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IF anybody’s friend be dead,
It’s sharpest of the theme
The thinking how they walked alive,
At such and such a time.Their costume, of a Sunday,
Some manner of the hair,—
A prank nobody knew but them,
Lost, in the sepulchre.How warm they were on such a day:
You almost feel the date,
So short way off it seems; and now,
They’re centuries from that…
—Mother Emily
Faraway sleep, come here, stay close to me, make me fly, through the mountains, above the dunes, without looking, without thinking any longer, without understanding any longer, giant sleep, elephant sleep, stretch out up here…
True confessions, offered without the use of waterboarding: The Callas-de Sabata Tosca from 1953 is not my favorite recording of Puccini’s opera. I strongly prefer Vishnevskaya-Rostropovich, Price-Karajan, and (in purely orchestral terms) Muti-Philadelphia. (By the way, the link includes a sound clip of goddess Galina in Tchaikovsky, the staggering beauty of which reduces vilaine fille to catatonia.)
Similarly, though I probably would kill anyone who tried to take from me the classic Crespin-Ansermet recording of brother Hector’s “Les Nuits d’été,” I actually prefer the version by Dame Janet Baker and Sir John Barbirolli. I can’t explain it, but there’s something about Dame Janet’s earnestness and more astringent, less satiny tone that for me actually underscores the sensuality and fancy of brother Hector’s music.
You can see and hear Dame Janet singing Berlioz’s “Les Nuits d’été” courtesy of YouTube. The performance is from 1972, with Sir Colin Davis at the helm.
Bonus: Crespin singing “Le spectre de la rose.” And while I’m at it: My favorite of all arias, “D’amour l’ardente flamme” from brother Hector’s La Damnation de Faust, sung by Crespin, Callas, and Kasarova. (Agreed, Kasarova is weird, but I love her.)
Bonus bonus: Dame Janet sings (in English) music from brother Hector’s Les Troyens. Her recording of this scene in French is one of my desert island discs. The YouTube version, too, is devastating.
Quel est celui de nous qui n’a pas, dans ses jours d’ambition, rêvé le miracle d’une prose poétique, musicale sans rythme et sans rime, assez souple et assez heurtée pour s’adapter aux mouvements lyriques de l’âme, aux ondulations de la rêverie, aux soubresauts de la conscience? C’est surtout de la fréquentation des villes énormes, c’est du croisement de leurs innombrables rapports que naît cet idéal obsédant.
—Brother Chuck, Le Spleen de Paris (English translation)
Necrophilia, “obsessive fascination with death and corpses.” Necrophagia, “the act or practice of feeding on dead bodies or carrion.” Opera lovers, devotees of a decaying art form, have an obvious penchant for these perversions. We orfanelli callasiani surely are the worst offenders of all.
Still, the sight of Cecilia Bartoli cradling Maria Malibran’s death-mask in the booklet that accompanies her new disc, Maria, does rattle. When I asked her about it for my Time Out New York feature, she gave a cool, matter-of-fact response, confirming my belief that opera people are deviants.
Bartoli is a fascinating subject. I’ve interviewed Julie Taymor, Peter Sellars, William Christie, Marin Alsop… very smart people. None, though, is remotely so smart as Bartoli.* With the exquisite manners of an Italian from generations past, she reveals precisely what she wishes to reveal, nothing more, all the while mesmerizing interlocutors with her charm.
Except when that delicious façade of hers slips. She was spent during our interview. When I asked whether releasing a disc named Maria so close to the thirtieth anniversary of Callas’s death wasn’t something of a provocation, she fumbled.
“She was a great singer of the 1960’s, the 1970’s,” she offered vaguely, overshooting Callas’s heyday by a decade. “And she was a very unconventional woman for her day. She loved research, and she also loved Malibran. I know that she had some of Malibran’s letters and a portrait.” (Callas, of course, rarely [if ever] set foot in an archive.) Beato narcisismo!
Maria is playing as I write. It is a disc to which I will return again and again, though I’ve listened to it relatively little since receiving it, simply because it is exhausting, almost too absorbing, too demanding.
What’s more, it doesn’t really sound like Bartoli. Manuela Hoelterhoff described her voice as “a smooth, glimmering truffle,” though it is chocolate with a silvery aureole, billowing through the air as weightlessly as silk when it’s not huffing and puffing out machine-gun staccatos and wiry trills. The throaty, slapping sound we hear on Maria and elsewhere is a cruel caricature of Bartoli’s tones.
By the way, I find her “Casta diva” sublime, but that won’t be a popular opinion here in New York, where loudness is mistaken for beauty and meaning in song—and where early Ottocento opera is routinely bludgeoned.
Lucky Europeans who can hear Bartoli in her Maria Malibran—la rivoluzione romantica tour! Well, read the article, and check out the links:
There’s much more out there; these few links are to get you started.
A period-instruments Sonnambula also starring Juan Diego Flórez is in the can, awaiting release by Decca. Bartoli sings Sonnambula in concert form at Baden-Baden in April 2008; before that, she takes on Halévy’s Clari (a Malibran role, represented on Maria) in Zurich.
Grazie, Ceciliona.
* Okay, you know who else is unbelievably brilliant and articulate? He is.
…Comme un navire qui s’éveille
Au vent du matin,
Mon âme rêveuse appareille
Pour un ciel lointain…
—Brother Chuck (set to music by mon bon patron)
Roberto (grazie, tesoro) reminds us that today is the World Day Against the Death Penalty. In civilized nations, the death penalty has been abolished. It endures in China, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Sudan, and where I live.
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