Mattia Battistini: Advent Calendar of Song: Day Twenty-One

Advent Calendar of Song: Day Twenty-One

Superlatives are inevitably dangerous, but it’s remarkable how many people regarded the baritone Mattia Battistini (1856-1928) as the greatest of all singers, the mastersingers’ mastersinger. Partly because it’s recorded in 1906, partly because it’s a bygone way of singing, partly because it's a bleeding chunk excised from a lesser-known opera, this will be nobody’s favourite Advent item. But you have to hear Battistini: nobody has ever known and shown more about singing. 

Battistini was a superstar who was famous in the eras of Verdi and Puccini. He sang their operas – he sang a great deal of Verdi - but they avoided having him sing their premieres: his virtuoso artistry might have superseded theirs. Wagner – so I believe (I can’t find a source for this just now) – remarked, when he heard Battistini sing Wolfram in Tannhäuser near the end of his life, that he had never heard the role sung so well. Massenet revised the tenor title role of his already hugely successful Werther so that Battistini could sing it. (Curiously, he avoided singing in the United States altogether; he did one big tour of South America, but otherwise claimed that he disliked extended sea travel.) 

You’ve heard Caruso. He often sang with the American soprano Frances Alda, longterm star of the Met (and author of Men, Women, and Tenors), during the years when his singing changed history and his records sold millions: she made a number of successful records with him, one of which (the trio from Verdi’s I Lombardi) is a particularly thrilling classic. Battistiini and Caruso sang together a number of times, but Alda sang with Battistini only once. It was in Rigoletto : Caruso sang the Duke, always one of his most popular roles (three arias and the quartet). He teased Battistini about his disinclination to sing in New York. But when Alda heard Battistini in Rigoletto’s title role, she was astounded. Despite her association with Caruso and many of the great artists at the Met, it was of Battistini that she wrote in awe: “he was the greatest singer I ever heard.”

Many agreed: he was known as “Il Paganini del Canto”, “Il Re dei Baritoni”, “La Gloria d’Italia.” The Russian baritone Sergei Levik left a large book of memoirs about the other singers he had witnessed and had known personally in Russia (where Battistini had his greatest triumphs for over twenty years before the First World War). The two whom Levik places above all others are Battistini and Chaliapin, though he knew them to be highly unalike:-

   “Battistini sang, and the sounds did not fade away but persuaded the listener of the truth of what he wanted to convey. It was difficult to resist such a persuasive voice, because, apart from the words and the music, one heard the truth in a voice that was soft but purposeful, warm yet decisive. He was the first singer after Chaliapin who made such a devastating impression on me, making me at the same time aware of the importance of timbre, perhaps in itself the most powerful of a singer’s means of expression.

    “Battistini’s voice was particularly rich in overtones, which continued to sound long after he had ceased to sing. The singer had finished singing, but the sounds somehow still held you in their power. The unusually attractive timbre of his voice caressed the listener, as though enveloping him in its warmth.

    “His voice was unique and without rival among baritones. He had everything that makes a vocal phenomenon: two full octaves of a sound that was uniformly soft throughout its full range, as well as being flexible, full of power and warmth and with something in reserve.

   “…In My Life in Art, Stanislavsky said that he retained an auditory memory of the singing of certain Italians, as well as a physical sensation, so that ‘his heart stood still and he couldn’t stop smiling from joy.’ Battistini was undoubtedly one of those singers.”

Battistini was already in his late forties when he began to record; curiously, only his first records (made in 1903) show him singing with a strong low register. From 1906 on (he was fifty), his low notes began to lose their former resonance; but he never lost them or his control over them. He went on singing big roles till past age seventy: he was due to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of his 1878 debut by singing the same virtuoso role, Alfonso in Donizetti’s La Favorita, in the same theatre, fifty years on – but, a month beforehand, he suffered an attack of asthma and died.

When people who knew him to be a paragon and prodigy would ask him why he didn’t teach, he would reply “My school is in my records.” He made many, over more than twenty years. He wasn’t, however, a paragon of the style we respect today; you have to ask carefully what he’s teaching. He departs from the notes and from their markings; it took me ten or twenty years to learn to admire the way he sings the title role of Mozart’s Don Giovanni – though I should add that (a) every pre-1914 singer who recorded Giovanni material is a shock to the system today (b) I've now come round to find almost all of their Mozart recordings fabulously addictive. Battistini, being famous for bel canto, knew how to break the rules that many have associated with bel canto: he could do purity and virtuosity, but they really weren’t what he was about. As with de Lucia, his singing was all about the messa di voce, but he never swelled and/or diminished notes for display – he did so for dramatic expression. He could deliver cadenzas that left other singers amazed, but they were expressions of abundant emotional overflow, without being extraneous.

Although he wasn’t one of the great physical actors of opera, he was a very remarkable vocal actor, changing the whole sound of his voice according to the character. Cruelty, passion, fury, lust, swagger, humiliation, evil: he had a different timbre for them all.

So how do I choose a single disc by him? One of his favourite roles was Charles V (Carlo Quinto), king of Spain, in Verdi’s Ernani; in 1906, he recorded five of Carlo’s great scenes. Each shows a different facet of Battistini’s incomparable gifts; I choose this one, “Vieno meco, sol di rose”, because of the amazing plasticity with which he shapes the phrase and bends the rhythm, the dulcet elegance with which he entreats, and the beautiful fluency with which he ripples through the tender coloratura of the vocal line.

The plot. Carlo (baritone) is in love with the heroine Elvira, who is also loved by the hero Ernani (tenor) and the old grandee Silva (bass). She loves Ernani, of course, but the chivalrous courtesy of the discreet, magnanimous, philosophical, but immensely powerful Carlo is wonderfully contrasted with the unforgiving malice and wounded pride of Silva. Act Two has just reached a particular crisis; Carlo solves the situation by inviting Elvira to leave Silva’s castle under his protection:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Es9UV7qPeiY

Chorus of knights to Silva:

Ogni pietade è inutile

t’è forza l’obbedir.

All pity is useless,

you must perforce obey.

Carlo (to Elvira):

Vieni meco, sol di rose 

intrecciarti ti vo' la vita; 

vieni meco, ore penose 

per te il tempo non avrà. 

Come with me, I want
to intertwine your life with nothing but roses;
come with me, time for you
will have no painful hours.

Tergi il pianto, o giovinetta, 

dalla guancia scolorita; 

pensa al gaudio che t'aspetta, 

che felice ti farà.

Wipe away the tears, young lady,
from your wan cheek;
think of the joy that awaits you,

that will make you happy.

<Ensemble, together, while Carlo repeats his final words:->

Elvira:

Ah, la sorte che m’aspetta

Il mio duolo eternerà (ecc.)

Ah, the fate that awaits me

will make my sorrow eternal (etc).

Giovanna and ladies:

Ciò la morte a Silva affretta

più che i danni dell’ età (ecc.)

That hastens Silva’s death

More than the ravages of age (etc)

Silva:

Sete ardente di vendetta,

Silva appien ti appagherà (ecc.)

Burning thirst for vengeance

Silvawill satisfy you fully (etc.)

What about his rubato! You hear the strings’ pizzicato beat keep up a steady pulse… and then you hear them slow down, astonishingly, for this quiet stream of romance: the suspenseful length of his phrases and the time-bending end of the second line (“ti vo’ la vita”). But how much else there is to hear, too! The quiet honey of his voice is like chivalry itself; he makes an ideal contrast between his softly ardent downward portamenti and (in the fourth line) the clean vault up from “tem-“ to “-po”; the sustained notes vibrate with magical tautness in the air; the ornaments in the vocal line flow with multiple nuances (there are tiny moments when we hear the dark force of his chest register, little marcato strikes here and there that a more “purist” singer would avoid); the fascinating alternations between quiet and volume; the marvellous way in which, even when he’s overriding the ensemble in the last line, he evidently has much more voice in reserve than he’s using here.… You could study this in terms of technique for years, but oh! this goes beyond virtuosity. You see his face; you read his mind; everything is there in the ways his voice flows on his breath. And Battistini surely makes Carlo something of an actor: this king seems a perfect gent, but he’s not without steel, while his chivalry has the dangerous charm of privilege and wealth.

A few singers in the last forty years have handled “Vieni meco” admirably: notably Renato Bruson in a live broadcast at La Scala in 1982 (you can find it on YouTube) and Dmitri Hvorostovsky live at the Met in 2012 (alas, no YouTube recording). Lajos Miller, a singer new to me, is eloquent and elegant in another YouTube account (probably from the 1980s) until the music gets more than he can handle easily. They’re all better than (on YouTube) the very handsome Ettore Bastianini live in the 1950s, who’s unsubtle, forceful, and bumpy (“Vie-he-ni meco sol di ro-ho-ho-se”). But go back to Battistini and they’re all beginners (stuffed shirts, too): he alone is a magician.