— Teatro Nuovo

La Perla de Barcelona

Everyone who loves singing has “favorites,” by which I mean singers you like maybe a little more than they deserve. Singers you want to hear in whatever, even things that don’t suit them all that well, even things you know somebody else did better, because you just enjoy their musical company. I couldn’t claim that Josefina Huguet (1871-1951) had above-average coloratura technique for her day, or that she was a probing interpreter, or that she made the best recording of any particular item. But her sunlit tone and easy musicality make me happy every time I play one of her records. They have had only marginal circulation in the CD era, so here are a few of them offered in case other fans of singing might make a new friend.

Huguet made her debut at the Liceu in her native Barcelona, singing Micaela and Lakmé (accounts conflict as to which came first) at age 17. She would sing there almost every season for the next twenty. She was quickly busy in Buenos Aires and throughout Italy as well, and was an early favorite of the Gramophone and Typewriter Company, making 169 records between 1902 and 1909. She seems to have retired from the stage around the latter year (but still singing well; see below). She maintained a teaching studio in Barcelona and lived long enough to enjoy correspondence with the young record collectors who had “rediscovered” her after World War Two.

Like all acoustical-era singers, Huguet had a firm middle range with no weak notes - that was an entry-level requirement, later allowed to lapse - and a well-managed chest voice. But she had a sweeter-than-usual sweet spot at the top of the staff. Through all the noise of first-decade commercial discs, despite all the loss of overtones, when she is hanging out around F and G we get a full dose of that age-old, never-stale pleasure that comes from a fresh soprano voice in flight. A good example is the somewhat daffy entrance aria of Dinorah (a soprano whose “mad scene” occupies the whole opera until just before the end). The rag-tag studio “orchestra” has trouble staying in tune, but the singing is delightful - both the frequent sustained Gs and the two high Bs that are spoken so casually one feels she could recite the alphabet up there with no strain.

Not that it was actually a light voice; she often sang Nedda in Pagliacci, and was chosen for the recording made under Leoncavallo’s supervision in 1907 - the first attempt ever to record a complete opera with orchestra and chorus. Although one senses the inhibiting effect of time limits and what must have been an unbearably cramped studio (and in June in Milan!), both Huguet and her colleagues hold up well. The best transfer of that can be purchased here.

She also made an unusual contribution on the repertory side: 34 of those commercial discs are songs in Spanish or Catalan. Several of these are winners, and no soprano of comparable vocal quality aside from Rosalia Chalia (see Record of the Week no. 2) did so much in this vein in the early years.

Some of Huguet’s records are so rare that even her “fans” have never heard, or heard of, a copy. But we all had a great surprise in 2013 when the Biblioteca de Catalunya began digitizing a collection of amateur phonograph cylinders made by the Barcelona textile merchant Ruperto Regordosa around 1900 and acquired by the library a century later. Along with many other treasures (including the only recordings of the composer Isaac Albéniz playing piano), these cylinders turned out to include 32 hitherto unknown recordings of Huguet. A sample follows, and the whole group is available to everybody here (click on “accés lliure” to hear each title).

Huguet’s very last solo record is a curiosity: the only known version of Santuzza’s “Voi lo sapete, o mamma” in Spanish. Unlike the rest of Europe, Spain and Portugal took their opera in Italian without translation to the local languages. Their American colonies or ex-colonies followed suit. N.B. this was not an “original-language” policy. It was an “Italian-is-close-enough-to-understand” policy, which applied equally to La traviata, Carmen, Lohengrin and Boris Godunov. (In my experience, even today, when Italian singers are guests in a Spanish-speaking theater, they just speak Italian slowly and with simple vocabulary, and all is well.)

However, around the time musical Spain was asserting itself anew in the music of Granados, Albéniz, and De Falla, there were a few experiments in the direction. It didn’t catch on; in the 1960s Caballé and Carreras were still singing Faust in Italian in Barcelona, and shortly afterwards Spain joined the rest of the world in esperanto/original performances. But Huguet’s pure-toned, impassioned “Vos lo sabeis, oh madre” is a beautiful souvenir of the attempt, radiant on the expansive top notes and intelligible in every syllable.

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.