Sixty years ago, as I was just beginning my critical semicareer with a few reviews for Opera News, one of my first assignments was to head up to Connecticut for a production of Handel’s Deidamia at the Hartt College of Music. In prospect, the main attractions were two. First, this would be a chance to check out the rear-projection scenic system of Dr. Elemer Nagy, of which I’d heard enthusiastic report as to its adaptability for small opera companies and educational institutions. Second, it would be a rare opportunity to see a fully staged Handel opera, albeit with student performers plus a ringer or two. Deidamia was Handel’s last opera, and not a terribly representative one—a pastoral/satirical tale concerning Ulysses’ recruitment of the young Achilles (disguised as a girl on the island of Skyros under the protection of King Lycomedes—never mind) for the assault on Troy, and erotic complications with the eponymous heroine, daughter of said king. It’s light entertainment of the most accomplished sort, with a bittersweet ending. The performance was well prepared, Dr. Nagy’s designs were charming and atmospheric, and I enjoyed the occasion.

Not a month later, the pièce de résistance in my first package of records to review for High Fidelity was none other than the then-recently discovered Tetide in Sciro of Domenico Scarlatti. Same island, same characters, same story! But with a few variants, and in the far different tone of the true opera seria, of the chamber variety. This was a performance on the Westminster label by the Angelicum forces of Milan, severely cut and with midlevel Italian singers, but certainly dedicated and accomplished enough to give us an idea of the work’s effect. And one year after that, I encountered another, later, opera seria (in form, if not in tone), Paisiello’s Il Re Teodoro in Venezia, as staged by Boris Goldovsky at Tanglewood with a cast that included Sherrill Milnes and Justino Diaz.

Taken as a fourteen-month slice of a young devotee’s experience of pre-Mozartean opera—two “Young Artist” productions and a no-stars recording—there would be nothing very remarkable in any of this today. But at the end of the 1950s, the operas of Handel, along with the opera seria in general, to say nothing of the Neapolitan opera buffa, the French tragédie or comédie lyrique, and anything else we categorize as The Baroque in opera, was very much the province of specialists of scholarly bent—and even they had not experienced much of it in performance, live or recorded. We knew that there had been a Handel performance revival movement in Germany, initiated at Göttingen in 1920 by Oskar Hagen (father of the noted American actress and acting teacher Uta Hagen) that had made some headway, and that in England the Handel Opera Society was finding good critical and popular response for a few of that master’s works.

We had also learned something about Handel’s operas from books like Edward J. Dent’s Opera or Paul Henry Lang’s Music in Western Civilization, or by dipping into Burney; and we knew the some fifteen or twenty arias from his operas and oratorios that had been recorded by great singers and were regularly programmed in the opening groups of vocal recitals; and we had a notion of The Handel Sound from some of his instrumental music and sacred choral pieces. And—ça va sans dire—Messiah. But with respect to the operas, things were pretty much as I describe them in Opera as Opera (see “Ombra mai fu and The Modern Mezzo,” pp. 305 ff.). This extensive body of work by one of history’s most important composers was only beginning to stir from its 200-year coma. You don’t have to rely on my subjective testimony on this. A few glances at credentialed contemporaneous accounts of the situation will settle the matter. And in these accounts you will also find—even among the most enthusiastic champions of the operatic Handel and of The Baroque as a whole—some serious doubt as to the 20th-Century theatrical viability of any of these repertoires. ^(I) At the very least, the champions note, a great deal of work would need to be done in terms of performance practice and audience orientation to discover how to make these operas play.

As I promised at the end of my last post (see Siegfried at the Met, 5/24/19), I am entering here some observations on the singing of the roles of Siegfried and Brünnhilde, as exemplified by the artists on the live historical recordings I selected to give us perspective on the current standard.

Siegfried: In terms of the basic qualifications for the part—strength, brilliance, and steadiness of tone; alacrity of vocal movement; guidance of the musical line and control of dynamics and coloristic shading; physical presence and temperamental ebullience; and, let’s not forget, sheer stamina—Lauritz Melchior is by a wide margin the best Siegfried of Siegfried of whom we have direct evidence. In certain aspects of style, musicianship (especially with regard to rhythm and tempo), and interpretive choice, it is possible to advocate for another tenor on a note-by-note, phrase-by-phrase basis. But those aspects, while worthy of consideration, are of far less importance than the pre-requisites cited, especially with a role in which the latter are met by so few.

Readers of my three-part report on Marston’s release of the complete Chaliapin recordings may have found it a stretch to find me drawing some specific technical parallels between these two exemplars, one a Russian bass, the other a Danish tenor, navigating quite different bodies of work. I’ll come to that in a moment. There are other similarities between the two. Both were large, powerfully built men, high-energy extroverts, given to physical pursuits not of the gym-and-personal-trainer variety (Melchior was a devoted huntsman). Both spent the later years of their lives and careers separated by political circumstance from their roots, and found their active operatic repertoires, initially varied and inclusive, narrowed to a few roles in which they were rightly deemed supreme. While Melchior had the early advantage of an upbringing in an educated, musical household in the highly civilized surroundings of Copenhagen, both ended formal education early and found their artistic footing under mentors and patrons. Both became popular, with their personalities and artistic standing points of ready recognition in the broader culture. We don’t think of Melchior as the paradigm of modern singingacting, as we do Chaliapin, but he was a major stage presence and an interpreter of great intensity, even  subtlety.

The technical similarity has to do with the treatment of two or three half-steps—let’s even bring it down to the pitches of E-natural and F above middle C, Chaliapin’s high notes and Melchior’s passing notes into the upper range. I observed that on these pitches at full voice, Chaliapin sang with a “gathered” adjustment, with all his energy concentrated into a precise position, “closed” but not “covered,” resulting in a tone possessed of a brilliance and ring unique among basses, which he could on occasion “open out,” but never to the point of becoming “spread” or shouty. And we find Melchior treating these same pitches in the same manner, adopting what he called a “narrow” point of attack, from which he could expand when needed.^(I)  This “narrow” positioning enabled him to find a pocket of resonantal ring that informed the entire range of the voice, and to avoid the distention of the open “a” that we hear in Set Svanholm (the Siegfried of both the Furtwängler/La Scala and Stiedry/Met performances) and Wolfgang Windgassen (of Keilberth/Bayreuth), from which it is difficult to re-focus for the high notes.

Two items of recent Opera as Opera news: First, the video of my April 15 conversation with Dean Fred Bronstein of The Peabody Institute in Peabody’s Dean’s Symposium series, in which we discuss some of the book’s themes relative to opera’s professional and educational future, is now up and running. Video and audio quality is excellent. Here is the link, which will also be posted on my media page. This series has had other distinguished guests, whose conversations are available in the archive, that I’m sure many readers will also be interested in. And second: Opera as Opera has chalked up another important review, by Mike Ashman in The Gramophone, the English-speaking world’s oldest record magazine. He of course has his own perspective and reservations, but his well-written review is in the main supportive, and ends with a strong recommendation. This brings to four the number of positive reviews the book has received in UK, following Stephen Hastings in Opera, Robert Matthew-Walker in Musical Opinion Quarterly, and Nils-Goeran Olve in The Record Collector, in addition to the fine thought piece by Richard Fairman in The Financial Times—excellent penetration for a book of this sort. 

I devoted my last post to exploration of the name character of this opera—troublesome as he is for many—and how he came to be fashioned as he is, at least on paper. And I mentioned that the cast of this season’s Met revival seemed promising, which is one way of saying that by contemporary standards it looked good—also on paper. I’m sure that when you read little expressions like “at least on paper” or “by contemporary standards,” you are hearing a cautionary, faint-praise tone. If so, your hearing is accurate enough. But before getting to some serious qualifications about performance and production and the relevance of standards other than contemporary, let me stipulate first that the male side of this cast gave a great deal of pleasure, and second that these roles are hard—hard to sing, hard to act on the two planes (call them the “real-life” and the “archetypal” planes) that must always be present, and hard to fuse into the singingacting unit that Wagner sought and that all dedicated performers have pursued for a century and a half or so; and further that the orchestral demands, particularly with regard to the dramatic involvement Wagner wanted from his “bandsmen,” are equally challenging. The two tenor parts are, in both their opportunities and their difficulties, extreme, and while Brünnhilde has but a single scene, there is contained within it just about every task that can be set to a dramatic soprano.

To begin with the gladder tidings (I report on the performance of May 2), and to work our way from the lesser to the greater demands—which, as chance would have it, is from the bottom up, Fachwise:

Fafner: This was Dmitri Belosselskiy. He was a solid Wurm in last season’s Luisa Miller, and he was solid here, too, which is to say that his voice had the appropriate density of color and sufficient size, that he sang steadily and on pitch, and that he hit the staging marks of the production’s dying-dragon concept (see below).

Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen has blown through town once more, for the last time (we are promised) in the production conceived and directed by Robert Lepage. Of that, I had previously seen just the Götterdämmerung, and that only through the good offices of a friend who happened to have a spare and affordable ticket. This negligence had nothing to do with negative anticipation of Lepage’s efforts. Reports about it had been universally condemnatory, but I fear no production, and have learned many times over that the general opinion isn’t necessarily my own. Besides, for me it is performance, not production, that is the key, and it was the prospect of a work I love deeply, and with whose performance potential I am acquainted, falling so far short of that potential as to be only a distant echo of itself, that kept me from entering the Ringnut sweepstakes first time around. As it transpired, Fabio Luisi led a solid orchestral rendering of Götterdämmerung, which (as  with any of the Ring operas) provides considerable reward in itself; and Deborah Voigt, although clearly intended for Gutrune rather than Brünnhilde, at least made an energetic stab at the latter. Apart from that there were only those distant echoes, and I thought that yes, the production’s a clunker, but that isn’t the real problem at all.

This time the announced singers, on the basis of my limited acquaintance with them, seemed more promising. So I decided I’d try to see Siegfried, the least-performed segment of the Ring. Not easy to do, but I did eventually ransom two seats for one of the three performances, looking forward to hearing the music live once more and, perhaps, arguing the opera’s case. There are a number of reasons for the relative unpopularity of Siegfried, and we’ll encounter them as we proceed, but I think the main one is simplicity itself: many people don’t like the protagonist, Siegfried of Siegfried. I’ve seen the mere mention of the name induce cringes of revulsion from confirmed opera lovers, and recall as culturally informed an observer as Michael Feingold (the valuable longtime theatre critic of The Village Voice, among other things) writing that though he liked Wagner’s music, he couldn’t get close to the Ring because of the nature of this character. Since I think this is an unnecessary obstacle, I am devoting this first of two installments on Siegfried to exploration of the eponymous hero. I could as well write about Brünnhilde, whose evolution is in the end more determinative than Siegfried’s; or Wotan, whose rise and fall governs the story for over half the cycle’s length; or even Alberich, the principal antagonist, whose potent resistance carries through directly into Götterdämmerung, and indirectly to the very end in the person of his fearsome son, Hagen. But though these characters can sometimes give rise to parodistic amusement, they don’t induce repugnance. So it’s Siegfried himself who will be the focus here. I’ll discuss how everything turned out for all concerned in this season’s revival in the next post.

In this final installment of my consideration of Feodor Chaliapin’s collected recordings, I will be focusing primarily on the excerpts from live performances in London in the years 1926, ’27,  and ’28. This means that except for the studio recordings considered in relation to those events, I will be passing over many remarkable sides. These are for the most part remakes of songs and arias he had already recorded, in many cases more than once. I’m not going to generalize about them, except to say that though Chaliapin’s interpretations of most of these pieces did undergo some change, his voice aged very little in quality and technical reach till his final years, which means that the presence of the electrical recording process alone makes them desirable in pure listening-pleasure terms. Some of my old favorites, like the Death Scene from Dargomyzhsky’s Rusalka or the magical mystery tour of the Rubinstein “Persian Song No. 9,” will, sadly, not receive discussion. But in the case of this prodigy of singingacting, I think the recordings that catch him doing that in the only place it can really happen, the theatre, must take pride of place.

The first of these occasions, the 1926 Covent Garden Mefistofele, received some attention in Part Two. The second yields the grouping of three monologues from what we would now call a “semi-staged” performance of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Mozart and Salieri, a chamber opera setting of one of three mini-dramas by Pushkin, each of which treats of one of the original sins. (The other two, The Stone Guest and The Covetous Knight, were set operatically by Dargomyzhsky and Rachmaninov, respectively.) The performance took place in the Royal Albert Hall on October 11, 1927, with the LSO under Lawrence Collingwood. This is an ingenious little piece, a witty commentary on envy predicated on the long-debunked legend of Salieri as Mozart’s murderer by poison. But at least for a non-Russian-speaking audience (and a connoisseur audience, at that), it justifies itself only in the presence of an extraordinary “actor who sings.” It’s set quite directly on the Pushkin text as Rimsky imagined it being declaimed by a great actor, and in fact he wrote out the entire vocal line before filling in any accompaniment, which for Rimsky is quite spare. So it will not satisfy lyrical cravings. Chaliapin “created” the role of Salieri (Mamontov’s Private Opera, 1898), with the reputedly remarkable character tenor and director Vasily Shkafer (frequently Chaliapin’s Shuisky) as Mozart. In these monologues, Chaliapin is obviously at the peak of what we might call his emotional/elocutionary/realism mode. But I would advise anyone approaching this material for the first time to 1) have at hand a complete libretto and/or a copy of Pushkin’s playlet, and 2) to familiarize him- or herself with the work via a complete recording (there have been several, but you won’t go wrong with the venerable Bolshoi version under Samuel Samosud, with two great artists, Mark Reizen and Ivan Kozlovsky, as the eponymous composers). Otherwise, these excerpts of what is essentially accompanied recitative, with nothing of the role of Mozart, the episode of the old fiddler, the offstage choral fragment from Mozart’s Requiem, etc., will have difficulty standing on their own, and the sudden flood of emotional pulsation in the orchestral peroration at the end (we pick up slight hints in sound of Chaliapin’s pantomime) will seem almost arbitrary.

As those of you on my blog announcement list know, I’ve been forced (well, not forced, but I don’t want to cheat the material) to postpone Chaliapin, Phenomenon: Part Three for one week. It will appear next Friday, Apr. 26. In our guise as publisher of Opera as Opera, we’ve had to cope with the bankruptcy of our long-established printer, a change of distributor (with no interruption to orders, fortunately), and associated issues—a drain on time and energy. More happily, I spent a couple of highly enjoyable and stimulating days to take part in a symposium hosted by Dean Fred Bronstein down at Peabody Institute, and to work a bit with some of the very talented students in the Opera Theatre class there. The symposium conversation was live-streamed, and will join the video archive of this ongoing series. I’m told it will take a couple of weeks to edit the video, but I will post a link to it on my media page and announce it here when it’s ready.

There were several interesting responses to my Samson et Dalila post of two weeks ago:

The first comes from David Stein, regarding the Samson highlights record with Risë Stevens, Jan Peerce, and the NBC Symphony conducted by Leopold Stokowski, originally an RCA Victor LP and now available on a Cala CD. I had noted that on the LP, Robert Merrill (as the High Priest) appeared only in the Act 3 “Gloire à Dagon” duet. But Mr. Stein informs us that on the simultaneously released 45-rpm version, the Act 2 scene between the High Priest and Dalila, beginning at “La victoire facile,” was included, and is on the Cala re-issue as well. That would make the CD, in any case recommendable for preservation of the exciting performance of the Bacchanale, even more desirable. Merrill was no great French stylist, but he did sing this part in the early ’50s, and one will surely not often hear it so handsomely vocalized.

While I’m at it—and since Chaliapin as Boris Godunov is coming up—I might mention also Stokowski’s disc of Boris extracts from the early ’50s. This is rather like some of the “symphonic synthesis” versions of operas (particularly Wagner’s) that Stokowski loved to cobble up, except that Boris’ big solo scenes are sung by Nicola Rossi-Lemeni, with incidental contributions from a couple of other singers. Rossi-Lemeni was a formidable singing-actor talent whose fine bass voice turned woolly all too soon. But this recording, done at the time of his San Francisco Opera debut in this role, caught him at his best, and is comparable to the splendid Filippo he sings on the Cetra Don Carlo. No, it isn’t Stokowski with the NBC, but the San Francisco Opera orchestra and chorus sound quite fine, and it is Stoki doing Rimsky. I have this performance on a Dell’Arte LP re-issue of the RCA Victor original, and I see from the old Myers & Hill Record Ratings that it, too, was issued in 45-rpm format—so perhaps some additional material lurks there. This, too, is available on Cala in its Stokowski Society series.

“Opera as Opera” news: two more thorough and supportive reviews are in. One is by Nils-Goeran Olve in the March issue of the dear old The Record Collector, and the other by Paul–André Demierre in Crescendo Magazine (www.crescendo-magazine.be). It will be a few days before we get some pull quotes on the “Opera as Opera” page, and Mr. Demierre’s piece is in French. But in the meantime we’ll rest the case with his concluding line: ‘”Opera as Opera’: une bible!”

Is Camille Saint-Saëns’ Samson et Dalila a great opera? Bearing in mind that though any opera exists only in performance, and so the answer always depends on tonight’s realities, we still learn through experience of any given work that it does or does not have the possibility of being great tonight, and on that basis name it “great” or not. And in that sense most of us would say that if our standard of greatness is Otello or Tristan und Isolde or Don Giovanni, Samson falls short; it’s not a great opera. But it is a good one, which if well performed can be exciting, entertaining, even moving. That makes it a legitimate canonical repertory piece, and if our gauge isn’t the best of Verdi or Wagner or Mozart, but whichever we deem the best of the new operas the Met has brought us over the past half-century, Samson miraculously ascends to greatness. We’d have to go back to Peter Grimes to sensibly argue the relative merits. That’s why the canon is a canon, the repertory a repertory.

One of the things I love about Samson is its orchestral palette. Even those who condescend to Saint-Saëns have to concede his almost Rimsky-esque expertise as colorist. I suppose he can sometimes be accused of splashing color around to conceal an absence of musical substance, but in his best big work, like the Third Symphony and Samson, where the structures are firm and the melodic or thematic ideas consistently engaging, that isn’t at all the case, and from Samson’s brassy call to arms to the undulating breezes of the Valley of Sorek, the cracking of the storm, the groan of the mill wheel and the fizzy, tinselly tints of the Temple of Dagon, the theatrical descriptiveness of the score is consistently captivating.

Not on the night, however, specifically the night of March 13, and that’s where my complaints begin. (Yes, the production is new this season. Musical and vocal things first, however.) The conductor was Sir Mark Elder, about whom I’ve blown warm and cool, never hot or cold, over the years. My reservations about him have often centered around tempo, at times not merely slow, but lumbering. On this occasion, these seemed to me perfectly all right, or would have been if possessed of more inner animation and outer presence. But those were lacking (in basic sonic terms, the music was underplayed), and the color range never got beyond Easter Egg pastels. Then there’s this: though there is plenty in the way of upper-midrange interplay for the woodwinds, sorties for trumpet, plinks for xylophone, plonks and sweeps for the harp, and taps for the cymbal, much of Samson is built from the bottom. This is especially true in Act 1, which is with some reason considered the easiest to let die, and is as true of the extensive choral writing as of the orchestra. Low-string sonority, which Yannick Nezet-Séguin has promised to make a priority (see the Pelléas post, 2/12/19) is part of what’s involved here. The other part is attack. A few instances from Act 1: the entrance of the choral basses at “Nous avons vu nos cités renversées” (allegro non troppo, with strong accenting in the orchestra—the beginning of a section that stacks the choirs’ entrances in ascending order for what a long-ago colleague of mine, nose crinkling, called “Biblical Counterpoint”); the angular motive that introduces Abimélech and underpins the first part of his episode; the churning staccato figure, ff, pesante, that launches the High Priest’s “Maudite à jamais la race“; and, after the prelude to Act 2, the propulsive, low-to-high intro to Dalila’s recitative that precedes “Amour, viens aider.” All these had nothing like the needed presence and punch. Nor was there compensation for this dearth in the higher, lighter regions: the lilting Act 1 Dance of Dagon’s Priestesses, for example, which can have considerable charm, was given no lift or pulse. From beginning to end, Elder led as if considering the music of no dramatic significance, just a layer of frosting without the cake. So the orchestra coasted along, patting the music on its primped-up head. Unlike the pit orchestras of times gone by, this one won’t go to the dramatic gesture unless pushed to do so. It will also not return to its designated chairs in the pit until good and ready to do that—this was yet another evening in which the whole house above orchestra level was given the distraction of not a few players making their way unconcernedly back (from intermission downtime, not offstage assignments) after the music had started. It’s insulting.

I said at the opening of Chaliapin/Part One that the release of this artist’s complete recorded output by Marston is the most significant event of the current opera season. And this may have struck some of my readers as odd and even self-contradictory, coming from someone who insists that opera as opera exists only in theatres, in the bringing-into-life of a work by in-the-flesh performers, in eye/ear simultaneity, in three dimensions, without cameras or mikes, and in real time. Secondary oralities, no matter how perfectly crafted, are not opera as opera, and neither is a document of any sort, for eye or ear. But I stand by both claims, and this is the reason: More than any other artists’ (all honor to Caruso, Callas, Lotte Lehmann—see the posts of Sept. 29 and Oct. 13, 2017—and many others), Chaliapin’s records bring to the mind’s eye and ear the ideal of the singingactor assoluto in a form that is still recognizable to us, even after the generational adaptations of the intervening decades. That ideal is the one for which the greatest operatic artists have always striven, and the fact that it is kept before us in its entirety and in freshly restored reproduction is—if we give it our attention—more important than any of the glimmerings that from time to time penetrate the light grey mist of the contemporary opera scene.

At the end of our last episode, we took leave of the mighty Feodor as he concluded his October, 1907 recording session in Milan. Next stop on the phonographic trail: Paris, in June of 1908. In the interim, though, came his first voyage to America and to the Metropolitan, and we should take some note of that, inasmuch as it constituted perhaps the bitterest episode of his career. He made his debut on the second night of the 1907-08 season^(I) as the Boito Mefistofele, with Farrar as Margarita and Riccardo Martin as Faust. He stayed at the Met until late February, adding the Gounod Méphistophélès (with Caruso and Farrar), the Rossini Don Basilio (with Sembrich, Bonci, and Campanari), and Leporello (under Mahler, with Scotti and Bonci, and possibly the most formidable female lineup in the house history of Don Giovanni: Emma Eames, Johanna Gadski, and Farrar). Throughout this run, he experienced audience enthusiasm but, despite rather grudging acknowledgement of his physical and vocal gifts, a general critical distaste, bordering on revulsion, at what was perceived as his rough, peasantish vulgarity and bodily exhibitionism. His defenders were for the most part not among the most powerful New York critics, and Victor Borovsky reports in his Chaliapin biography that for some reason, only the more negative reports were translated for him (he as yet knew no English). He hated the Met’s shabby production values and its undervaluation of acting and dramatic preparation, and, like many others, found New York a major culture shock. (And though he doesn’t mention it in his memoirs, except for Mahler he had only weak house conductors to work with.) He sailed for Europe with little other than contempt for America and its leading opera company, and was not to return for thirteen years.

This week, instead of leading with more news about Opera as Opera developments (it’s going well), I’d like to pass along a little nudge about Will Crutchfield’s ongoing series of superbly annotated ancient-vocal-recording posts, “Will’s Record of the Week.” He will now be developing a mailing list for those who would like to subscribe and receive notifications. I strongly recommend.  Here’s the link.  

The most important event, artistically speaking, of the 2018-19 opera season so far has been the release of Feodor Chaliapin/The Complete Recordings on the Marston label. The 13-CD box contains every side and cylinder, published and unpublished, that Chaliapin is known to have recorded. In terms of sound restoration and pitch verification, Ward Marston has met, if not transcended, his own loving and scrupulous example, and in terms of packaging, presentation, and documentation has outdone even the finest of the earlier CD and LP hommages to this mightiest of singingacting exemplars.

In one of the essays included in the release’s handsome, copiously illustrated hardbound book, Michael Scott (in collated excerpts from his The Record of Singing) says: “Chaliapin ranks with Caruso and Maria Callas as one of the greatest singers and most potent and influential operatic artists of the twentieth century,” and he goes on to note that in one respect he surpassed the other two, for he achieved his dominance without the natural claim of higher-ranged voices on public attention and affection. Such evaluations are automatically open to dispute, and the accomplishments of these three artists (and of so many others–Ponselle? Melchior? Flagstad?, etc.) are so unalike in crucial ways as to foreclose any sensible comparison. Still, I might have picked Caruso and Callas for that purpose myself, at least with regard to influence, and I might have taken Scott’s observation one step further. Caruso was a very great singer, a musically instinctive and sophisticated interpreter, and an irresistible performing personality who eventually gained respect as an actor, but he was nothing like the pioneer of total singingacting transformation that Chaliapin became. Those two share common ground as contemporaries, as heroic, man-in-full males, and trailblazers in their respective vocalities. Callas, also heroic but two generations advanced into her art’s creative decline, was a trailblazer to the past. Her vocal prime, during which she was supreme in music of such different characteristics than the men’s, lasted less than a decade. Chaliapin’s endured for forty years, and ended only with his final illness.

My consideration of the Compleat Chaliapin will require two posts, and will proceed chronologically through the recorded oeuvre. Today’s will cover less of that ground than the next installment, because it will try to get some sort of handle on how Chaliapin became Chaliapin. That is perhaps the most remarkable of all the stories I know of the fulfillment of artistic potential. For although (such worthies as Thomas A. Edison and Malcolm Gladwell to the contrary notwithstanding) talent—and particularly talent at the exponential, “genius” level— is by no means overrated, it is also rare for any degree of talent to reach such full development, and against so formidable an array of obstacles as to make it appear that the obstacles were necessary to the development.

We have two new favorable reviews of Opera as Opera to tell you about. In The Boston Musical Intelligencer (https://www.classical-scene.com/2019/02/10/opera-cure), Ralph Locke has written an uncommonly thorough, thoughtful, and balanced piece, replete with helpful linked references. And in the Swedish Opera (not to be confused with the UK magazine in which Stephen Hastings reviewed the book), Nils-Göran Olve has contributed another very well-considered article. It’s in Swedish, but we hear that Mr. Olve will soon be heard on the topic in an English venue. After this long string of positive reviews, I must also report that we’ve received our first slam—not quite the “hatchet job” it was termed by a forewarning friend, but certainly negative. It comes in Opera News from Fred Cohn, a writer whose work I have generally enjoyed. He does concede a virtue or two (at least he credits me with “a great ear”), but the length and detail of several sections, which many reviewers and readers have greeted enthusiastically and some as a mixed blessing, Cohn finds “infuriating.” He also seems bothered by the book’s focus on problematics. His piece does contain a first, though: my writing has never before been called “reactionary.” And to today’s topic:

  Claude Debussy’s ever-beckoning Pelléas et Mélisande returned to the Met repertoire on January 15, in the production directed by Sir Jonathan Miller that was first mounted in 1995. This wasn’t, finally, an adequate representation of the work, but it had its positive aspects, and even held out one potentially promising prospect. To those elements first. Although Ferruccio Furlanetto’s bass occasionally turns unsteady on sustained upper notes these days, it is still a satisfyingly large, well-seated voice (I perked right up at “Je n’en dis rien“—the performance was underway!), and he is still a performer who commands the stage without jumping through any hoops to do so. He was that rare thing, a consistently interesting Arkel, and in Act V contributed stretches of shaded mezza-voce singing that constituted the evening’s most distinguished vocalism. After a dullish start, Kyle Ketelson gradually established himself as Golaud, his attractive bass-baritone rising to the challenges of the terrible later scenes. And though I much prefer a physically appropriate grown-up in the role of Yniold, for both vocal and dramatic reasons (the only really persuasive performance of the part I’ve seen was that of the young Teresa Stratas), A. Jesse Shopflocher, singing with clear tone and good intonation, was musically and linguistically on top of his assignment.

But: if we have decided to do an opera called Pelléas et Mélisande, it’s incumbent on us to have on hand a singing actor of the unusual sort who can hold our attention as Pelléas, and, even more importantly, another who can do the same as Mélisande. A general giftedness, a general kind of appeal, is not enough. Neither of these title roles is demanding in terms of compass or tessitura, which is why, although the parts are designated as tenor and soprano, it is sometimes practicable to cast a baritone as Pelléas and a mezzo-soprano as Mélisande. But what is absolutely necessary is that both voices be capable of sharp declamation in their lower ranges—”sharp” in actual verbal clarity, and in inflectional nuance as well. With a couple of relatively brief exceptions (Golaud’s jealous rage, then bits of his remorse; the lovers’ climactic ecstasy), the characters express themselves in emotionally restrained manner, registering their meanings in small but distinct inflections in the lower octaves of their ranges. While Pelléas is quite correctly cited as the most successful of all the operas yet written that have tried to derive their vocal settings directly from the rhythms, accents, and intervallic moves of its language as spoken, Debussy, responding to the psychological atmosphere of Maeterlinck’s play (see below), created not a web of “natural” or even highly imaginative line readings, but rather its musical analogue. Thus, many stretches of dialogue actually flatten out the expected rise and fall of the normal speech patterns, subtly displace their accents, and “unnaturally” regularize their rhythms, all in a range that is lower and narrower than the operatic custom, yet still a fifth to an octave above speaking range, and with the color span of the cultivated singing voice.