Clara Butt: Advent Calendar of Song: Day Twelve

Advent Calendar Of Song: Day Twelve

Please don’t think you have been through the toughest examples of whoosh-and-scratch 78rpm sound in this series! I have further thickets through which to drag you, today and later. (But I’m sparing you Mapleson cylinders, through some of which the voices can hardly be heard but which do record live performances, usually at the New York Met.) 

This is one of the most famous numbers in all music, widely known as Handel’s Largo. Really, it’s marked “Larghetto”, and is the opening item of Handel’s opera Serse (Xerxes). The opera was a complete failure at its world premiere in London. The aria was rediscovered in the nineteenth century, as a concert number. I grew up with recordings of the “Largo” by Kathleen Ferrier and Beniamino Gigli, then learnt in my teens from Janet Baker that it could be sung in a much more inward, contemplative way. (I didn't expect ever to see the opera, though. Had anyone told me there would be an award-winning production at English National Opera in the 1980s, it would have seemed preposterous. But lo! it came to pass.) This month I’ve been sent Lucia Popp’s wonderful recording, which strikes me as great as any I’ve ever heard.

But Handel wrote it for a castrato, Caffarelli (1710-1783): who made a fortune, was notoriously temperamental, sang for over thirty years, and - after becoming a longterm star at the Teatro San Carlo, Naples -  built a palazzo. 

How did the castrati sound? They did much to develop the whole art and science of bel canto (starting in the Renaissance), and became the dominant vocal virtuosi of the eighteenth century, commanding huge fees. By the 1830s, they were a dying species: the French star tenor Adolphe Nourrit wrote home to his wife from Venice after hearing one for the first time, the castrato Giovanni-Battista Vellutti (1781-1861), who was then in his late fifties. Nourrit asked his wife to imagine  Vellutti's style by recalling three of the great Italian operatic sopranos she had seen in Paris - Giuditta Pasta, Bendetta Pisaroni, and Fanny Persiani: "He is indeed the great master of all the great singers of this period, the tree which has produced  all this fine fruit."  We have recordings by one of the last of the castrati, Alessandro Moreschi (1858-1922) - castration had been legally prohibited even in Italy by the tkme of the recording - but they’re problematic: Moreschi was past his prime and may not have been the best, but his sound, often effectively and affectingly plaintive, tells us much. (You can find them on YouTube too.) Some of today’s countertenors have recognizably studied his records; others sound light years away. It’s a controversial area: let’s turn instead to one particular contralto in this aria.

When we reach the word “contralto,” however, we touch on other areas of controversy - and perhaps a sound almost as remote as that of the castrati. Few women singers today call themselves contralto anyway. Kathleen Ferrier and the young Janet Baker did call themselves contraltos (Baker soon became a mezzo-soprano, and ended up singing several soprano roles.) But one school of thought is very sniffy about both Ferrier and Baker: they, like many mezzo sopranos of today and recent decades, are deemed to have avoided the resources of the chest register. (Baker, I’m told, once said “I have a very good chest register before breakfast! But then it goes.”) I’ve adored Ferrier since earliest childhood and Baker since my teens. I can find fault with both, but many of their recordings matter hugely to me. They remain on the too-long list of singers left on this calendar. 

Today, however, I give you a singer who can only be a contralto: another Englishwoman, Clara Butt (1872-1936). Her voice was vast, projecting “Land of Hope and Glory” over thousands at massed gatherings in Hyde Park and representing the voice of Empire to many. (Thomas Beecham claimed that on a clear day you could hear it across the English Channel.) She completed her vocal studies in Paris, with Jacques Bouhy, who trained others of the great contraltos of the day; Saint-Saëns was wild about her, wanting her to sing Dalila in his Samson et Dalila opera in London; Elgar composed the song-cycle Sea Pictures for her. She was married to a baritone, Kennerly Rumford, often singing with him. (Not everyone loved her voice: Reynaldo Hahn called it “une voix obscène”.) But her account of Sullivan’s “The Lord Chord” takes you to places no other singer can: you can find it on her YouTube. Perhaps because she was tall (six foot two), she only sang one role in opera: Gluck’s Orfeo. (When Saint-Saëns wanted her to sing Dalila in London, the opera was prohibited by the Britain’s then law against the stage representation of biblical subjects.) Apart from the immense power of her chest register, she had a wonderfully secure top, could sing with amazing delicacy (as her recording of “Sea Pictures” shows), and had brilliant coloratura. And the affecting. amazing power of her chest register is something that was praised in the castrati.

Here’s her Largo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XX4fEC_zwck This is thoroughly Victorian Handel, sung in oratorio manner. But the whole voice from chest to top flows with stunning ease; the words are effortlessly lucid; it’s a thrill to hear how she enters higher notes. (I know her accent sometimes sounds Australian - she wasn't - but you can’t miss the words!) (Nellie Melba, being Australian, sang with a real Australian accent and nonetheless triumphed in Paris, New York, as well as London. When Delibes wanted her to sing the title role of his Lakmé, a colleague suggested that her accent might be wrong; Delibes replied “Qu’elle chante en chinois, si elle veut, mais qu’elle chante mon opéra!” – let her sing in Chinese if she wants, but let her sing my opera. It’s a good line, but actually Melba’s words in French are far clearer than many to today’s French singers. Likewise Butt's in Italian.) 

In the recitative alone, Butt shows what the messa di voce is about: the ability to swell and diminish sustained notes, not as an effect in itself but as part of expression. Then the opening note of “Ombra mai fu” does so again. As with so many pre-1914 singers, she’s constantly making imaginative contrasts of soft and loud, often without the same phrase. I won't say more; I think she teaches you everything.

Frondi tenere e belle
del mio platano amato
per voi risplenda il fato.
Tuoni, lampi, e procelle
non v'oltraggino mai la cara pace,
né giunga a profanarvi austro rapace.

Tender and beautiful fronds
of my beloved plane tree,
let Fate smile upon you.
May thunder, lightning, and storms
never disturb your dear peace,
nor may you by blowing winds be profaned.

Ombra mai fu
di vegetabile,
cara ed amabile,
soave più.

Never was a shade
of any plant
dearer and more lovely,
or more sweet.

Clara Butt (1872-1936)

Clara Butt’s London home, Swiss Cottage