Jussi Björling, early and late (I first saw him in 1948, in Rigoletto) sang the highest percentage of beautiful, untroubled notes of any tenor of my experience. He also sang the single worst one—the worst, at least, from a singer of high accomplishment. That came in the spring of 1959, at the last performance I saw him give. He was singing Cavaradossi—again opposite Albanese—and was cruising along blissfully until the big defiance scene in Act 2, with its proclamations of “Vittoria!” that we all look forward to. The first, on F-sharp, sprang forth without impediment. But it’s only the set-up for the second, up to the A-sharp. J. B. crouched slightly and hurled himself at it. “VITT–R-R-R-R-yr!” It literally sounded as if he were vocalizing on an “r” of the hardest American sort. There was a collective gasp from the audience. Björling cut the note off quickly, shook his head like a dog shaking off water, and dove back in. He sang a splendid third act, with melting, finely molded voicings of “E lucevan le stelle” and “O dolci mani,” as we’d expect, and a keen high B-natural at “Diffonderem!“, where by this time we didn’t know what to expect.

Even the greatest of magicians isn’t God, and sometimes when you go to pull the rabbit out of the hat, you come up with a skunk. When a good singer hits a bad note, the only useful question is, “What sort of bad note?” They come in infinite variety. In Björling’s case, the terrible A-sharp was the flip side of the precision of phonation and tuning, the purity of vowel formation, and the exact balancing between breath release and compression, with which he sang. When he threw his available energy at the note (and the double-“t” of “Vittoria!” would have set up some extra compression), the voice didn’t blow open, distort, wobble, fall overweighted below the pitch or fly ungrounded above it. It imploded. It was a coup de glotte that never came unstuck—the glottis slammed shut, and all the constrictive contractions of which the surrounding muscles are capable followed suit.

Reverse-engineering from this incident, we can see that it was the logical extreme of the slighter miscalculations involved in the relative disappointments I’ve spoken of. The fibers of the willowy sapling, with its slim, flexible trunk, received the bursts of energy joyfully, while those of the tree of lovely shape but forty-some yearly rings to count and some bad weather in its history were at times at times stiffer, more guarded in their response, and when this  reluctance presents itself, it cannot be simply overridden. Singers of conscious technical mastery and/or superb proprioceptive instincts find ways to adjust. Jussi Björling undoubtedly had much superior vocalism still ahead of him at the time of his death (Sept., 1960, at the age of 49 ); you have only to hear his golden “Dein ist mein ganzes Herz” in the party scene of the Karajan Fledermaus to know that. We were deprived of the chance to hear that, and to see what tactics he might have adopted for his most challenging repertory.