Listening again, after long abstinence, to Licia Albanese in this phase of her career has taken some getting used to. I wouldn’t say that she was the last in the line of “acting-with-the-voice” Italian or Italianate sopranos, for Scotto and Zeani, and to some extent Kabaivanska, all of whom overlapped with Albanese’s afternoon and twilight years, were yet to run most of their courses, and Magda Olivero was completing her final round of laps. But, outlasting Mafalda Favero, Albanese was the last to memorably imprint—through tonal colorings and specific, lightly stroked touches of articulation that were certainly products of conscious artifice but nevertheless seemed natural, “organic,” to her mode of emotional expression—a range of shifting, cameo-like moments that allowed us to understand and empathize with feminine ways of being that were implied by the writing of her characters, though even then passing out of style. She could launch arcs of full lyric soprano sound up through the high D-flat, and through her first dozen years or so at the Met, her lower octave was in presentable shape, including some chest notes that, though never as vibrant as, say, Favero’s, were musically valid.^(I)Though her commercial recordings were actually rather limited, they included some prestigious items (Mimì with Gigli, Violetta and another Mimì under Toscanini, and the RCA Victor Manon Lescaut with Björling), and between these and broadcast recordings that give us her Butterfly, Nanetta, Lauretta, more Violettas, Desdemona, and, less fortunately, her Nozze Susanna, one can gain an appreciation of her enormous popularity here in America.

By 1956, the year she turned 47, Albanese had for several seasons been mixing Toscas in amongst her Mimìs, Massenet Manons, and the remarkable lifetime run of Cio-Cio-Sans (300 in all, it is said) that her shrewd choices, vivid theatricality, and unquestioned gifts of veristic expression enabled her to sustain. As heard here, the top of her voice is still at her beck and call, not quite with the bloom of yore, but of good quality, on pitch, riding on the legato line, and never thin or squally. The lower octave, though, is scrappy, a thing of rags and patches. This role seldom moves down into true chest-register territory. Instead, it does something more treacherous for a lyric soprano voice. Over and over, it requires firm, clearly projected tone just above that. Lucrezia Bori, a singer whose voice was of no greater format than Albanese’s, and who sang this role often with the likes of Enrico Caruso and Giovanni Martinelli, possessed a perfect bonding of supported tone, girlish and pure but strong, in this range (any difficulty for her would have been with the Bs and Cs at the top, but she seems to have sung them without arousing protest). Albanese, however, has only a thread of tone in this area if she doesn’t find reinforcement for it from below, so she moves a form of chest mix upward, where she trips over it coming and going. It’s unnerving to hear the frequently parched, mouthy tone, the obviously unwelcome intrusions of this “lifted chest” timbre on what should be unproblematic downward intervals, and the assortment of scratchy onsets and glottal clucks with which she propels so many phrases forward. Of course, she has many devices on hand for getting an interpretive point through all this flak, and never stops giving a performance. In Act 4, I was torn between admiration and affection for her damn-the-torpedos emotional intensity, concern for her laryngeal health, and suspicion over the substitution of easily summoned tears for genuine fullness of feeling. True, much of the vocal messiness is underlined by the mike, but it all this corresponds to my general recollection of the impression in the theatre—where, however, we had the benefit of her often charming and dedicated self.