When I refer to “a different vocal set,” I don’t mean one that is necessarily outside the frame of the older one; there is plenty in the 1847 version that calls for lower-range strength with a defined chest register and, just as importantly, the ability to sing sotto voce in an intense conversational mode in the lower-middle range, just above the passaggio. But there is no question that “La luce langue” suggests a deeper, sustained anchoring and darker coloration than its high-reaching allegro brillante predecessor; that its forceful cabaletta relies more on accenting in the midrange than on a proliferation of articulations toward the high end; that Lady M’s part in the “Ora di morte” follows suit; and that these changes exert a pull on the overall structure of the voice that is now expected to embrace the whole of this true prima donna assoluta part. Finally: the dramatic demands of the role’s rhetoric mandate mastery of the entire span of the chiaroscuro, at the disposal of an artist whose temperament brings that forth from within.

In my lifetime, there has been one singer who, to judge by an off-the-air recording supplemented by all the rest we know of her, embraced the qualities just described: Maria Callas. This is the Callas of the 1952 La Scala performances, and thus the one we hear on the Mexico City broadcasts of those years and on the Cetra recording of La Gioconda, a “big, wide-ranging dramatic voice that is also ductile and responsive to widely varied dynamic and timbral demands,” as I described it when reviewing three different LP releases of the Macbeth performance in the Jan.,1973 Musical Newsletter. I called it “a performance in a thousand” (probably an underestimate) and went on about her “sensitivity to the shape of Verdian gestures” and “her ability to maintain rhythm and mold rhythmic transitions without once seeming calculated or lacking in spontaneity.” All true. I also took note of some technical roughness, especially her habit of driving the chest heedlessly high, to which I could add that for all her discipline and domineering quality, there was an element of emotional wildness in her singing and a bite in her tone that could turn harsh—things not out of line with Verdi’s expressed wishes for the role. She recorded Lady Macbeth’s solo scenes in the studio a few years later, still often to good effect and with some gains in nuance over the ’52 broadcast. But by that time the voice had slimmed and lost some of its grounding, she’d pulled back, and she was now singing for the mike. It’s not the same.^(I)

We missed Callas in New York (the story’s too famous to bear repeating here), along with the conducting of Dimitri Mitropoulos, who suffered a heart attack just as rehearsals began. So we did not receive the totality of her performance, with its bonding of physical with vocal acting, of eye with ear, and with the fire of a great Verdi conductor. But we have since had a succession of singers, beginning with her replacement in that production, Leonie Rysanek, and her immediate successor, Birgit Nilsson, who had enough voice and interpretive talent to satisfy the role’s essentials and make the show go. In addition to two mezzo-sopranos and two sopranos from the Mariinsky, I’ve valued the work of singers who, despite voices of lesser calibre, caught important aspects of the part in the theatre: Lauren Flanigan at the NYCO, Josephine Barstow in Miami, and for that matter Anna Netrebko at the Met, who for all her glamor of tone and persona, falls into that same category.