César Vezzani: A Calendar of Song: The Second Day of Christmas
Second Day of Christmas, in Song
Which voices are sexy (or sexually exciting) and why? I can hear why anybody finds the voices of Anna Netrebko, Pavel Lisitsian, Leontyne Price, Dmitri Hvorostovsky, or dozens of other singers sexy, but to me there’s so much else going on in their singing that sex is only an incidental factor. Anna Moffo and Régine Crespin had sexy voices, but when they tried to sound seductive (often), they tended to cheapen their music. Franco Corelli had filmstar good looks and an exciting voice: just sometimes he could combine technique with heart in an astounding way, but the effect is so impressively touching that I hardly notice I’m being seduced. The many beauties of Caruso’s voice and style move me in many ways: probably several kinds of sexual attraction are involved, but it’s truly hard to analyse them. When I find such voices as Isobel Baillie’s and Emma Kirkby’s irksomely pure, I’m irritated by the way they’ve deliberately pared sensuousness in their voices in pursuit of the supposedly angelic, like Philip Pullman characters separated from their daemons.
The Corsican tenor César Vezzani (1888-1951) certainly didn’t try to sound sexy. He was heroic, forthright, ardent, with fabulous diction. Almost every number he recorded (of those I’ve heard) has been recorded with greater elements of lyrical sensitivity and imagination by others tenors. But I love the virile integrity of his singing – and there are notes in his compass that happen to make me weak at the knees: where I’m immediately conscious of a sexual ingredient in my response. You may disagree: but he's so admirable a singer that I hope you find him rewarding.
He specialized in French roles – in 1930 he recorded a complete Gounod Faust - while also singing a few operas by Wagner, Verdi, Puccini, and Leoncavallo, always in French. You could take dictation from his singing; but, whereas I find Pavarotti sometimes too emphatic in his (famous) elocution, Vezzani’s French words sound remarkably close to speech. We like to think all great singers (apart from Joan Sutherland, of course) have wonderful diction, but verbal utterance is more central to the French style than to any other. (When Rossini , the world's most famous composer of operas,moved to Paris in the 1820s, he had to learn a more syllabic way of composing vocal lines.)
Here is Vezzani as a very virile Roméo, at the start of the balcony scene in Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette, recorded in 1931: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYIO9t0vPpo
L’amour, l’amour !
Oui, son ardeur a troublé tout mon être !
(La fenêtre de Juliette s’éclaire.)
Mais quelle soudaine clarté
resplendit à cette fenêtre ?
C’est là que dans la nuit rayonne sa beauté !
Love! Love!
Yes, its ardor has troubled my whole being!
(Juliet's window lights up.)
But what sudden light
shines in that window!
That’s where her beauty shines in the night!
Ah! lève-toi, soleil! fais pâlir les étoiles,
qui, dans l'azur sans voiles,
brillent aux firmament.
Ah! lève-toi! parais! parais!
astre pur et charmant
Ah! rise, sun! make the stars pale
that, in the sky without veils,
shine to the firmament.
Ah! rise! appear! appear!
pure and enchanting star.
Elle rêve! elle dénoue
une boucle de cheveux
qui vient caresser sa joue!
Amour! Amour! porte-lui mes vœux!
Elle parle! Qu'elle est belle!
Ah! je n'ai rien entendu!
mais ses yeux parlent pour elle,
et mon cœur a répondu!
Ah! lève-toi, soleil!, etc.
She's dreaming! She’s undoing
a lock of hair
that has just caressed her cheek!
Love! Love! give her my vows!
She’s speaking! How beautiful she is!
Ah! I heard not a word.
But her eyes speak for her,
and my heart has answered!
Ah! lève-toi, soleil! fais pâlir les étoiles,
Qui, dans l'azur sans voiles,
brillent aux firmament.
Ah! lève-toi! parais! parais!
astre pur et charmant.
Viens, parais!
Ah! rise, sun! make the stars pale
that, in the sky without veils,
shine to the firmament.
Ah! rise! appear! appear!
pure and enchanting star.
Come, appear!
Not many singers sound best on “ee” vowels, but what about Vezzani in “Oui” in that opening recit? In fact, he takes so many of the most singular French vowels and makes them gorgeous (“pur” “nuit”, “firma-ment”, “char-mant”, “che-veux”, “répon-du”). I find his quieter lower notes very touching (“tout mon être”); they have a quality of vulnerability surprising in him but right for the music. The amount of chest power he has in his top notes is astounding, the more so because he enters them with such clean attack. (“C’est là”).
When he starts the aria ("Ah, lève-toi"), he shapes the melodic lines like a sculptor (and oh those downward portamenti, like sighs). The keen vibrancy of his voice – not remotely tremulous - is very French. The topmost notes, “parais!” (2.49-2.51 and again 3.18-3.24 are knockouts, but those are not where my knees weaken. Just before that, his “Ah, lève-toi, ah lève-toi” (2.42-2.48) and after that his “astre pur et charmant” (2.53-2.58) are among the passages where his splendid firmness of purpose just vanquishes me, as are the aria’s opening lines, “Ah, lève-toi, soleil! fais pâlir les étoiles.”
There are more boyish, tender, refined ways of singing this music. Try Edmond Clément https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aiyX1bxX2Mk and Nicolai Gedda https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqCVdBbdbD8 . Just as heroic as Vezzani is the earlier Paul Franz (1876-1950) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDnvv7zVzlQ ; Franz, who sang Wagner’s Siegfried, Verdi’s Radamès (Aida) and many French roles, may have been the greatest French tenor of all. I can always choose an alternative to Vezzani in anything. But when I return to him, he’s a shock to the senses, a voice I feel throughout my body.
