Dear devotees: I am pleased to be able to announce that Marston Records’ 10-CD set devoted to the recordings of the great American baritone Lawrence Tibbett is at last ready for release, and that an hour-long program, heard on 435 NPR stations (link below) has been aired in connection with it. Since I contributed to both the set and the broadcast, I cannot review them. But I can briefly describe and (of course) recommend them.

The Marston release. The set, long delayed owing to complications that originated with the pandemic shutdown, comprises every side that Tibbett recorded during his long, exclusive relationship with RCA Victor, including unreleased alternate takes, plus a large selection of his radio and film recordings, and even a live recital from the Worcester Festival. It is by far the most inclusive gathering of Tibbett material ever released, and is up to Marston’s customarily high standards of restoration and presentation. Coming up on 75 years since his last Metropolitan performance, there is still a plausible case to be made for Tibbett as the greatest male American classical singer. He set a standard for the singing and acting of the major Verdi baritone roles (Simon Boccanegra, Iago, Rigoletto, Germont) that has not been surpassed. He championed the cause of American opera with Deems Taylor’s Peter Ibbetson, Louis Gruenberg’s Emperor Jones, and others, and with Helen Jepson was the first to record the important solos and duets from Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, with the composer in attendance. With his hundreds of radio broadcasts, early sound film appearances, and extensive recital tours, he penetrated the American popular culture as no other operatic artist before or since. In my 35,000-word essay, I place critical discussion of his recordings in an ongoing biographical context, and attempt to bring some further clarity to the causes of the vocal crisis that, though it did not end his career, sharply curtailed his effectiveness over its final decade. The set’s booklet also contains an introduction by Will Crutchfield and a wonderful trove of photos, some never before published. The set may be ordered now, and will ship before the end of the month—see the Marston website for details.

The NPR program. This is an episode in the long-running series More than Music, conceived and hosted by Joseph Horowitz. The series is devoted primarily to American music and the American classical music scene, including its black and indigenous influences, so Tibbett’s uniquely American story is a natural fit. The program presents some choice Tibbett recordings reflecting his broad artistic sympathies, alternating with discussion guided by its host, with observations from an intriguing quartet of guests: baritone Thomas Hampson, tenor George Shirley, author and NYT columnist John McWhorter, and myself. It was first broadcast on the morning of March 19, with times dependent on local stations’ schedules. The full program, along with Horowitz’s excellent article in artsjournal on Tibbett and our rapidly changing sensibilities, can be accessed here.

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NEXT TIME: Under the time pressures of my recent articles on Maria Callas, I neglected this usual end-of-post feature. So: my principal subject will be the Metropolitan’s new production of Verdi’s long-absent La Forza del destino, whose MIA status I first wrote about a little over six years ago. Has that status actually changed? Target date: Friday, April 19.

My review of the most frequently cited extrinsic factors in the early and pronounced decline of Maria Callas’ voice (see last week’s post) has left us uncertain as to what might or might not with any confidence be declared causative. But what about an intrinsic one? That is, might there be something inherent in the way she sang that could have been a significant contributing element, if not the sole determinant? We should remind ourselves that singing, like any other discipline (especially one with a strong physical component), is best learned when young, and not easily re-learned later. Once set, the laying-down of tracks, the engagement of a complex of co-ordinations in a very particular pattern organized for a very particular purpose, responds with confusion when asked to re-direct. So it is especially regrettable that we have not so much as a single sampling of her singing from her years in Athens, the years of intense advanced study and early professional forays. It’s always difficult to know what value to place on reviews and testimonials, even from professional observers, singers, or teachers, unless one has become very familiar with their knowledge, predilections, and motives. We may, though, draw at least tentative conclusions from an accumulation of such reports and their alignment (or not) with what we are able to hear for ourselves, via recordings from a few years later. There is a goodly collection of such reports sprinkled through the opening chapter of Michael Scott’s book, and I think that with all due caution we can conclude that Callas had from the beginning “you know, the big voice,” and that at times she drove it overly hard in the exclusively spinto-to-dramatic roles she sang (no others were on offer). She was also evidently a very quick learner who had already acquired crack musicianship, and was in possession of enough florid capacity and range to embrace the challenging big-but-mobile Weber and Beethoven arias she essayed. The sopracuti were not really on display in her recital and concert programs, unless they poked through in the “Bel raggio lusinghier” or a Trovatore aria she sometimes programmed (which one is unspecified).

It is also difficult to know what has passed between teacher and pupil, not necessarily with respect to the teacher’s “method” or principles or declared goals, or with the pupil’s talent and dedication to them, but with respect to what has really been absorbed into the pupil’s network of reflexive activations at the functional level of technique I spoke of earlier. When Callas auditioned for lessons with the distinguished coloratura Elvira de Hidalgo in 1939, the latter heard “a violent cascade of sound . . . dramatic and moving;” it was as if she had been “waiting for that voice for a very long time.” In other words, there was already extraordinary material to hand, many tracks already laid down from this 15-year-old’s previous study, from her ambition and her imagination, her obsessive silent singing. Still, at that age the imprints are yet fresh, and more easily re-routed. It is clear that in Callas’ five years of work with de Hidalgo, at least two things were emphasized. One was the development of both ends of the range, but in particular the lower end by means of the chest register, which de Hidalgo herself, in company with all the Southern European high sopranos of her day, deployed. (We can hear it in especially enlivening form on her zarzuela recordings.) True, Callas was at the age where that function is emerging anyway, but de Hidalgo unquestionably summoned it and cultivated its uses; Callas herself referred to this. The second was mastery, in the form of an infinitely repeatable precision of pitch and rhythm, in music demanding extremes of velocity and flexibility, including elaborate embellishment—which meant, first and foremost, music of Italian Romantic styles. (Mozart and Handel call equally upon that mastery, but the former was only lightly engaged by Callas, and the latter not at all, save for a lonely outing of “Care selve.“)^(I) Obviously, Callas’ singing reflected both these emphases. But the critical question with the chest register (apart from its very existence, at issue in contemporary pedagogy) is what working relationship it forms with the two-thirds-to-three-quarters of the female range lying above it. And the critical question with the time-honored methods of mastering velocity and flexibility, assuming they have been well taught and well learned, is whether or not the teaching and learning of them has remained congruent with the essentials of strength and balance in the given voice. Those methods, enshrined in traditional progressions of exercises, belong to the executional level of technique. In and of themselves, they have but a fortuitous agreement with functional requirements, and even when they are to the keenest of perceptions successful, they are replete with opportunities for the kinds of unrecognized compensations, or overrides, I referred to earlier.

Dear devotees,

The post scheduled for today, March 9, will be published on Monday, March 11. With apologies for the delay,

CLO

We have recently (on Dec. 2) celebrated the 100th birthday of Maria Callas. For an artist so long departed (she died in 1977, and her last performances of a complete role were in 1965), there’s been a remarkable amount of attention paid. Warner (now the curator of both the EMI and Cetra catalogues) has released a 131-CD box that purportedly contains every known scrap of her recorded legacy. There’s a new documentary covering her Paris debut (1958) and the events surrounding it. Opera devoted the entire feature-article section of its December issue (seven articles) to her, and followed up with two more contributions in January. There was even a two-page spread in the heavily popcult-oriented Sunday New York Times and, more predictably, a festive smorgasbord of events and exhibitions in Athens, sponsored by Greek National Opera. On a more modest scale, there was also a full-day discussion, workshop, and concert event  here in New York under the sponsorship of Teatro Nuovo, in which I had the pleasure of participating as a member of the severely attrited cohort who saw and heard Callas in live performance with at least nominally adult eyes and ears.

There is just cause for celebration. Maria Callas was a great artist, and an enormously influential one. Michael Scott, in his artistic biography of her, ^(I)calls her “one of the three greatest opera singers of this [the 20th] century,” the other two being Caruso and Chaliapin. I’m not sure I’d rate her above all other contenders—where would that leave Lauritz Melchior, for one?—and so much depends on what each of us values most highly in singing—but she certainly belongs at that level of consideration. There cannot be much argument about her influence, except to note that it was confined to the operatic sphere. She did not, in addition to her operatic triumphs, elevate a folk-derived song genre, as did both Caruso and Chaliapin, or dominate an art song literature, as did Fischer-Dieskau, or penetrate down into music of the entertainment culture, in the manner of a Tauber or Tibbett, and by that means broaden appreciation of the classical voice. I think we are also entitled to assume that, in opera’s midcentury scramble to expand its repertory in the absence of viable new candidates, some restoration of the so-called “bel canto” part of it, and of the singing practices associated with that, was bound to take place. But of her status as primary catalyst, the single artist without whom such restoration would not have happened so quickly, embraced so much, or endured so well, there’s really no doubt. In my judgment, the restoration has not been without its underside, with respect both to operas deemed repertory-worthy and the direction some voices (beginning with Callas’ own) have been taken. But that, along with an evaluation of net gain or loss, is an argument for another time, and in any event is hardly Maria’s fault.

Callas’ unique artistic identity had three commonly attributed aspects: first, that she wedded the power and color of the best late-E-19 soprano voices with the agility and precision of embellishment of earlier styles (or, as I like to put it, the prismatic voice with the ornamental one), thus uniting two schools of technique and expression that had come to seem mutually exclusive; second, that she infused this vocality with a sense of dramatic purpose that rang true to a modern ear, and so relieved those older styles of the burden of seeming only aesthetic; and third, that this sense of dramatic purpose was also evident in her onstage physical presence and behavior (commonly referred to as “acting”), and fused with that element in her singing to create an unusually compelling unity of interpretive intent and effect. I believe those observations are accurate, though sometimes overly valorized. But what struck me upon first hearing her recorded voice, several years before seeing her, was a beckoning in its timbre that sounded ancient and modern at once, as if she were channeling something bygone, drawing us back toward it, yet also making it immediate to us. The something was embedded in the voice because it was embedded in her, and at her best she brought it forth directly, almost guilelessly, all the hard work involved notwithstanding. One of my fellow panelists at the birthday event, Peter Mark, observed that nearly all the masterpieces of 19th-Century opera are tragedies, and that Callas’ voice was uniquely suited to them because of a tragic quality in the tone itself. That’s getting close to the nature of her genius. With the advantage of hindsight, and staying for a moment with romantic notions about the sort of artist she represented on the highest plane: Maurice Maeterlinck—writing, if I recall aright, of the early passing of a brother—spoke of a certain look that marks those who are destined to die young, and Ernest Hemingway, writing of men in battle, of a particular smell that signals the same fate. If there is such a thing as a shade of the singing voice that sends that message to those attuned to it, it was there in the voice of Maria Callas. And that essence was there to the end, instantly recognizable even when the executional skills were severely compromised.