Ponselle said that if we wanted to know what she sounded like, we should listen to her broadcasts, not her studio recordings. She was speaking mainly about the time restrictions of the 78-rpm side, which so often forced quicker tempos and a race-against-the-clock atmosphere on singers and musicians, affecting expression and sometimes the quality of the tone itself. There’s a wealth of Ponselle broadcast material, and on some of it we do indeed feel we are closer to her voice and personality than we get on her Columbia and Victor recordings. The trouble is that it all dates from the final years of her career. Her voice was in nothing like the functional decline of Callas’ at the same age and career stage—it still had its impressive size and richness, its support and good intonation—but it had lowered and loosened somewhat, and the roles that had made her reputation (the Forza and Trovatore Leonoras, Aïda, Norma, etc.) had become impracticable for her. So the only two of which complete broadcasts circulate are Violetta and her final new one, Carmen. The latter certainly represents in part an accommodation to vocal realities, but both reflect her ambitions to adapt to changing ideas as to what constitutes credibility onstage and, perhaps, film. She wanted to make the sort of transition Bellincioni had made a generation earlier—she wanted to be more real—and in the case of Violetta had gone straight to the source. Her first Violettas (Covent Garden, 1930) were rapturously received. In her home house, she never got quite such unreserved approval for it, at least in terms of critical response.

As with Callas’ Violetta, I wish I’d been there. I wish I could have experienced the voice everyone who heard it considered one of the miracles of 20th-Century singing, so incompletely conveyed, I’m sure, by even her best records. And I wish I could have seen her, so that I could have fairly evaluated for myself the effect of her physical presence and, in the context of the time, her physical acting and its meld with her singing. But I wasn’t and couldn’t, so like the rest of us not yet of centenarian status, I can only listen and visualize with the mind’s eye. And we are dealing with mid-’30s AM Met broadcast sound, which does no favors for a large soprano voice. In much of the writing, it doesn’t take great imagination to hear the impact of her singing at full voice, the frequent loveliness and carrying quality of her mezzo-piano and pianissimo, and her experienced sustainment of a long line. On the whole, it’s a superior traversal of the role by a voice of the dramatic type, as distinct from those of the purer lyric-coloratura sort (e. g., Lucrezia Bori, Amelita Galli-Curci) who had been taking it at the Met. But we become aware of slippage in the voice’s centering. “Ah, fors’è lui ” is begun with a pearlescent pianissimo that was probably magical in the theatre, but when the expansion comes at “Ah, quell’amor,” the exactitude of guidance is dissipated. She plows through “Sempre libera” with good cheer and reasonable alacrity, though not the ease and precision of her earlier florid work (Norma, Ernani, Trovatore). But it’s a full step below score key, bringing in the tough-sounding mix characteristic of her lower-middle range at this time, suggesting a singing Bette Davis. (And I heartily dislike the way this makes it impossible for even a good tenor to clear into a released, freely ringing upper range with his offstage “Ah, quell’amors.”)