Joan Sutherland : Advent Calendar of Song: Day Eighteen
Compare and contrast! Yesterday I gave you Beverly Sills’s singing of one Handel aria: those of you who loved it praised the way she made the words count, while those of you who had problems with it were bothered by vocalism but not elocution. Today I give you Joan Sutherland in another Handel aria: perhaps the opposite experience, but to me no less marvellous.
Purists, block your ears with wax! Sutherland, singing the title role of the opera Alcina, here steals the aria of the opera’s second soprano, Morgana. Shocking, I know, like Russia invading Ukraine. What’s more, she transposes it up, up, up.
And I have not begun to list her two most basic faults, which you can hear perfectly well here. Her diction is perfectly rotten (rotten here in Italian, the most singable of all languages – you actually often wonder which line of the libretto she’s singing - but in other recordings equally rotten in her native English and other tongues too). And she loves to scoop her way up into the opening note of a phrase. How on earth can anyone hold up Sutherland as a star exponent of bel canto style?
But how can they not? Who is so sadly emaciated of heart as to resist this miraculous singing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOIj3dVXa0o , so stunning in energy, brio, effulgence, brilliance, lustre? Beyond even the thrill of her rhythmic attack and the cascading glory of her coloratura, I adore the gleam with which she sustains longer notes - for example at 0.29, 1.17, 2.56 - like powerful shafts of light. As for the marvels of presto passagework, she both reveals the intensely civilised nature of this baroque music and opens up its return to nature. This is lark-like abundance, while its echo effects within an unbroken phrase have the quality of play that perhaps lies at the heart of art itself. I’ve known this recording for forty years; even now, I can’t listen to it without my breathing changing and a sense of the whole world becoming brighter and more joyous.
A.
Tornami a vagheggiar,
te solo vuol' amar
quest' anima fedel,
caro, mio bene, caro!
Come back to me with longing eyes.
This faithful heart wants
to love you alone,
my dear, my good one, my dear!
B.
Già ti donai il mio cor :
fido sarà il mio amor;
mai ti sarò crudel,
cara mia speme.
Already I gave you my heart;
my love will be faithful to you;
never to you shall I be cruel,
my dear hoped-for one.
A.
Tornami a vagheggiar,
te solo vuol' amar
quest' anima fedel,
caro, mio bene, caro!
Come back to me with longing eyes.
This faithful heart wants
to love you alone,
my dear, my good one, my dear!
And yet you really can’t make out Sutherland’s words in this recording. If - like anyone with a heart and soul - you rejoice in her singing here, what does this tell us about music itself? All of you have been writing in abouthow important it is to make words register in vocal music. Much of the time, I’ve been saying the same. Here, however, is where I turn around to make the opposite point: music is not always there to serve words. Have we been too (fave word) logocentric?
We all know that many composers re-used the same music to different words anyway - and/or to different expressive effects. Many of the great composers began with the tune, then added the words, rather than the other way around. Lorenz Hart’s words “Falling in love with love is falling for make-believe” are not in the same spirit as the song to which Richard Rodgers set them. The tune of Sullivan’s “The sun whose rays are all ablaze with ever-living glory” is not in the same mindset as Gilbert’s words. In both cases, the words are more consciously clever, the music more marvellously innocent – and that two-tier expression, an inbuilt irony, is part of the fascination.
Opera abounds with such expressive complexity. When Brangäne in Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde tells the lovers to “Beware! Beware!”, everything in the music says the opposite. (And there’s a further layer of expressive complexity, often revealed by stage action or choreography: the music often expresses things the composer never imagined.)
I don’t exonerate Sutherland for blurry diction. I’d like to hear her enounce the words that I think say one thing while Handel’s music says another. If you want to hear her do so, then try this undated but slower and surely earlier recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6uW6yLB_8M This, too, is wonderful, with brighter words, fewer scoops up into notes, and maybe even more astounding lustre in the sustained notes. Yet now go back to the https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOIj3dVXa0o recording and just relish the amazing speed, sweep, and freedom. I confess I prefer the one where you can’t make out the words. She’s taking “Tornami a vagheggiar” at a terrific lick, just because she can. The effect is all the more phenomenal because Sutherland’s voice - unlike those of most of the terminally pure singers who tackle Handel - is so ample, so well-nourished, and so (to use an adjective I’ve used of other singers) polychromatic. Hers is a voice illuminated from within.
Well, opera, by essence, as much about voice as about words. Ninetyfive percent of the time, I prefer it when both voice and words register on my senses. This is my favourite example of the five percent. There are any number of pretty and pure sopranos who manage to thread this aria, with lyrics intact, through the eye of a needle on their way to desperately good intentions. (On YouTube, Louise Alder, Kathleen Battle, Veronica Cangemi, Nathalie Dessay, Amanda Forsythe, Karina Gauvin, Sandrine Piau: Forsythe does best at making the words register.) But their virtues simplify the experience. The quasi-wordless one by Sutherland is the one account where I have to surrender my senses, to lose my bearings, and to be carried away into something I can’t neatly explain.
There may have been medical reasons why Sutherland, soon after becoming an international coloratura celebrity in 1959, stopped making words matter. Having had serious sinus trouble, she reconceived her vocal method. It worked: she went on singing up to 1990, projecting pyrotechnics with this marvellously large, free voice into her sixties. Often she emphasised legato and cantilena (with exaggerated portamenti) at the expense of diction. There were constant complaints, which she could afford to override. With most of the rest of her repertory, my mixed feelings become much more mixed. And yet I do have the vast majority of her recordings. I often marvel at details in them.
How nice to have been entertaining the same conflicting feelings about one singer, even about the same recordings, for four decades and more. I dare say I’ll carry on being conflicted about her till I die. But I hope I also go on surrendering to her fabulous, culpably wordless, singing of this aria.
