Beverly Sills: Advent Calendar of Song: Day Seventeen
Day Seventeen of the Advent Calendar of Song
I’ve now posted three of the famously great voices in succession: Ella Fitzgerald, Rosa Ponselle, Alexander Kipnis. Today, let’s try a singer with lighter, less impressive equipment but in one of opera’s supreme arias.
In Handel’s opera Giulio Cesare in Egitto (Julius Caesar in Egypt, 1724), Cleopatra is not yet the great monarch and symbol of Eastern erotic allure she was to become; she’s twenty-one, and falling in love with Julius Caesar amid a singularly complex era in Roman-Egyptian political relations. Over three acts, Handel gives her no fewer than eight arias. He gives Caesar the same number, but they count for less - whereas most of Cleopatra’s are among the greatest ever written, ranging between highly elegant allure, tragic despair, and dazzling joy.
This Act Two aria catches Cleopatra in despair. It’s also an ideal example of Handel’s talent for spinning only twenty Italian words (“Se pietà di me non senti, giusto ciel, io morirò. Tu da' pace a' miei tormenti o quest'alma spirerò”) over almost eleven minutes of music, in an A-B-A da capo structure: Cleopatra repeats and repeats and repeats the same thought – the B section does remarkably little to change her mood - but the music keeps deepening and transforming that thought, so that we sense the obsessive, painful anxiety building in Cleopatra’s mind with really stunning psychological power and beauty. (The beauty of anxiety: what a paradox! Handel is among the very few composers who could bring it off.)
This Cleopatra is Beverly Sills (1929-2007), an American soprano who has largely seemed less than first-rate. On many recordings, I don’t dispute that view of her achievement, though she often has good moments. (She was a vivid actress.) She had a light, pretty coloratura soprano voice that was always on the fluttery side; opera people nicknamed her “Silvery Bells”, condescendingly. Her voice, probably because she tackled too wide a range of roles from the late 1960s on, became only more fluttery when her international career took off in the early 1970s.
Cleopatra was the role that made her a major star with New York City Opera, in 1966. YouTube does not state when this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLNYfuSnKkY
was recorded, but – you can hear the audience at the end - I suspect it’s her 1968 debut performance at the Teatro Colón, Buenos Aires. Her peak years were 1966-1975; she retired in 1980.
You can listen to “Se pietà” sung by more glorious voices – Monserrat Caballé, Leontyne Price, Joan Sutherland – but not with such aching sorrow as with Sills here: the emotion is there in her phrasing. And, unlike most Cleopatras, she makes this aria inwardly focussed rather than a public statement. She shapes the whole aria with fabulous line that transcends the thoroughly tremulous nature of her voice. Sills had famously fast coloratura: you can hear that in the trills she adds when the A section returns. But this is a slow, quiet aria. She sustains it, builds it, develops it slowly and quietly; the trills just apply further pressure on the line.
A.
Se pietà di me non senti
giusto ciel io morirò.
If you don’t feel pity for me,
Just heaven, I’ll die.
B.
Tu da' pace a' miei tormenti
o quest'alma spirerò.
Grant relief to my torments,
or this soul will expire.
A.
Se pietà di me non senti
giusto ciel io morirò.
If you don’t feel pity for me,
Just heaven, I’ll die.
Hers was a bright, light, pretty voice; she’s in such good form here that her vibrato seems expressive rather than (as it would become) intrusive. But there you are: she’s in such good form that her voice acquires real beauty and melting softness, more through line and breathing than through texture and bloom. I find this truly exceptional singing, even though hers isn’t, for me, a great instrument. I so hope you agree.
