience of pre-Mozartean opera—two “Young Artist” productions and a no-stars recording—there would be nothing very remarkable in any of this today. But at the end of the 1950s, the operas of Handel, along with the opera seria in general, to say nothing of the Neapolitan opera buffa, the French tragédie or comédie lyrique, and anything else we categorize as The Baroque in opera, was very much the province of specialists of scholarly bent—and even they had not experienced much of it in performance, live or recorded. We knew that there had been a Handel performance revival movement in Germany, initiated at Göttingen in 1920 by Oskar Hagen (father of the noted American actress and acting teacher Uta Hagen) that had made some headway, and that in England the Handel Opera Society was finding good critical and popular response for a few of that master’s works.

We had also learned something about Handel’s operas from books like Edward J. Dent’s Opera or Paul Henry Lang’s Music in Western Civilization, or by dipping into Burney; and we knew the some fifteen or twenty arias from his operas and oratorios that had been recorded by great singers and were regularly programmed in the opening groups of vocal recitals; and we had a notion of The Handel Sound from some of his instrumental music and sacred choral pieces. And—ça va sans dire—Messiah. But with respect to the operas, things were pretty much as I describe them in Opera as Opera (see “Ombra mai fu and The Modern Mezzo,” pp. 305 ff.). This extensive body of work by one of history’s most important composers was only beginning to stir from its 200-year coma. You don’t have to rely on my subjective testimony on this. A few glances at credentialed contemporaneous accounts of the situation will settle the matter. And in these accounts you will also find—even among the most enthusiastic champions of the operatic Handel and of The Baroque as a whole—some serious doubt as to the 20th-Century theatrical viability of any of these repertoires. ^(I) At the very least, the champions note, a great deal of work would need to be done in terms of performance practice and audience orientation to discover how to make these operas play.

As I promised at the end of my last post (see Siegfried at the Met, 5/24/19), I am entering here some observations on the singing of the roles of Siegfried and Brünnhilde, as exemplified by the artists on the live historical recordings I selected to give us perspective on the current standard.

Siegfried: In terms of the basic qualifications for the part—strength, brilliance, and steadiness of tone; alacrity of vocal movement; guidance of the musical line and control of dynamics and coloristic shading; physical presence and temperamental ebullience; and, let’s not forget, sheer stamina—Lauritz Melchior is by a wide margin the best Siegfried of Siegfried of whom we have direct evidence. In certain aspects of style, musicianship (especially with regard to rhythm and tempo), and interpretive choice, it is possible to advocate for another tenor on a note-by-note, phrase-by-phrase basis. But those aspects, while worthy of consideration, are of far less importance than the pre-requisites cited, especially with a role in which the latter are met by so few.

Readers of my three-part report on Marston’s release of the complete Chaliapin recordings may have found it a stretch to find me drawing some specific technical parallels between these two exemplars, one a Russian bass, the other a Danish tenor, navigating quite different bodies of work. I’ll come to that in a moment. There are other similarities between the two. Both were large, powerfully built men, high-energy extroverts, given to physical pursuits not of the gym-and-personal-trainer variety (Melchior was a devoted huntsman). Both spent the later years of their lives and careers separated by political circumstance from their roots, and found their active operatic repertoires, initially varied and inclusive, narrowed to a few roles in which they were rightly deemed supreme. While Melchior had the early advantage of an upbringing in an educated, musical household in the highly civilized surroundings of Copenhagen, both ended formal education early and found their artistic footing under mentors and patrons. Both became popular, with their personalities and artistic standing points of ready recognition in the broader culture. We don’t think of Melchior as the paradigm of modern singingacting, as we do Chaliapin, but he was a major stage presence and an interpreter of great intensity, even  subtlety.

The technical similarity has to do with the treatment of two or three half-steps—let’s even bring it down to the pitches of E-natural and F above middle C, Chaliapin’s high notes and Melchior’s passing notes into the upper range. I observed that on these pitches at full voice, Chaliapin sang with a “gathered” adjustment, with all his energy concentrated into a precise position, “closed” but not “covered,” resulting in a tone possessed of a brilliance and ring unique among basses, which he could on occasion “open out,” but never to the point of becoming “spread” or shouty. And we find Melchior treating these same pitches in the same manner, adopting what he called a “narrow” point of attack, from which he could expand when needed.^(I)  This “narrow” positioning enabled him to find a pocket of resonantal ring that informed the entire range of the voice, and to avoid the distention of the open “a” that we hear in Set Svanholm (the Siegfried of both the Furtwängler/La Scala and Stiedry/Met performances) and Wolfgang Windgassen (of Keilberth/Bayreuth), from which it is difficult to re-focus for the high notes.