Marilyn Horne: A Calendar of Song continued: The First Day of Christmas
We all know that tastes differ, but that should be merely a starting-point. I’m not trying to choosing thirty-seven singers you’ll find it easy to love; easy listening is for the timid, lazy, and complacent. Art takes the soul on an adventure; the great performers all take us where we have not been before. Some singers (cf. actors, dancers, writers, food, drinks) are acquired tastes, antithetical to the principles with which we set out years ago: at first we wince, and then, if we are lucky, we are changed. (Maria Callas asked Lord Harewood if he had liked her voice when he first heard her. She knew perfectly well that her voice did not conform to known types, and that most connoisseurs did not enjoy hers at first acquaintance. By the time she asked the question, Harewood – a great connoisseur of singing and a good critic - had become a devotee and friend of hers.) It seems to me that, over forty-five years of following the performing arts, I have changed and changed and been changed, again and again. The adventure is not always comfortable; but the brain, the heart, and the senses all keep fusing in new ways that enrich life itself.
I choose today’s item because it’s both phenomenal and – though in modern sound and seen live - contentious. It wowed me the first time I heard it on LP, almost forty years ago; it’s stunning another way now that we can also see it on video. Both the singer’s voice and her use of it are, however, not to all tastes.
In the early 1980s, I was going through an old-fogey stage, convinced that all the greatest singing had happened in the past (“The only good singer’s a dead singer”) when my old friend Richard Fairman played me the new double-LP box set, “Live at Lincoln Center - Sutherland, Horne, Pavarotti - Bonynge”. (Although online information gives 1981 as the date, I think that refers to the vinyl release; I think this Lincoln Center concert took place in early 1980.) Its three singers, the Australian soprano Joan Sutherland (1926-2010), the American mezzo-soprano Marilyn Horne (b.1934), and the Italian tenor Luciano Pavarotti (1935-2007), had been singing together since the early 1960s, with the conductor Richard Bonynge (Sutherland’s husband). And though they all had independent careers, they also worked together in twos and threes for well over twenty years, with very great mutual respect, regarding themselves - with good reasons - as leading exponents of bel canto. When Sutherland retired on New Year’s Eve 1990, she, Horne, and Pavarotti all sang as guests in a Covent Garden performance of “Die Fledermaus”, coming together again like the Three Musketeers after all the years. This 1980 concert shows them all on top form: on first hearing it, it reminded me that we were still living in an age of superlative singers.
From that concert, here’s Marilyn Horne, in one of the male roles that Rossini wrote for mezzo soprano – a woman playing a heroic male lover. Rossini here, composing for an 1819 premiere, seems to have been consciously picking up the castrato tradition that was now more or less extinct in opera. (He wrote it for Benedetta Rosmunda Pisaroni. You may remember that on Advent Day Twelve – Clara Butt in Handel’s “Ombra mai fu” – I quoted Adolphe Nourrit’s 1838 letter to his wife after he had heard a castrato for the first time. To imagine the castrato style, Nourrit asked his wife to imagine three of the singers they had heard in Paris: Pisaroni was one of them.)
For once, I recommend watching rather than just listening, because Horne stands completely still – and, more important, shows almost no discomposure of the shoulders or neck because of her deep control of breathing lower in the torso. (You do see her briefly raising her shoulders at for some big breaths, especially before the huge and spectacular cadenzas at 7.55-7.56and 8.02. Even so, the shoulders quickly subside.) When you hear the energy and attack she develops during this long number, you’d really expect her to move her arms, and to transfer weight from foot to foot. (She does do some small gestures beneath the elbow.) There are also many singers who can’t help showing tension and strain in their shoulders in a virtuoso number – or who adjust the placement of their heads to position the vocal tone either by raising the jaw or lowering the whole head. Not so here.
The most controversial thing about Horne is her very strong use of chest register. (In terms of gender studies, her chest notes are a perfect antithesis to Fred Astaire’s head notes. To enjoy them is to have your notion of masculinity and femininity enlarged.) To make a firm, heroic sound, she often carried her chest sound too high. (This is tricky terrain, but in general the voice’s different registers should sound naturally without being forced. Many singers sometimes carry their chest notes too high, but less systematically than Horne. Others avoid chest notes altogether, which generally has an emaciating, bloodless, treble-choirboy effect, as the castrati did not.) For Horne, the result of so much chest emphasis was that, in later years, the tension in her method made her lose pitch, in particular, singing sharp. (In the early 1990s, I remember her singing thoroughly out of tune in her Covent Garden farewell role, in Rossini’s L’Italiana in Algieri.)
And that element of stress or grip in her vocalism – the opposite of “floating” – makes some listeners object strongly to her whole method. There are many ways of delivering the rapid passagework in coloratura : some would argue that hers is all too marcato, sometimes almost aspirated. While I wouldn’t encourage others to copy these aspects of her style, I relish the utterly sui generis aspects of her singing; I’m thrilled here by how well her registers are integrated, so that she does dazzling cadenzas from bottom to top of the voice and down again that show you the whole vocal spectrum. It’s a burnished voice: the force of the chest nourishes the lustre of the middle and the top.
Whether you hate her or like her, she was one of the great virtuosi of my lifetime, and often sensationally exciting. Especially in Italy as well as in America, she was idolised - though I’ve also heard complaints about her sound and style as much in New York as anywhere else. I find it fascinating to watch her, because she is physically so very calm and objective. She was a fun performer in person: during a 1980s recital of hers at Covent Garden, she addressed the whole house as if at ease with everyone there - and when someone let out an almighty sneeze after one song, she exclaimed “Gesundheit!” She and Sutherland were often a classic duo, especially in operas by Rossini and Bellini; this surely is because they shared the same brio, the same rhythmic éclat. Here she is, delivering an object lesson in phrasing, brio, rhythmic éclat, and much else: Marilyn Horne in Malcolm’s aria from Rossini’s La Donna del Lago (The Lady of the Lake): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-ocg0zV-as
Malcolm:
Mura felici ove il mio ben s’aggira
dopo più lune io vi riveggo.
Oh happy city walls wherein my love walks,
at last I see you again.
Ah! voi più al guardo mio non siete
come lo foste un di ridenti e liete.
Ah! no longer do you seem the same to me
as you were once, happy and smiling.
Qui nacque, fra voi crebbe, l’innocente ardor.
Quando soave fra voi scorrea mia vita
al fianco di colei;
che rispondea pietosa a’ voti miei.
Here in your midst was born and grew our innocent desire.
How happy was my life here
beside her;
here she responded with passion to my vows.
Nemico nembo or vi rattrista
ah! m’invola, e agghiaccia il povero mio cor.
A hostile cloud now casts a pall over you
ah, afflicts me, and turns my heart to ice.
Mano crudele a voi toglie
oh! rio martiro,
la vostra abitatrice il mio tesoro
A cruel hand is taking away
- oh wicked torment -
my beloved, your inhabitant.
Elena, o tu che chiamo,
deh, vola a me un’ istante:
tornami a dir io t’amo.
Serbami la tua fè.
Elena, you whom I’m calling,
oh, fly to me for a moment,
tell me again “I love you”.
Keep faith with me.
E allor di te sicuro
anima mia lo giuro
ti toglierò al più forte
o morirò per te.
And then, sure of you,
my soul, I swear to you,
I’ll take you from the strongest
or I’ll die for you.
Grata à me fia la morte
s’Elena mia non è.
Death would be a boon for me
if Elena did not exist.
Ah! quante lagrime finor versai
lungi languendo da’ tuoi ben rai;
ogn’ altro oggetto è a me funesto.
Tutto è imperfetto, tutto detesto;
Ah, how many years I’ve shed by now
sorrowing afar from from your eyes;
everything else is deadly to me.
Everything is imperfect, I loathe everything.
Di luce il cielo no più non brilla,
più non sfavilla astro per me, no!
Cara tu sola mi dai la calma,
tu rendi all’ alma grata mercè.
The sun no longer shines in the sky,
the stars no longer twinkle in the sky, no!
My dear, you alone give me calm,
you bring welcome grace to my soul.
I love the long introductory recitative because it’s full of thought, variety, diversità di cose (variety of things – a criterion back in the Italian Renaissance). At 1.48-157 she demonstrates a classic messa di voce. And at 2.27-2.33 she delivers a cascading downward scale that’s a foretaste of what’s to follow.
Then the main aria “Elena, o tu che chiamo” starts at 3.15, with another messa di voce, this moving into a trill. Horne keeps the thought going throughout; the musical pace has changed, but she’s engaged in the drama. The scales at 5.50-6.00 happily astound me; in the trill at 6.09 to 6.15, she’s one of the rare singers who can make a trill sound inward, meditative. And the movement of thought between extrovert and introspection is fascinating.
Rossini liked the cabaletta (fast closing section), “Oh! quante lagrime” (6.41-9.43), a good deal. (He re-used it in a piece of chamber music. I was reviewing a David Bintley ballet when suddenly the clarinet made me think, “Marilyn Horne should be singing this!”) When she repeats it from 8.02 onward, she embellishes (as this music requires), and boy, does she show how. Horne really shows mega-chest register here at 8.22-8.25 and 9.35-9.43. Although she’s certainly maximising it for dramatic effect, it’s this kind of sound - seldom heard from English women singers after Clara Butt - that explains why some people refuse to accept Kathleen Ferrier as a true contralto or Janet Baker as a real mezzo. I love those women too, but I think it’s important to recognise how different their methods are. Above all, I love her more for rhythm than for sound: Rossini’s music pulsates so powerfully with her. As I listen, I find to harder to keep still than she does.
For a fascinating further study of bel canto, I also recommend this edited, fragmented 1977 conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxqwVHw2oYM in which Sutherland, Horne, and Pavarotti talk with Bonynge and one another about diverse aspects of bel canto (and demonstrate what they mean). (When Pavarotti talks about “a real tenor voice” at 3.14-3.55, showing how to cover the upper passaggio notes at F, F sharp, and G, some would argue he’s implicitly criticising the vocal method of Giuseppe di Stefano, Plácido Domingo, and José Carreras, three tenors about whom there were always complaints from purists. But these are complex areas. He mentions di Stefano later, with praise, as one of the lineage of great Italian tenors from Caruso on.) The three singers were very fond of each other. Horne was known as “Jacky” by her friends: in her autobiography, she says how she was once dining with friends at her favourite restaurant after giving a televised recital when Pavarotti placed a telephone call to her table, to say “Jacky, you looked so fuckable.” They also were fascinated by their places in the lineage of singers. In her autobiography, Horne speaks of how all three knew they were kindred stylists in their mastery of deeply controlled breathing; she’s also thrilled that, when she met Rosa Ponselle, Ponselle complimented her on her cheekbones. (Cheekbones have cavities that help singers to develop vocal resonance – some cheekbones much more than others. Horne’s pleasure in Ponselle’s compliment connected to her knowledge that Caruso, on meeting Ponselle in 1918, said “You’re like me” as he recognised her broad cheekbones as resembling his.)
Perhaps no interesting singer is perfect. Sutherland had atrocious diction for most of her career; Pavarotti’s voice was on the small side, with over-emphatic elocution (he was compensating for his naturally poor diction in speech); and Horne built a whole style around her chesty, edgy, hard-hitting virtuosity, developing the intonation problems I’ve mentioned. All three, however, made recordings where nobody else can touch them. Horne’s style is by no means all butch force; in one of her recordings of Adalgisa in Norma (Sutherland in the title role), she performs the most marvellously inward mezza voce (half-voice, another special technique) singing ever. I hope you see why Horne is sensational; and why she’s not to all tastes; and I hope you find – as with everything in this series – that she changes your taste a little (or a lot). Please let me know how she affects you!
By the way, the two biggest delights of my Christmas Day were (a) a walk across Camden Town and, especially, the Outer Circle of Regent's Park, with midday sunshine on the Nash terrace architecture (b) the news, from a friend over a superb lunch, that Claudia Muzio (1899-1936) had an affair with Aristotle Onassis (1900-1975), well over thirty years before his more celebrated affair with Callas (1923-1977). Discuss!
