Enrico Caruso: Advent Calendar of Song: Day Eleven
Advent Calendar of Song; Day Eleven
This Advent Calendar isn’t about my twenty-five favourite singers; I’m trying to make a different point about singing with each record. In some cases, I’m aware they’re acquired tastes; I acquired those tastes long ago. In this case, the main point is about portamento: the carriage of vocal tone upward or downward to another note. Bel canto asks singers to enter notes cleanly, and often move cleanly from note to note with unbroken legato; but it also trains them to show how the movement from certain notes to others passes through the air like an arc. In some moods, the two things I am most obsessed about in singing are vibrato and portamento.
Please prepare today for lots of whoosh and scratch and an orchestra that sounds as if it’s playing in an igloo a mile away. I remember being so upset by the first LP transfer of Caruso records I ever heard that I returned the record. Little did I know that I would soon be an addict. Period recording affects each of you differently: one of you loved Chaliapin’s probably 1922 recording but couldn’t take the remoteness of Lotte Lehmann’s 1941 one. That sounds illogical, but it’s actually to do with subtle matters of frequencies, which differ both with voices and with ears. Well, today here’s Caruso. I hope you can hear what I love; and I certainly do.
This https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1-aj_xtHIg is from 1907. Enrico Caruso (1873-1921) and the gramophone had already helped to make each other’s careers; his “Vesti la giubba” recording (“Pagliacci). He earnt a hundred pounds in 1902 for recording ten arias; neither he nor the recording company had any clue then that before his death in 2021 he would have earnt over two million dollars, the recording company twice as much from his recordings alone. But his was already a voice like no other: the soprano Geraldine Farrar observed that, before you spoke of singers, you had to set aside two, Caruso and Rosa Ponselle, because theirs were the two miraculous voices, founts of melody like no other. At first, the critics resisted it; the audiences never could.
This number is famous, widely known as the “Pearl Fishers” duet, written by Georges Bizet (1838-1875) when he was only twenty-four. Today we have other standards of tenor and baritone beauty for it: I, like many others, discovered this through a famous 1950s recording by Jussi Björling and Robert Merrill; Edouard Clément and Marcel Journet, Benjamino Gigli and Giuseppe de Luca, set other standards of beauty here too. What’s different about Caruso? I find his voice the most polychromatic, the one in which every part of his body from foot to skull seems to be converted into making vocal tone; and he’s also a superlative musician, with an astoundingly sculptural sense of vocal line. He made many recordings of duets: his voice always matches that of his colleague, no matter how those colleagues varied. This baritone is Mario Ancona (1860-1931); I choose this recording because of the way they share the same sculptural use of downward portamento.
By the time of this recording, 1907, Caruso was world famous, an institution at Covent Garden and the New York Met and opera house everywhere. He later learnt to sing his French roles in French, including Nadir in Les Pêcheurs des Perles (The Pearl Fishers, I Pescatori di Perle). But here he and Ancona sing in Italian. I can’t provide the Italian text, though they make most of it so clear that you can translate it as you go along. I’ve underlined the French words where both Caruso and Ancona make amazing effects with downward portamento (often more stylish than upward portamento): they begin doing so after their opening recitative leads them into the famous melody.
But the introductory recitative matters because it establishes the mood of erotic intoxication, of sheer trance: they both relive the moment of seeing the priestess whose beauty comes to them as a revelation. They never expect to meet her; they cannot shake off her spell; they swear eternal friendship.
Nadir Au fond du temple saint
paré de fleurs et d’or,
une femme apparaît !
At the back of the holy temple,
decorated with flowers and gold,
A woman appears!
Zurga Une femme apparait!
A woman appears!
Nadir Je crois la voir encore!
I believe I see her again.
Zurga Je crois la voir encore!
I believe I see her again.
Nadir La foule prosternée
la regarde, étonnée,
et murmure tout bas :
Voyez, c'est la déesse
qui dans l'ombre se dresse,
et vers nous tend les bras !
The crowd, prostrate,
watches her, astounded,
and murmurs quietly:
See, it’s the goddess
who attires herself in shade
and extends her arms towards us.
Zurga Son voile se soulève !
Ô vision ! ô rêve !
La foule est à genoux !
Her veil lifts slightly.
What a vision! What a dream!
The crowd is kneeling.
Both
Oui, c'est elle !
C'est la déesse
plus charmante et plus belle !
Oui, c'est elle !
C'est la déesse
qui descend parmi nous !
Son voile se soulève
et la foule est à genoux !
Yes, it’s she! It is the goddess,
more charming and more beautiful.
Yes, it’s she,
it’s the goddess
who’s come down among us.
Her veil has parted
and the crowd is kneeling.
<This version of the duet then cuts to the end, with both men singing “Jurons de rester amis” “”Let’s vow to remain friends.” Of course you now what happens in opera when they do that. This is only Act One.)
Apart from the beauty of Caruso’s voice, I love the sense that they’re both drugged by her beauty and by its memory. Those portamenti knock me out, again and again. Ancona’s one, down from the first note, is a perfect introduction to the style.
Here’s hoping you also enjoy. I don’t ask you to prefer it to all other versions or even to say this is how to sing Bizet; I do hope you see why their line and portamenti transform it. I am a portamento addict.
Alastair Macaulay
Enrico Caruso (1873-1921)
Mario Ancona (1860-1931)