John McCormack: A Calendar of Song: The Fifth Day of Christmas
A Calendar of Song: The Fifth Day of Christmas
And we were speaking of purity. The Irish tenor John McCormack (1884-1945), after studying singing a little in Dublin and already possessing great natural talent, came to London in 1904, the year of his twentieth birthday. That year he heard Caruso sing La Bohème at Covent Garden; it was the epiphany of McCormack's entire career. Thirty years later, he told his biographer “That voice still rings in my ears after thirty-six years. It was like no other voice in the world. The memory of its beauty will never die.”
In 1905, he departed for Italy, where he trained for just three months with Vincenzo Sabatini. So much was already natural and right about McCormack’s sweet tenor voice that Sabatini concentrated on giving him greater breath control and greater skill in the Italian language and Italian style. In 1906, he made his debut in Italy, but his career took off when he returned to London in 1907, returning every season up to 1914, singing there a spectrum of Italian and French roles by Mozart, Rossini, Donizetti, Verdi, Gounod, Puccini. While he was still in his mid-twenties, he began to sing regularly with two of the supreme sopranos of his day, Nellie Melba and Luisa Tetrazzini. Tetrazzini rightly wrote later of him “as the Irish tenor with the God-given voice”; he, in turn, called her his "fairy godmother". Thanks to her, he made his New York debut in 1909; in 1910, he made his debut at the New York Met. In 1917, he became an American citizen.
In New York, he immediately won the clamorous support of the city’s Irish Americans - whereupon he began to sing recitals to huge audiences in several American cities. This was the age of Caruso, whose vocal splendour eclipsed most of his tenor rivals - but McCormack was not eclipsed. The two men had a mutual admiration society: there’s a nice legend that, when McCormack once greeted Caruso with "And how is the world’s greatest tenor today?", Caruso replied “And since when, Giovanni, did you become a baritone?"
Even so, McCormack didn’t have the equipment for the heroic roles in which Caruso blazed so well. Gradually he pared back his operatic singing; he stopped singing opera before he was forty. Meanwhile he gradually began to sing Italian and French in a much more Irish-brogue accent. (This was also true when he later turned to German lieder.) I don’t enjoy the many recordings he made where this Irish accent is strongly evident in his Italian, French, and German; his earlier recordings show he had begun differently.
But he remained a true musician: the many recordings he made with the violinist Fritz Kreisler – I’m tempted to include one today – are some of the peak examples of a great singer and a great instrumentalist working together. (Caruso had likewise made some superb recordings with the great violinist Mischa Elman.) And although you can trace Caruso’s influence on him in many recordings, he never lost his own individual style: both in material he shared with Caruso and in non-Caruso fare by composers from Mozart to Rachmaninov, he’s no clone. He went on singing into his fifties; in many of his later recordings, the bloom and sweetness have gone from his voice, yet in some of them he still does wonderful things.
McCormack’s managers were always advised to save money by not printing his songs’ words in the programmes for his concerts; his diction was too clear for any texts to be necessary. He was friends with James Joyce, and encouraged him in his early attempts to sing. (He was a singer with a life: he played cricket and tennis well, he was proud when he was able to buy a Franz Hals painting, he knew Rachmaninov, Kreisler, and leading sportsmen as friends, he owned race horses and nurtured an unfulfilled ambition to own a Derby winner.) Another friend took W.B.Yeats to a McCormack recital. Yeats at one points left his seat; the friend, finding Yeats pacing to and fro outside the auditorium, asked if Yeats had not liked McCormack’s singing, to which Yeats replied “Oh! he’s wonderful – but the damnable clarity of the words!”
Although I love a few of his later recordings, I want you to hear the sweetness, bloom, and delicacy with which he sang in his twenties. This is his second recording of “The Snowy Breasted Pearl,” made in 1910: an Irish song delivered with many bel canto virtues and brilliantly sustained so that its three verses each cast a different spell. It’s more or less all a perfect example of mezza voce (not messa di voice), which is literally half-voice, singing that is quietly calm.
The words are by Stephen Edward de Vere (1812-1904), descendant of the Earl of Oxford sometimes claimed to have written Shakespeare. This de Vere's father was a friend of Byron’s; his brother was also a published poet; and he himself in 1847 took passage in one of the notorious “coffin ships” that transported so many Irish people away from the Great Famine to the New World or, in many cases, to the next world because of the numbers of deaths. De Vere wrote a report that helped to make “coffin ships” illegal in that same year, 1847. In addition to his own poems, he wrote translations of Horace (perhaps least translatable of all ancient poets) that have been highly praised. (I must hunt them up!)
Here you go:-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdaIA2aF990
Oh she is not like the rose
that proud in beauty glows
and boasteth that she's so wondrous fair.
But she's like the violet blue,
ever modest, ever true,
from her leafy bower perfuming the still night air.
Oh, she's gentle, loving, mild,
she's artless as a child,
her clustering tresses softly flowing down.
I'll love thee ever more,
sweet “*colleen oge as-thore*,
my true love, My Snowy Breasted Pearl.
*sometimes printed as “cail’n og a stóir”, a sweet young colleen
If I sigh, a sudden fear
comes o'er her and a tear
stands quivering within her downcast eye.
When I smile, those orbs of azure
gleam forth with love and pleasure
like sudden glory bursting through a clouded sky.
If I claim her for my bride,
she trembles at my side
and gently lifts her eyes with looks so tender.
I love thee, only thee, my *colleen gal machree *,
my true love, my snowy breasted pearl.
*sometimes printed as “cail’n geal mo chroidhe,” meaning “shining (or fair) colleen of my heart”.
Such was she, but oh! a change,
how mournful and how strange
on my loved one, my own beloved one came.
Paler still her pale cheek grew
and her eyes azure hue
seemed lighted with a flame,
a fatal, wasting flame.
Oh! We laid her in the grave,
where the willows sadly wave
and the hollow winds are sighing a plaintive wail.
I'm alone, alone, alone;
so wearily I moan
for my lost love, my snowy breasted pearl.
Those of you who are portamento addicts have some beautifully gentle examples here. In the first verse, there’s one at the end of “But she’s like the violent blue,/ ever modest, ever true”, and another in the words “flowing” (“her clustering softly flowing down”) and “sweet” (“sweet colleen Oge-as-thore”).
In the second stanza, there’s another portamento on “fear (“”a sudden fear / comes o’er her”). The whole song is sung softly, so it’s wondrous when suddenly he goes quieter yet (as “she trembles at my side”). More amazing in that second stanza is the diminuendo on “thee” running into a portamento (“I love thee, only thee,/ my colleen gal machree”). The diminuendo casts one spell, and then the portamento is more of a glissando, the kind of magical delicacy usually associated only with the greatest portamento singer of them all, Callas. As the song proceeds, there are all kinds of subtle diminuendi on sustained notes, and wonderful effects of rubato and rallentando that are offset, as throughout the song, by light accelerations, and by the gentle firmness of rhythm at the end of many lines (“still night air,” for example, on one note).
The third stanza has another sudden piano on “O! We laid her in the grave”, then a simple but plaintive portamento on “sadly” (“where the willows sadlywave”). The phrase “And the hollow winds are sighing” has one of McCormack’s miracles, the prolonged pianotop note on “are”: you can maybe label it as falsetto or voix mixte (please let me know your thoughts), but no label can explain its astonishing texture and vibrato. Perhaps a greater feat is the way he seamlessly reintroduces chest voice in “plaintive wail”. And what about the various textures on the song’s final phrase “snowy breas-ted pearl”? The phrase lasts seventeen seconds, by the way.
I know I ought to condemn the whole thing as manipulative parlour sentimentality, but there’s no way I can. I’ve loved this 1910 recording for maybe twenty years, but I’ve been finding many new nuances in it today, not always with dry eyes or steadiness of breath,
Wednesday 30 December
