Will's Record of the Week

Encore Verdi

This is a follow-up to last week’s survey of the singers who worked with Verdi in his last two productions, in Paris in 1894. There’s another participant who ought to be remembered - a “second cast” singer who didn’t work directly with the composer, but was the subject of interesting comments from him.

Falstaff went up in April at the Opéra-Comique, and when Verdi returned in October to mount Otello at the Opéra, Victor Maurel went over to the big theater to play Iago, and Lucien Fugère (1848-1935) took over the title role in the autumn reprise of Falstaff at the Opéra-Comique. Boito, the librettist, had apparently spoken severely of Fugère to their publisher Ricordi, and Verdi offered a gentle corrective:

Boito’s criticisms are perfectly fair, but in his judgment he forgets that of the public. All right, Falstaff moves around too much and doesn’t do Quand’ero paggio well...but he repeats it three times.

Again that encore! Strange as it seems to us, the repetition of sections that had pleased the audience was one of the main markers of success in opera in the 19th century. They couldn’t go home and hear it again on a record. If they weren’t box-holders or habitués of the gallery they may not have known when they would ever have a chance to hear it again.

The same Verdi letter notes repetitions of the laughing quartet of the Merry Wives and of Quickly’s narrative about Herne’s Oak on that particular night. From other accounts we know that the Honor Monologue, Ford’s soliloquy, Fenton’s sonnet, and Nannetta’s Song of the Fairies were often repeated in early Falstaff performances. Verdi himself regularly encored at least three sections of his Requiem when he conducted it all over Europe. There was simply a livelier two-way connection between audience and stage in those days.

Fugère, meanwhile, failed to record anything from Falstaff, and that’s a pity, because he was a charismatic interpreter. Here he is in a lively song recorded in 1902, Paul Henrion’s “Le vieux ruban,” picked because it is similar in range and spirit to the “amorous” Falstaff in his big scene with Alice Ford. The voice per se is more utilitarian than beautiful, but the use of it is expert, from the superbly clear diction to the poised head register and warm low notes to the fine-grained pianissimo trill at the end.

Fugère made about twenty records in his mid-fifties, and then - to the surprise of everyone except those who had been attending the Opéra-Comique - almost thirty more between the ages of 79 and just short of 82. His last stage appearances (as Doctor Bartolo) were made at age 85. In between, an interviewer asked him the secret of his longevity and elicited a classic response: “If a man doesn’t sing well at 83 — when will he, I’d like to know!”

Here is his very last record, the “Chanson du chevrier” from Halévy’s Le val d’Andorre, composed in the year Fugère was born and recorded on 13 May 1930.

In the meantime, two readers have made versions of the same comment on Albert Saléza, Verdi’s Paris Otello: that he sounds more like a Fenton, i.e. very lyrical and perhaps a little “light,” in his sole surviving studio recording.

This is undeniable, especially in the opening phrases of the piece he chose (“Tu che a Dio spiegasti l’ali” from Lucia di Lammermoor). There is somewhat more heft to the sound in the taxing climb to top A near the end, but it’s hard to tell much from such a primitive document. (The complete vocal portion of this dim 1898 cylinder is heard at the start of the last audio selection in last week’s post).

It’s also hard to be sure how a single recording relates to the overall span of the singer’s activity. That he was capable of delicately shaded tones in the “passaggio” area, tending towards the head-voice side, is beyond doubt - and there are moments in Otello that can benefit from that, and go begging in most performances. Did Saléza favor that facet of his singing because he was in a room and not on the stage? Or is that just the way he sang this piece? What might he have done in a whole series of records? (He did, apparently, make at least four more at the same time as the Lucia aria, all for the legendary firm of Gianni Bettini, but none has come to light in modern times.)

Saléza also appears on three of the Mapleson cylinders, recorded “Live from the Met” between 1901 and 1903. On only one of these can I glean any useful idea of his voice, but that one (a bit of the duet “Verranno a te sull’aure,” also from Lucia, sung on 2 March 1901) is interesting. The lines beginning “pensando ch’io di gemiti / mi pasco, e di dolor” are clear enough - just - to give an idea of Saléza’s E-flat at the cusp of the “passaggio.” (The prompter is as audible as the tenor: the apparatus was in his box.) Then there are two attacks on upper A-flat and a solid scale up to B-flat on “ah, su questo pegno allor.” In all these the voice sounds - marginally but distinctly - darker and heavier than on the solo cylinder.

That doesn’t prove anything, but it does raise a familiar question for students of early sound artifacts. Transposition of key was common in opera, vastly more common than it is today, and Edgardo’s final solo was a very frequent candidate for transposition. When Ricordi first issued printed orchestral parts for the opera, the whole final scene appeared twice in them, first in the keys of Donizetti’s autograph and then a half-step lower. So the possibility must be entertained that Saléza might have been singing in D-flat and not in D when he recorded his cylinder - and if it is played at a speed producing the lower key, the voice sounds, yes, darker and heavier.

There’s not a clear way to decide. As far as I know, nobody has discovered a “standard speed” for the few known Bettini cylinders. Sometimes comparison of vibrato rates reveals a sonic signature that helps us judge the proper speed for a doubtful item, but in this case we simply don’t have enough samples to go by. Without getting into the technical details, the vibrato heard on the few decipherable moments in the live duet (almost certainly sung in key) is empirically within the possible range of the voice on the Bettini cylinder as heard in either key. So in the end we must go by subjective impression.

Here is a handy comparison tool: the first lines of the solo as reproduced in D; the fragment from the live duet (played twice, and one has to listen at least twice to make any sense of it at all); and finally the same opening of the solo as reproduced in D-flat. Which is right? We have to guess, but we want to guess, because one way or the other it is an Otello voice admired by the composer of Otello.

Teatro Nuovo puts great emphasis on learning from the singers who had never heard, or heard of, microphone singing - primitive recordings from more than a century ago, forming a link to the traditions of opera’s heyday and the infinite potential of the natural, unassisted human voice. Check this space regularly for samples, and click here for some pointers on how to listen.