Conchita Supervia: A Calendar of Song: Two Short Songs for New Year’s Eve
Forty-five years and maybe eleven days ago, I met my great friend William Relton at a Wagner performance at the London Coliseum. (Reginald Goodall was conducting The Valkyrie; we were introduced by his old friend Simon Butteriss – now my old friend too – who I had met at university two months earlier.) William and I both still love Wagner and often talk about him, as we do about much else, but there’s one area on which we’ve always differed: he labels it “S.C”, which stands for “Spanish crap.” It includes both flamenco and the Spanish sings arranged by a number of Spanish composers. But I, having already lost my heart to Spanish music before I knew William, have never budged.
There are even moods, as I’ve told William, when I’d swap all Wagner for a single Spanish song. William once looked at me as if alarmed to think I might mean what I said; I did indeed, I explained - and the reason is rhythm. I never return to Wagner’s music when I need a fix of rhythm: his genius lies in harmony, melody, philosophy.
This morning, that conversation came back to mind when I came across a line of the British critic Desmond Shawe-Taylor about the singing of the mezzo-soprano Conchita Supervia in Spanish song: “the kind of rhythm which makes the non-Spanish world seem only half alive and awake.” Yes! Shawe-Taylor was one of the critics of recorded singing in whose writing I most steeped myself in my first year at university; Supervia (1895-1936) was a singer I had loved since earliest childhood – I grew up with an LP of her excerpts from Carmen.
Today’s singers tend only to make their professional debuts well into their twenties. Many of the stars of the nineteenth century began in their teens: Adelina Patti, who sang Lucia di Lammermoor at sixteen and became the most idolised singer of the second half of the nineteenth century, went on singing for more than forty more years. Supervia, however, started even earlier: she made her debut in 1910, two months before her fifteenth birthday. She sustained an ever growing career up to 1935; but in 1936 she died in childbirth, in London. (She’s buried fifteen minutes’ walk from William’s flat. Her grave was designed by Edwin Luttens; the sculptor William Reid engraved it with a tortoise, since she adored tortoises. I will go pay my respects soon!) Some will remember her grandson James Supervia (1949-2019), an actor, choreographer, and dancer in London and elsewhere: he had his grandmother's large eyes.
Supervia’s fascinating in her use of both head voice and chest voice. Few singers are more vivid - and she was evidently a fabulously natural actress (there’s a famous film clip from the 1934 film Evensong in which, as the young rival of Nellie Melba, she sings and acts Musetta in the Waltz Song in La Bohème – her performance stops Melba, or rather the actress playing Melba, in her tracks). Supervia’s diction was stunning: English was her fourth language, but her recording of “Oh no, John, no, John, no, John, no” is one of the all-time classic accounts of English folk song.
Her repertory included Mozart, Rossini, Berlioz, Bizet, Massenet, Humperdinck, Puccini, Richard Strauss: she sang the title role in Der Rosenkavalier (Octavian), conducted by its composer at La Scala (it was sung in Italian as Il Cavaliere della Rosa). She was a famous Carmen for more than twenty years, singing it in both Italian and French. Although Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia had never disappeared from repertory, she single-handedly made two other Rossini comedies, La Cenerentola and L’Italiana in Algieri popular again. She performed Carmen and those Rossinis at Covent Garden under the baton of Thomas Beecham in the last years of her too-short life. Hers was not a large voice: when she sang Carmen at Covent garden, the critic Neville Cardus wrote in The Guardian that Beecham toned down the score to make her register. But Beecham would not have been averse to that. Decades before, the general manager of Covent Garden, Harry Higgins, said that John McCormack’s voice would “never be heard over the orchestra”, whereupon Beecham replied “Then make your damned orchestra play softer.”
What’s not to all tastes is her intense, rapid vibrato, sometimes called a flutter. Probably recordings make us more aware of it: some who saw her live were unconscious of it, whereas on records it’s been compared to the rattle of dice in a box. But here, on the same side of one 78rpm, she sings two Spanish songs, using her vibrato to very different effect. The songs are “Nana” and “Polo” of Manuel de Falla’s Siete Canciones Popolares Españolas (Seven Spanish Folksongs): her accompanist is Frank Marshall, who taught Alicia de Larrocha (who, in addition to her own first-league concert career, in turn accompanied Victoria de los Angeles).
De Falla had composed, or arranged these seven songs in 1914. In 1928, he had recorded them, playing the piano to the Spanish coloratura soprano Maria Barrientos. Barrientos is good (her recording is on YouTube), and de los Angeles’s several recordings of the songs - the most sheerly beautiful - are better (at least one is on YouTube, the live one with de Larrocha); but the 1930 recordings by Supervia go beyond her own customary standards of vividness. There are notes in “Nana” when you sense the intensity of that vibrato. But nothing prepares you for the combination of vibrato and chest voice in her calls of “Ay!” in the final song: if the opening “Ay!” startles you, brace yourself for what’s to follow. The single ten-secoind “Ay!” from 2.59 to 3.09 is a good candidate for most fabulously weird sound in the history of vocalism.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVTpgC4Aq3w
Nana (Anon.)
Lullaby
Duérmete, niño, duerme,
duerme, mi alma,
duérmete, lucerito,
Sleep, little one, sleep,
sleep, my darling,
sleep, my little
morning star.
Nanita, nana.
duérmete, lucerito
Lullay, lullay,
sleep, my little
morning star.
Polo (Anon.)
Polo
¡Ay!
Guardo una pena en mi pecho
que a nadie se la diré.
Ay!
I have an ache in my heart
of which I can tell no one.
¡Malhaya el amor, malhaya
y quien me lo dió a entender!
¡Ay!
A curse on love, and a curse
on the one who made me feel it!
Ay!
Translations by Jacqueline Cockburn published in the The Spanish Song Companion (Gollancz, 1992)
Vibrato is not, of course, all that’s going on here. The line and phrasing throughout “Nana” are wonderful, and the sweetness on the word “lucerito” (“little star”), with one note delectably floated up in head voice. The way she quietly - lingeringly - enounces “guardo una pena in mi pecho” with tiny marcato pounces on every syllable is piercingly right (“I keep an ache in my heart”): she’s not just guarding her wound, she’s nursing it. This is singing of attack, vehemence, near-hysteria, burning spontaneity, and a form of intensity suffused by real imagination. Even if we think we’ve suffered the emotion the words describe, her singing takes us where we have not been.
Thursday 31 December
