An appropriate start to a search for something like Verdi’s intended voice might be with Gemma Bellincioni. She’s appropriate for a couple of reasons. She was famous for this role, in part because she was evidently the first soprano to insist on costuming herself in the opera’s period, rather than the “c. 1700” that had been forced on Verdi at the opera’s premiere. She was also a singing actress in what was then a modern manner. Early in her career, she had sung many performances of roles by Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Meyerbeer, Verdi’s Gilda, et al.—the expectable late-Romantic repertoire, including a great number of parts in operas destined to die in infancy. We don’t know how well she sang them, or with what revisions to the scores, but she had enough success with them to put together a flourishing career. Beginning in 1890, when she “created” the role of Santuzza opposite her life-partner-to-be Roberto Stagno, she fashioned herself into a verismo diva. She originated the name part in Fedora (which the Met will revive later this season), was the first Italian Salome (a role she sang over 100 times), and once again sang in many new and quickly forgotten pieces, now in the newer style. And a final item of cred: it was Bellincioni to whom one of my three chosen Violettas, Rosa Ponselle, turned for coaching in the role.

In matters of both technique and “style,” Bellincioni’s recordings ^(I)present a jumble of strengths and weaknesses. Apart from the serious limitations of early acousticals and their recording conditions, we hear a vibrato that is not only intense, but inconsistent, leaving a jumpy impression on even those who receive such tone (always better accommodated by Mediterranean ears than by others) with equanimity. Her breath sustainment is poor, making for numerous unsatisfyingly short phrases. There are many vowel distortions and syllabic peculiarities of short-term convenience. On the other hand, she is sometimes capable of quite stunning effects of diminuendo and subito piano, and shows an excellent trill. Phrases of surprising size and fullness emerge from time to time, and in writing of the sort to which she became adapted (e. g., “O grandi occhi lucenti,” from Fedora), she sings with better sustainment of line and tonal beauty. Clearly, for her many fans, the faults and peculiarities were taken as parts of the package made intriguing by her temperament and physical acting talent. Two things germane to our discussion strike me about her “Ah, fors’è lui” (1903, piano only). One is that it doesn’t sound typically veristic. She is not making overt emotional sound-gestures, but essentially musical ones, and quite indebted, at that, to an ornamental aesthetic reflective of earlier practice. Second, her singing is perfectly illustrative of the uses of the controlled, musicalized chest register. She’s singing the aria a half-step down, giving her more assured poise on those difficult upper A-flats (now Gs) of “occul-ti” and “tumul-ti,” and enabling a lovely high excursion at piano later—but also turning all those grounding Fs on “u” and “i” into Es. They’re all sung in a light but distinct chest, with no darkening applied, from which she moves upward without the slightest discrepancy or loss of equalization. That ability is a significant technical asset—one for which I can’t think of a single exemplar of this voice type in the postwar era.