The Atlantic Monthly/Volume 95/Number 568/Singers Now and Then

by William James Henderson

Singers Now and Then

By W. J. Henderson

The first half of the eighteenth century is accepted by historians of musical art as the golden age of singing. Nevertheless, it is often questioned whether the singers of to-day are not as great as those who caroled the arias of Handel in the Haymarket. To the typical opera-goer of the present the names of Caffarelli, Farinelli, Senesino, Faustina, and their contemporaries are not even echoes. His acquaintance with the names of singers goes back only as far as the halcyon days of Grisi and Mario. Jenny Lind and Tietjens he may have heard of, and the name of Giorgio Ronconi may not be altogether strange to him.

But he who reads the records of song knows that according to all accounts, contemporary and subsequent, the singers of the early eighteenth century were the demigods of a sort of age of fable. They seem now to have moved through a rosy mist of glory with their sublime heads haloed by the radiant stars. They were princes and queens; at their feet the world bowed and fell. Furthermore, they were the first and the only authentic exponents of that most adorable of all arts, the Italian bel canto, the art of singing beautifully. They drew their knowledge from the original and unpolluted fountain. They poured it in rivers of pure water through Europe, and made the land glow with the verdure of a spring that has never returned.

At any rate, that is how it all appears to one who looks back into the record of the time or turns the pages of histories compiled by men who never heard a songbird earlier than Piccolomini. What, then, are we to think of our idols of today? How does our adored Jean de Reszke compare with the princes of song in the early eighteenth century? What rank would have been accorded to the suave and polished Plançon or to the beloved Sembrich?

These are questions which cannot be answered to general satisfaction. To project a de Reszke into the serene atmosphere of the era of “Radamisto” or “Almira”? would be to thrust upon a comfortable public a problem quite insoluble. To ask the votaries of Siegfried and Otello to listen to Caffarelli or Farinelli singing one of their elaborate exfoliations of a melodic idea would be to invite an emphatic expression of impatience. The singers of the golden age sang with a totally different purpose from that of the singers of to-day, and to that purpose their style was adapted. They were singers pure and simple. They had to contend with no obstacles of textual significance. No strange and ear-testing intervals confronted them. The orchestra never obtruded a vigorous independence of utterance upon their ears. And above all, they were not called upon to unite with the graces of song the interpretative functions of the actor.

If we go back to the very beginnings of operatic art, we find that the recitative invented by the Florentine adventurers into music was very elementary in its demands on the artist. It serves to convince us that the characteristics of fine singing in the days of Francesca Caccini, daughter of Giulio Caccini, author of the Nuovo Musiche, must have been smoothness, purity, and equability of tone, and a fluent emission of the successive notes. These are the basic qualities of the Italian legato, the foundation of all good singing. Caccini, however, wrote some simple ornamental passages, and from these and similar ones in the works of his contemporaries were developed the longer and more elaborate ones found in the operas of composers of the latter half of the seventeenth century.

At the end of that century the Italian method of singing was complete. The great Pistocchi school of Bologna was ready to send into the world its wonderful pupils, and Porpora was prepared to instruct the youthful Caffarelli. How thorough the instruction of that time was we learn from the often told anecdote of Porpora’s keeping Caffarelli at work for six years on a single sheet of music paper,on which the teacher had written all the possible feats of vocalization. At the end of the period of study the teacher said to the pupil, “Go, my son, you are the greatest singer in the world.”

The achievements of these rigorously trained singers founded that firm faith in mere singing which still exists among Italians. The history of opera in the time of Handel is well known, and it exhibits a curious state of musical art. The singer was the monarch of the musical kingdom. Composers were merely tailors who made garments of vocal glory for these potentates. The adulation which is now poured at the feet of a Calvé or a Caruso, when compared to the blind devotion offered to Crescentini or Faustina, is as the gentle sigh of a summer zephyr in the presence of a cyclone.

The great Handel had to write his operas according to the dictation of these lords of song. It was not for him to say where he would introduce a duet or a solo. It was not for him to say what kind of an aria he would write at any given place in his score. All these things were laid down in the vocal code of the singers. They decreed what solos and duets they were to have, and where they were to be introduced, and what their character was to be. No Gounod could have bestowed the patriarchal osculation upon the brow of the successful Marguerite in those days. The prima donna, if pleased with the jewel song, might have held out her little finger for the composer to kiss kneeling. No Wagner would have dared in 1735 to tell a soprano how to phrase a declamation. The spectacle of the bowed heads of Materna and Winkelmann and Scaria at Baireuth would have started the princes of the early eighteenth century to writhing in their tombs. They would have. made this Wagner wriggle at their feet like his own “Wurm.”

Nevertheless, these singers had great and sound merits which lay at the foundation of their influence in the world. The stories told of them sound fabulous, yet they are well attested. Farinelli’s beautiful voice and exquisite singing certainly did cure Philip V of Spain of an attack of melancholy which threatened his reason. When the Princess Belmont was almost insane from grief, it was Raff who saved her life by singing so that he moved her to tears. Senesino threw off the assumption of his réle and rushed across the stage to embrace Farinelli, who had just sung an air marvelously. Crescentini in Romeo e Giulietta wrung moisture from the eye of the Man of Destiny, and wet the cheeks of all his court. These are not fables; they are facts. Yet the accomplishments of these singers were all in the domain of vocal finish. What they did, they did by pure beauty of tone and phrasing.

In purity and beauty of tone, in command of breath, in accuracy of intonation, in smoothness and agility in the delivery of ornamental passages, the singers of this first great school were the greatest that have ever lived. With all deference to the opinion of Porpora, Farinelli must have been the supreme master of them all. My colleague, H. E. Krehbiel, owns the collection of musical manuscripts made by the poet Gray. In writing about it in his charming volume, Music and Manners in the Classical Period, he draws some valuable information from the music as to the vocal abilities of the eighteenth century. He gives the crown to Farinelli, and adds, “One of the things which Gray’s music can teach us is that, taking the art for what it was one hundred and fifty years ago, the greatest operatic artists of to-day are the merest tyros compared with him.” Notice the qualification. We are to take the art as it was a century and a half ago. “It would be idle to attempt comparisons on any other basis than mere technical skill, however,” says Mr. Krehbiel; and that fairly sums up the matter.

How are we to reconcile this view with the stories of those singers so deeply moving their hearers? In so far as they relate to the tributes paid by one artist to another, we may fairly presume that the emotion was aroused by the perfection of the art, for among vocal masters and mistresses technical finish counts for more than all other qualities together. Go where you will among singers, and listen to their talk; you shall hear them discussing method, method, and only method. Doubtless it was so among the pupils of the first great school of Italian cantilena.

As for the audiences, they were easy to move. It was a happy day for the musician. He had no soul problems to solve in his music, no philosophic riddles to expound. His theory was external beauty; his system, symmetry of construction. The music of Handel was a series of exfoliations of thematic trunks. Text was employed rather as an index to the character of an air than as a dominant power, to which the music must be subservient. The prima donna had to have her aria d’ agilita that she might display the range and flexibility of her voice, and her aria of more dramatic nature that she might exhibit the beauty of her crescendo and diminuendo and her marvelous finish of phrasing. Nine times out of ten one of these airs would cover six or eight pages of printed music, while the text would consist of four lines of verse, to be sung over and over again, with endless repetitions of a word here and a word there. Even the mighty Sebastian Bach, than whom no more serious composer ever lived, was not a stranger to this method of vocal composition.

To bring ourselves to a full realization of the public attitude toward the singers and their music, we would have to carry ourselves back to the ante-Haydn period, when external beauty rather than detailed expression was the aim of musicians. Above all, composition was at that time what Dr. Parry in his Evolution of the Art of Music has so aptly named “organized simplicity.” If we would realize how the audiences of the early eighteenth century melted and swayed under the magic spell of the art of Farinelli, we must think of people hanging breathless on the accents of Patti singing Home, Sweet Home, or Brignoli singing Good-bye, Sweetheart, Good-bye. Sentiment, grace, gentleness, but no note of the great tragedies of human life, lie in such music, and these qualities lay in the music which the princes of the operatic stage sang in the days of the great Handel and Porpora.

The construction of the operas was wholly favorable to the performance of feats of singing. The story of the work was told in the recitative. The airs were the embodiments of certain sentiments suitable to situations indicated rather than actually reached in the development of the plots. In singing these airs the artists were not expected to act. They were not expected even to gesticulate freely. Repose and dignity were their aims, together with the preservation of the perfect control of the breath. The recitatives were declaimed in a broad and noble style in which accent and nuance did the work now done by declamatory emphasis and action. The entire purpose of an opera seemed to be to tell a story which should serve as a basis for the setting of certain sentiments to songs in aria form. The art of libretto construction was to arrange the succession of sentiments in such a way that the proper series of solos, duets, choruses, and ensembles should be made, and that the arias of different character should enter in such a way as to provide variety of style, and give the singers opportunities to display all their accomplishments. In short, everything was made tributary to that marvelous art of song in which these singers excelled. Nothing was ever permitted which could mar its perfection.

It was an interesting state of musical art, the age of simplicity, of receptivity, of public juvenility. But it could not last. Sophistication was bound to come, and even if the public was willing always to eat candy, the composers were not satisfied to remain mere confectioners. It was not in Italy, however, that the change made itself visible first. France must have the credit, if credit it be, of having led the movement toward a return to the dramatic ideals of the inventors of opera.

Lulli, a transplanted Italian, with a political spirit and a meagre share of musical invention, sought to impart influence to his operas by setting the text to an imposing style of musical declamation. He never had a grasp of the lucid aria form of the Italians; his mind was too poor in melodic ideas. Neither could he deal happily with voices in mass. His choruses are as thin as the easy unisons of Verdi’s earlier works, and his duets are only dialogues. But, on the other hand, he sincerely tried to make his music convey the feeling of the text, and he made his choruses appropriate to the general tone picture.

Rameau, who worked about a century later than Lulli, was much farther along the road toward dramatic verity. In fact, Rameau had just what Lulli lacked, namely, musical invention. Hence in plasticity of form and variety of expression his operas were far in advance of the earlier master. They were farther than the lapse of time alone could have carried them. Gluck, who was a younger contemporary of Rameau, was deeply influenced by him, and struck out a new path toward dramatic truth in operatic music. But all of these composers were the slaves of the innate Gallic love of refinement and elegance in art. They gradually lessened the amount of purely ornamental singing in opera, but they did not rob the music of its polish and its fluency. Musical form was preserved at all cost, and the aria came again into its own.

Gluck, with all his originality and sincerity, did not know how to escape its domination. But the old-fashioned roulades, the shakes and jumps of the early masters and mistresses of vocal technic, now became few and far between. The broad, noble, classic style, which was withal as cold as it was statuesque, was developed by these composers. The battle between their ideas and those of the Italians was fought out on Parisian ground. The great singers of the Italian school carried the public with them. For a time, indeed, the master works of Gluck overcame all opposition, and the public confessed to a perception of their greatness. But it could not last. The desire for mere amusement won, and with the advent of Rossini Europe went back to the old strumming airs of the popular Italian style.

Yet singers had been influenced by the modifications which had been made. The mere fact that a composer had compelled a public to accept his ideas of opera showed that temporarily at any rate the domination of the singer had ceased. ‘The vocal artists had been led to modify their style to suit the requirements of the operas, and something of the wonderful finish of the early days gradually gave way to energy of manner and vivacity of articulation. Of course there was no chronological line drawn between the two styles. They existed side by side for a period.

In the early years of the nineteenth century Angelica Catalani, the Melba of her day, ravished the ears of Milan, Lisbon, and Paris with her exquisitely beautiful voice, her wonderful compass, which ranged to the high G (Sybil Sanderson’s “Eiffel Tower” note), and her dazzling brilliancy and accuracy of execution. At the same period Pierre Jean Garat, the tenor idol of Paris, showed how beauty of voice and perfection of technic could be united with-perfect taste and exquisite sensibility. If Fétis is to be trusted, Garat was almost the first singer to study the æsthetic plan of an aria and design his reading of it in accordance therewith. This can hardly be quite correct, however, for it was in the purely musical features of their delivery that the master singers of the preceding epoch had excelled.

In 1822, six years before Catalani’s retirement, and one year before the death of Garat, two vocal comets flashed upon the firmament of opera. One was that strangely gifted and unequal genius, Giuditta Pasta, and the other that superb musical tragedienne, Wilhelmina Schroeder-Devrient. The latter startled the world with her imposing and passionate impersonation of Beethoven’s Lenore in the revival of Fidelio in 1822. A long career of dramatic song was hers. She was great in several roles, such as Adrianno in Wagner’s Rienzi, Euryanthe, Senta, and Preciosa. She failed as Venus in Tannhäuser. Wagner said she did not like the rôle. Schroeder-Devrient was not a singer; she was a dramatic artist with extraordinary declamatory force. She was the forerunner of the early school of Wagner interpreters, who knew little or nothing of the graces of song as practiced by the great artists of the Catalani type.

Pasta was a singer more closely approaching the type of the great dramatic sopranos of to-day. She united admirable singing with tragic acting of the classic style. She was undoubtedly the Lilli Lehmann of her time. If she had been called upon to sing rôles of the early Wagnerian kind, she would have succeeded in them. For her Donizetti wrote Anna Bolena, Bellini La Sonnambula and Norma,—her greatest part,— and Pacini Niobe.

With the advent of the works of Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, and their contemporaries, the demands upon singers changed. Certainly when Beethoven wrote Fidelio he had no thought of catering to the old appetite for exquisite finish and brilliant execution. He was seeking for the embodiment of tragic emotion; hence action, facial expression, and declamatory force had to contribute to the achievement of his end at the sacrifice of that bodily repose which made the singing of Farinelli and his peers what it was. Close upon the heels of Beethoven came Weber with his dramatic operas, and he too dragged singing as then understood from its pedestal. Wagner, as we well know, went still farther; but it was long after the period of the reign of Donizetti when Wagner came into his own.

We are far in these complacent days from regarding Bellini and Donizetti as “cocksparrow revolutionaries,” but they cut niches in the steps of progress just as assuredly as did Beethoven and Wagner. Their niches, however, were of a different kind. These masters were in the line of succession of the old Neapolitan school of composition, the school which sought always to conserve in opera the element of pure vocal beauty; but they yielded to the growing demand for dramatic intensity, and in so doing sacrificed some of the reposeful features necessary to the art of perfect singing.

The recitative of their operas was far more animated and varied than that of the earlier works. Much less of it was of the secco kind, the kind supported merely by chords on a harpsichord or a few stringed instruments. The new combination of instrumented recitative with aria parlante and aria di bravura, called the “dramatic scene,” demanded a wider range of expression and style than singers had hitherto sought to put into one number. It aimed chiefly at dramatic color, and it robbed the singer of those nicely contrived opportunities for the preparation of breathing which the old arias afforded.

Yet these were the days of singers who to us seem to be creations of overheated fancy. What marvels have we poor twentieth-century opera-goers not heard of Grisi, Mario, Malibran, Rubini, Tam-burini, and Ronconi! Yet we know it was Rubini, long the tenor idol of Paris, who introduced into the art of song the trick called the vibrato, without which no well-regulated singer now regards himself as properly equipped. The vibrato is the mother of the tremolo, that pernicious vice which leads to so much tawdry sentiment and such a wilderness of singing out of tune.

If, however, we are to believe the enthusiastic accounts of contemporaries and the memories of very wise old men, these singers had as much technical skill as the princes of Handel’s day, together with much more emotional warmth. Certainly the music which they sang, and which few singers of to-day can deliver beautifully, is in itself evidence of the extraordinary development of their powers. The numbers of Norma are not for any singer but one capable of hurling into an auditorium with perfect freedom the measures of Weber’s “Ocean, thou mighty monster,” a dramatic scena of the most exacting sort, and only to be well sung by a great singer.

But it was not in works of this sort that the famous singers of the early thirties and forties at the Italiens in Paris and at the opera in London made their fame. Grisi was indeed hailed as the successor of Pasta, but it was in Anna Bolena that she succeeded her. In this now forgotten opera of Donizetti the great quartet, Grisi, Rubini, Tamburini, and Lablache, set London afire. It was for this quartet that Bellini in 1835 composed I Puritani, and when Rubini retired, Mario succeeded to his place in the quartet, and with it created Donizetti’s exquisite comic opera, Don Pasquale.

Grisi was the queen of the operatic circle. Her voice was described by the London Times as “a pure, brilliant, powerful, flexible soprano.” It was conceded to be one of the finest ever heard. “As an actress Mlle. Grisi exhibits discriminative powers of no common order,” said the Thunderer. This does not sound extravagant, yet Grisi’s praises have not ceased to echo down the corridors of operatic history.

More enthusiastic are some of the accounts of Lablache. His bass voice is said to have equaled his enormous physical strength, which was so great that he could hold a double bass viol at arm’s length. Yet he roared gently on most occasions, and used his thunders only when art demanded that he should. He was huge of frame, and was as clever in comedy as in tragedy. His Leporello has never been surpassed. What a Wotan he would have made! Tamburini was a handsome, graceful fellow with a smooth, liquid voice of two octaves, and a facility of execution in florid music which would make any contemporaneous baritone stare. Those were the days of Rossini’s popularity, we must remember, and every one, from the soprano down to the bass, had to sing roulades.

But perhaps the best understanding of the vocal art of the period may be gathered from the comments upon Rubini. He had a chest register running from E of the bass clef to high B, and his falsetto went on to the high F. He used the head tones too much, but the public liked to hear them. He could pass from one register to the other so that no one could detect the change. “Gifted with immense lungs,” said Escudier, “he can so control his breath as never to expend more of it than is necessary for producing the exact degree of sound he wishes. So adroitly does he conceal the artifice of respiration that it is impossible to discover when his breath renews itself.. . . In this manner he can deliver the longest and most drawn out phrases without any solution of continuity.”

His appearance was not good, and he was awkward. He was no actor at all, and his recitative was poor. In ensembles he never opened his mouth to sing. He would walk through a third of an opera, only to sing like a veritable demigod when his great aria was reached. Then he poured forth his splendid voice, his passionate delivery, his new and startling vibrato, his equally novel and affecting sob in the closing cadence,—hear Caruso do it,—till the most critical lost their judgment and acclaimed him a master of art. So indeed he was, but he was an aria singer pure and simple. He cared nothing for dramatic impersonation, and waited always for the supreme vocal moment. At any rate, that is the opinion of Chorley, who was, taking him all in all, the most observant critic of that period.

Mario, the idol of London, the adored of all womankind, was surely not so great a singer as Rubini, but he was a finer operatic artist. He was the perfection of theatrical grace, and he had an unmistakably fervent temper, which inspired his best scenes with communicative ardor. He was a master of the art of dress, and he always presented to the eye a delighting picture. As Chorley said, he was “the most perfect stage lover ever seen whatever may have been his other qualities or defects.” ‘The same commentator notes that he was a great Raoul in Les Huguenots, and that in the fourth act he rose to the full requirements of the masterly duet.

Throughout all the accounts of these singers of the elder days, one finds chiefly consideration of purely technical perfections. If behind the finish of the art of delivering the notes and phrases there lay a warmth of temperament or a grace of natural manner, well and good; but you may search in vain for any study of the intellectual attributes of these princes of the operatic stage. The era of philosophical music had not yet arrived. Sublimated sentiment was about the highest achievement of operatic composition, and the old sovereignty of musical forms, which made the librettist a servitor of the composer, had not ceased.

The great revolution in operatic art was brought about by the radical reforms of Wagner. When his sensational theories, demonstrated in his equally sensational works, spread through Europe, singers were called upon to study new problems. The proposition that the drama was the thing, and that the music was simply a means of expressing the poet’s thought, was in itself sufficient to startle operatic Europe, and it did. It is needless now to describe the battle that was waged over this theory. The fight is over, and even the modern Italians accept the Wagnerian theory up to that point. The result of the spread of Wagnerian ideas has been the development in the last quarter of a century of a new school of singers. I do not mean the Wagnerian singers of the early sort, for they were not singers at all, except in a few brilliant instances. They were declaimers and singing actors, whose vocal powers were imperfect, but whose dramatic temperaments and intelligence enabled them to affect their public powerfully. The new school of singers is that of which Jean de Reszke is the supreme master, and of which Lillian Nordica, Lili Lehmann, Edouard de Reszke, Delmas, Renaud, and a few others, are the leading members. There is little room for doubt that these singers would make an inferior showing in pure technical brilliancy as compared to the singers of the epoch of Farinelli.

Their entire schooling has been directed to a different end. They have not sought to stand still and amaze audiences by the mere beauty of their tone, the polish of their delivery, the length of their phrases, the exquisite finish of their sentiment. The emission of tone has been with them a means, not an end. It is one of their interpretative materials. Hand in hand with it go clear enunciation of the text, phrasing which sets forth not simply musical beauty, but the significance of the poetic lines, verbal emphasis utilized as carefully as in speech, dramatic expression designed on lines closely resembling those of elocution rather than song. Furthermore, action of the most imposing and delineative sort is demanded by the methods of this school.

The question may well be raised, then, whether the greatest dramatic singers of to-day are not artistically the peers of the princes of 1770, though they are less accomplished as singers. What could the pupils of the Pistocchi school have achieved if confronted with the same tremendous demands upon their resources as are the operatic impersonators of to-day? Compare any one of the airs of Handel with the tremendous duet of Raoul and Valentine in the fourth act of Les Huguenots. Analyze the enormous difference in style between a scene of Gluck and the last act of Verdi’s Otello. Set the third act of Aida against one of the early works. The amount of physical force required in these modern creations is far greater than that demanded by the older operas, and the opportunities for reposeful singing, in which complete command of the vocal resources may be had, are fewer indeed.

But this is not all. There is the enormous volume, the gorgeous sonority, of the modern orchestra to be considered. The singer of to-day does not rest upon a simple accompaniment. He himself accompanies an orchestral description of brilliant character, an instrumental depiction of emotional struggle far more eloquent than his own utterances. If he is to dominate this, he must be capable of producing a notable volume of tone, and of making all his expressive modulations upon a gigantic scale. This is the day of big voices; the little, sweet organ has no place in the monster opera house behind the thundering modern orchestra.

Still another consideration must be brought forward. Above all things the successful dramatic singer of to-day must have brains. He cannot content himself with the study of vocal technics and the plan of arias. He has to construct an impersonation upon the highest poetic lines. Even the Italians are demanding this of their singers, and such rôles as Mascagni’s Osaka or Puccini’s Scarpia, while requiring powerful voices and declamatory skill, need in even greater measure intelligence and theatrical subtlety.

Wagner was the father of it all, and he must be thanked for the more intellectual impersonations given now to characters which used only to be sung. Gounod’s Faust, Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots, Verdi’s Il Trovatore, are all better interpreted now than they were a quarter of a century ago, because the singers who then sang only these have since turned their attention to the works of Wagner, and have learned the meaning of the philosophic and poetic musical drama. Jean de Reszke, who has sung Faust and Tristan, Romeo and Siegfried, with equal beauty and truthfulness, is, taking him all in all, a more influential dramatic artist than Farinelli. Yet there can be no doubt that Farinelli was a better singer than de Reszke.

Some remnants of the middle school, that of Grisi and Mario, are left us in the persons of Sembrich, Melba, Caruso, and their kind. It is well for us that they are here, for otherwise we might lose sight of the possibilities of pure singing, which is the true basis of all operatic impersonation. These are the artists who have the true schooling, and in all probability, when we hear Sembrich and Caruso in L’ Elisir d’ Amore, we are not an immeasurable distance away from a performance of Don Pasquale with Grisi and Mario in the cast.