— Teatro Nuovo

Rossini mezzo

Eugenia Mantelli is a famous name today only to record collectors. Her ultra-rare Zonophones of approximately 1905, besides commanding dizzying prices when original copies change hands, set what long seemed to be an unreachable standard for bel canto agility in a contralto voice. “Long,” in that sentence, means “until Marilyn Horne showed up and reminded people that it can be done.” But now, two full generations into the bel canto revival, we can go back to Mantelli and find a standard-setter in a narrower sense.

It isn’t about range. Astonishingly, for most opera-folk today, she leaves out both the lowest and the highest notes in the big aria from La cenerentola. She sings “Una voce poco fa” a half-step lower than written, and her Carmen finishes the Seguidilla with a downwards resolution of that last “tra la la.” It also isn’t about creative ornamentation; she does a bit of that, but mostly just delivers what the composers wrote.

It’s about three things: clarity of articulation without any interruption in the flow of tone; mastery in the center of the voice; and velocity. Mantelli doesn’t offer particularly low or high notes, but she also never offers a weak, shaky, breathy, or awkward one. She has no trouble with dynamics or trills in the octave starting on middle C. She can get her scales up to a tempo of about quarter-note = 140 without even touching the brakes when she turns a corner.

Her most-circulated records are the ones from Barbiere and Cenerentola, so here instead is a song - familiar as a student-piece from the beloved Schirmer anthology “Twenty-Four Italian Songs and Arias.”

That speaks to the turns, trills, and mid-range security. Here is a sample, from a noisy cylinder recorded in 1898, of the super-fast scale work (heads-up that the pianist gets confused and thinks her cadenza is finished before it is).

Elsewhere in her recordings there is a good deal of charm and verve, along with great legato in long phrases. All of them that have survived can be found here in an album that every aspiring mezzo or contralto should own and study. But after all this, the details of her career may come as a surprise.

Mantelli was born in 1860, the same year as Nellie Melba and Fernando de Lucia, with both of whom she sang. She started at the top, with a series of engagements in 1883-84 among colleagues like Gemma Bellincioni (the original Santuzza and Fedora) and a whole constellation of stars who lie on that tantalizing cusp of history, i.e. might have recorded their voices, but didn’t: Erminia Borghi-Mamo, Julian Gayarré, Teresa Brambilla-Ponchielli, Romano Nannetti. She was on the legendary South American tour that marked Arturo Toscanini’s unplanned podium debut. (In some accounts, the management’s frantic search for its young principal cellist and soon-to-be conductor concluded in Mantelli’s hotel room, where they may or may not have been going over scores together.)

But her roles were not exactly focused on bel canto. She never sang any opera by Rossini; her bread and butter were Amneris, Ortrud, Azucena, Carmen, Mignon, Fricka. A frequent partner was Francesco Tamagno, the first Otello; Mantelli made her Met debut with him in Aida in 1894 (“a substantial contralto voice of fine quality,” reported the New York Times) and held her own beside that trumpet-voiced tenor in six operas including the local stage premiere of Samson et Dalila. She sang in big theaters everywhere and kept a heavy schedule right up to her retirement from the stage at fifty (with a six-role season in Lisbon, where she had been a favorite for 27 years).

So - a thoroughly up-to-date singer with a mostly modern, mostly big-voiced repertory. Her only role calling for a significant amount of florid work was the page in Les Huguenots. The coloratura thing was an old-fashioned skill she had learned as a youngster (both her parents were singing-teachers) and kept in shape for concerts. But she had really learned it.

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.