Rosa Ponselle: Advent Calendar of Song: Day Fifteen

Advent Calendar of Song Day Fifteen

So now I've managed to whittle the remaining eleven days of Advent down to about eleven hundred different singers. Day by day, I truly never know what I'll choose next: even for the final Christmas Day, I still have a wide choice. Remember that I’m not giving you favourites, or favourite pieces of music, I’m trying to make different points about singing.

One issue, inevitably, is sheer beauty of voice. I spent a very large part of my undergraduate first year sitting in Cambridge Public Library leafing through old issues of “The Gramophone”, reading record reviews going back over the previous twenty-plus years. (Somewhere around 2018, I had a fan letter at the New York Times from a musician who had little interest in dance but liked the way I wrote about it: he said it reminded him of the English music critics he used to read. Aha, I thought, now I know my undergraduate studies paid off.)

Some of my favourite Gramophone writing in those days was by Desmond Shawe-Taylor and Philip Hope-Wallace (Bob Gottlieb likewise remembers when BBC Radio’s programme The Critics seemed only to feature people with had double-barrelled names), especially when they disagreed with each other. In the 1950s and 1960s, though, all the critics seemed to agree that that the most sheerly beautiful voice of the day was Victoria de los Angeles; in the 1970s (and later the 1980s) that it was Montserrat Caballé.

I’ve certainly been in love with both those women’s voices since my teens. I notice, however, that I’ve mainly (not always) fallen out of love with Caballé’s voice because she does too little to sustain my interest in it, whereas de los Angeles (except when she’s sounding too goody-two-shoes) still does my heart good, even in very simple music. (Kiri Te Kanawa, a famously ravishing voice in the theatre, somehow didn’t work so well in the studio.)

All of which is preamble. On Day Eleven, I mentioned that the soprano Geraldine Farrar said, probably in the 1920s and 1930s: “When you wish to discuss singers, there are two you must put aside. One is Caruso. The other is Rosa Ponselle.” Farrar had sung with Caruso a great deal; she had retired before the arrival of Ponselle.

So this brings us to the American soprano Rosa Ponselle (Roza Ponzillo, 1987-1981), whose career in opera lasted from 1918 to 1937. She had one of the most exceptional voices of the twentieth century, with absolute smoothness of emission from top to bottom, and such dark power in the lower regions that she might just as well have become a contralto or mezzo. Amazingly, she had little training: she came up through vaudeville in her teens, and lo! made her Met debut at age twenty-one in one of Verdi’s most taxing roles, Leonora in La Forza del destino, beside none other than Caruso. (She was extremely nervous, and was always grateful for the way Caruso would whisper to her in that debut performance "Io vi sostengo, o cara": ""I'm with you, dear". That was Caruso for you, always larger than his own concerns.) She often sang with him in the 1918-1919 and 1919-1920 seasons, notably in La Forza del destino (Verdi) and La Juive (Halévy).

She herself later complained that few of her 78 recordings represented the way she hoped she had sung live: she felt she had had to rush music to fit it into the confines of the 78 side. (It's worth noting that Caruso makes an immense impression in everything, whereas Ponselle does indeed sometimes sound rushed, and not always musically interesting.) Most of her career was in the United States, but she created sensations at Covent Garden (1929. 1930, 1931) and Florence (1933).

Twenty years later, Maria Callas - who greatly admired Ponselle’s recordings (and is said to have been, very reasonably, jealous of Ponselle’s vocal equipment, though Callas’s voice in its prime went higher, had more coloratura brilliance, and covered a wider musical range) - sang many of the roles in which Ponselle had made an indelible impression: Giulia in Spontini’s La Vestale, the title role of Bellini’s Norma, Leonora in Verdi’s Il Trovatore, Violetta in his La Traviata, Leonora in his La Forza, the title role in his Aida, the title role in Ponchielli's La Gioconda, the title role in Puccini’s Tosca. It’s fun to compare the two: Ponselle certainly (as Callas remarked) started with better equipment, though she had to transpose parts of Traviata down as Callas did not. Famously, when Callas made her debut as Norma at Covent Garden in 1952, the Olympian music critic Ernest Newman announced “She is no Ponselle”. (Callas went on using Norma as her debut role in Chicago, New York, Paris, and elsewhere.) In almost all those roles, I’m thrilled to listen to the recordings by both women: generally I think Callas is the superior musician with the more flawed voice and the greater psychological acuity; Ponselle's voice is the more astoundingly polychromatic, serenely produced, and naturally impressive. (Neither of them had the best diction in the world: Callas is generally famous for hers, usually with good reason, but actually sometimes went in for blurry vowels and indistinct consonants, whereas Ponselle could have mannered vowels and undramatic utterance. They were both born English speakers; neither recorded English to good effect.) I've made several mentions of the term messa di voce, the crucial ability to sustain a note steadily while swelling and/or diminishing it: most vocal connoisseurs immediately think of Ponselle's celebrated one in the opening note of "Pace, mio dio", the final aria of Leonora in Forza, though I don't think she makes this feat - marked in Verdi's score - particularly expressive. (She surely thought otherwise. When she had her own villa built outside Baltimore, she called it "Villa Pace". Later in the same aria, Verdi asks Leonora to hit a top B pianissimo, pp. Ponselle adds another messa di voce.)

But in some slow music Ponselle is phenomenal. She sang just one role in Italy: Giulia in Vestale in 1933. Twenty-one years later, Callas – newly slim and briefly blonde – sang it at La Scala, directed by Luchino Visconti. (Toscanini remarked to a colleague that he found Callas very interesting, very musical, but he couldn't understand her words. He was a devotee of Renata Tebaldi, whose Italian diction is exemplary.) Vestale (1807) is a neoclassical opera, written in the apogee of Napoleonic neoclassicism, whose harmonies made a great impact on Wagner and others, but today can be colossally boring as a whole. Callas loved the Act I aria “Tu che invoco”, which she often sang in concert in the later 1950s, after the Visconti production: it builds from a slow beginning into an grippingly histrionic climax. But Giulia’s second aria, “O nume tutelar,” despite the character’s personal misery, remains throughout in a kind of slow contemplative stillness where Ponselle reigns alone.

It’s a prayer to Latona or Leto (mother of Apollo and Artemis/Diana). There are miraculous notes at both top and bottom - middle, too – where her sound alone places us in communion with the numinous. So does the mixture of repose and focused intensity in her very breathing and phrasing, whereas Callas's emission is relatively tremulous. (I actually can find at least a fault or two in Ponselle's account, but so what? I have faults too – I can’t find the original French words to this aria, which both divas sing in Italian translation.) This beauty, recorded in 1926, has no like:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1aXolUfai2A

O Nume tutelar degli infelici

Latona, odi i miei prieghi

l’ultimo voto mio, ti muova,

ti muova o Nume

pria che al destin io soccomba

fa che dalla mia tomba

s’allontani quell' adorato oggetto,

per cui morte m’attende.

O goddess of unhappy wretches,

o Latona, hear my prayers;

let my last prayer move thee, o goddess.

Before I go to meet my fate,

grant that the one

for whom I die

may escape from this tomb.

I hope you marvel at it it too.