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Il vascello fantasma

For this week, a pair of curiosities that I was moved to revisit by Conrad L. Osborne’s recent blog posts on Der fliegende Holländer. For those who don’t know Osborne: he was the single best active critic in the field of opera and vocal music for a period of about 25 years. Those 25 began more than 60 years ago, after which he shifted his activities (mostly) to performing and teaching, and shifted his writing to what eventually became Opera as Opera. Both the book and the blog he launched after completing it are essential reading for whoever wants to understand where opera is coming from and where it might go.  

Three early Ricordi scores of “Der fliegende Holländer”

CLO has many probing things to say about Dutchman and the role it has played in our shifting ideas of dramatic interpretation - and about its vocal requirements. The solos of the lovelorn tenor Erik remind us of Wagner’s often-expressed admiration for Italian bel canto; Wagner loved to praise Italy’s singers while deriding what he saw as triviality and cheapness in the music of Donizetti and Verdi. But Conrad points out that in his later recommendations to the interpreters of the opera, the composer seems to have been concerned that singers might take the bel canto thing in the wrong direction:   

“Nor must Erik be a sentimental whiner: on the contrary, he is stormy, impulsive, and somber [...] Whoever would give a sugary rendering to his Cavatina in the Third Act would do me a disservice, for it ought instead to breathe distress and heartache.”

Since I study minor Italian singers from the dawn of the gramophone era, I have had occasion to check out the completely forgotten Alberto Caffo, a Veneto tenor who in 1905 recorded “Il cor ferito a morte” from Il vascello fantasma. (For Americans, used to the literal translation of the title as The Flying Dutchman, it seems strange that in Italy and France the opera was long called The Phantom Vessel.) I thought it would be worth pulling out Caffo’s record to ponder the application of actual Italian vocalism to a bit of the role, in this case part of the lyrical solo in Erik’s second-act scene with Senta. 


Caffo (1877-1931) was apparently nothing out of the ordinary in his day, but he is an Italian lyric tenor eminently suited to Gennaro, Nemorino, or Fernando, and with a style that later either disappeared or migrated to a few small voices whose owners would never have imagined interpreting a Wagnerian hero. His tone is sweet, he navigates the passaggio-oriented lines like someone enjoying a jaunt through his favorite territory, his gruppetti are precisely etched without becoming interruptive, and his clean pitch defines the chromatic intervals well (including the moment in which he had unfortunately learned the music wrong, and found himself obliged to discover a microtonal inflection between E-flat and D). 

Anything “stormy” or “somber” here? I think Wagner, looking back on his first really successful opera, was a little embarrassed to realize he might have given Erik imitation-Donizetti to sing. If you didn’t know Dutchman, and I had said Caffo’s record was from L’esule di Roma or some other Donizetti opera you also don’t know, there is not a single moment that could tip you off to the fraud. So maybe the injunctions to performers were at least in part an attempt to tilt the role towards the character he felt in hindsight he should have created.

But would he have found this interpretation too “sugary”? Hard to say. What Caffo gives is what the writing seems to request. Italian tenorizing in Wagner’s day - both when he wrote the opera and when he wrote the comments - was full of special effects far beyond these elegant shadings, and was sprinkled with incidental, half-conscious flickers of ornamentation whose echoes we can hear in singers like Fernando de Lucia (ROTW 22). So it is difficult to be sure what Wagner had in his mind’s ear as “sugar.”  

He did add something else quite interesting, though:  

“Everything that might justify a false conception of this piece, such as its falsetto passage and its final cadenza, I urge [the interpreters] either to alter or to omit.”

The first surprise: What, change something in Wagner? Leave something out? In fact the composer was no purist; as the new critical edition of Tristan und Isolde shows in dizzying detail, he was more than willing to tweak a vocal line if someone found the tessitura uncomfortably low or high - and even willing to transpose whole passages up or down for the same reasons, composing new modulations to bridge the shifts. 

Of course, anyone who knows the scores as he wrote them will agree that his version is better - but the takeaway from all these adjustments seems to be the importance Wagner set on vocal parts sounding good, even if it meant adjusting the score so that a particular individual singer could sound good in it. That sort of change happened daily in the operatic world he knew, and everybody expected it. (Right around the time of Dutchman, Verdi wrote to Donizetti asking him please to take care of all needed adjustments to suit Ernani to the cast of its Vienna premiere, which Donizetti was supervising.) 

In this particular case it is fascinating to read Wagner’s idea about the “Falsettstelle.” He doesn’t say that he didn’t mean it to be one - he just says that it is one, and seems to suggest that if that leads to a wrong conception, i.e. the “sugary” one he has just mentioned, then it would be better to change the notes. This surely signals that he was on board with the developing tendency for tenors to take their chest-voice production higher in the range. But at the same time it says something interesting about what he was expecting to hear when he wrote it. 

Can we glimpse what that might have been?  Here are two early recordings that give a hint: 

 
 
 

Meanwhile the question of vocal registration looms large in the other souvenir I know of Il vascello fantasma circa 1905, the first part of Senta’s Ballad as recorded the following year by Emilia Corsi (1870-1928). This is probably even farther removed from our current conceptions than Caffo’s Erik:  Corsi treats the G above middle C as a note to be sung routinely in full chest voice when volume is desired. German sopranos at the time rarely if ever did this, though they did often approach F and sometimes F-sharp in that way. I wonder what Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient (Wagner’s early muse and original Senta) did? Corsi, meanwhile, is quite expert with another challenge here, tapering the soft phrase-endings on upper F and G - and the chesty middle G certainly provides a strong ending when the orchestra crashes back in with the Dutchman motive.  

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.