Fernando de Lucia: Advent Calendar of Song: Day Thirteen
Advent Calendar of Song: Day Thirteen
No, this will be the most controversial one.
Here’s another scratch-and-whoosh number from 1906; and it would surely be controversial with most of you even (or especially) if these two singers were singing it right before us in 2020 in perfect sonic conditions. What’s more, it contains one of the most obvious blunders in the history of the gramophone; I’m surprised they didn’t re-record it. Even so, I’ve been obsessed by it for decades, and I re-listen to it often and with great emotion.
One of the factors that will be controversial about it is vibrato; another is rubato. I choose it for its tenor’s amazing use of messa di voce, of taking a thread of tone and swelling it – or the opposite, of taking a full-voice note and then fining it away with a diminendo. Or do I just choose this recording because the very sound of his voice here makes me see tears pouring down his face? Certainly it has that effect on me, like no other recording of any music I know.
Like the Caruso two days ago, this, too, is a duet from Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers, but from one act later in the opera. Bob Gottlieb once remarked, brilliantly, that the great subject of the nineteenth-century novel was adultery: that’s true of nineteenth-century ballet and opera, too – especially for the operas of the 1860s, where Les Pêcheurs des perles (Bizet, 1863), Tristan und Isolde (Wagner, 1865), and Don Carlos (Verdi, 1867) are just three of the classics where the soprano is divided between love for the tenor and another allegiance (in the other two cases, her husband). In this case, the heroine Léila is affianced to no man but to the holy temple: her duty is to remain veiled and to pray through the night for the safety of the pearl fishers. You may be sure this is the cue for the tenor Nadir, who met her once in the past, to turn up and try to distract her with talk of love. When she warns him that it’s death for him to remain, he begins this part of the duet, piling on the seductive pressure with high romance.
Like Caruso, this tenor was Neapolitan. He, Fernando de Lucia (1860-1925), was thirteen years older than Caruso, so was in his forties when he began to record; and he outlived Caruso, to sing at whose funeral he emerged from recent retirement, in his sixties. The differences in their voices are radical: de Lucia’s voice has the rapid Romantic vibrato that many singers and actors of the late nineteenth century (Sarah Bernhardt, above all) employed to express intense sensibility.
It’s likely that de Lucia transposed much of his music down when he recorded it, but, since the speeds of 78s are not actually all at 78, there’s keen debate about what pitch they should be played at. Even so, I learnt to love the old LP transfers of his records when the higher pitches made him sound like Larry the Lamb. (Claudia Roth Pierpont, who adores him too, calls him Lorenzo l’Agnello.) Now his recordings always played lower, sometimes maybe too much. (In this case, he seems to have taken it down just a semitone: not a big deal.) He made complete recordings of Barbiere di Siviglia and Rigoletto in his late fifties. This is from 1906, year of his forty-sixth birthday.
Something very striking about de Lucia is that, although his voice is relatively baritonal in pitch, he places much of its tone in the head – in the face. I find his diction terribly affecting, as if he’s dropping the words, and the tone itself, in your ear.
Rubato: he’s one of the greatest exponents of slowing rhythm within a phrase to make a point. Since nobody does this much any more, it can sound shockingly wilful now; but he’s not the only old mastersinger who did this. Some of the greatest conductors applied this radical rubato too. (Willem Mengelberg’s 1929 conducting of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth and Fifth symphonies with the Concertgebouw can be listened to as the greatest example of orchestral playing in all recording, but I especially recommend the opening phrases of the second movement https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shUyw_x6nOM for how amazingly he makes the rhythm slow and linger, even when all the strings join in. As you can hear, Mengelberg knew how to contrast this with fast tempi and with regular pulse too.) In ballet, many of us used to complain about how Soviet Russian dancers liked to fall behind the beat, but I think the tendency began with an understanding that the conductor would go with them.
Anyway, please listen to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=nYl9670ap6E to how de Lucia begins this quietly, and then uses the messa di vocemethod, building the pressure and volume or fining them away, always like the workings of his heart, never as isolated stunts. He also adds quiet ornaments, notably a gruppetto (four-note turn) ornament to the second line; and the magical high A in the fifth line (“Non hai com-pre-so. Those of you are portamento addicts can notice several wonderfully subtle examples, giving each phrase fabulous plasticity. As with Caruso, de Lucia carries portamenti off because he can also vault cleanly to high notes (that top A), showing that he’s making artistic choices rather than just sliding his way out of necessity or lazy taste. And every line has the radical rubato I’ve mentioned: it’s a central part of his poetry.
Words below: Bizet wrote Pêcheurs in French, natch; like Caruso and Ancona, de Lucia and Huguet sang it in Italian.
The embarrassing thing is that when Léila (Josefina Huguet, a Catalan soprano billed as Giuseppina Huguet by the Italian recording company) replies at 1.53, de Lucia makes a false entry, singing over her before realizing his mistake and stopping mid-phrase. Or is it his mistake to stop in mid-phrase? They’ve both observed a cut in the music; they may have had different ideas about where the cut was, so she may have expected him to go straight to the close when they sing together. After two lines of hers, he joins in and stays in. Huguet (1871-1951) made many other recordings with him (notably numbers from Lohengrin and Rigoletto); as you hear, her vibrato and general sense of messa di vocematch his, though she has none of the intimacy with which he lodges his voice in your nervous system.
Nadir: Ton coeur n’a pas compris le mien
Au sein de la nuit parfumée.
Quand j’écoutais, l’âme charmée,
les accents de ta voix aimée,
ton coeur n’a pas compris le mien!
Your heart hasn’t understood mine!
In the heart of the perfumed night,
when I heard, with soul enchanted,
the sounds of your beloved voice,
your heart failed to understand mine.
Non hai compreso un cor fedel
allor che l’ombra <??> il ciel.
T’ama quest’alma (?>inebriata<?>
<? ?> la tua voce amata.
Non hai compreso, compreso il nostro amor.
Léila: Ainsi que toi je me souviens!
Au sein de la nuit perfumée,
<Nadir repeats the end of his verse, while she continues>
mon coeur alors libre et charmée
a l’amour n’était pas fermée!
Ainsi que toi je me souviens!
I remember just as you do!
In the heart of the perfumed night,
my heart, then free and enchanted,
was not closed to love!
I remember just as you do.
Unlike most tenors, de Lucia was a famous actor; in the 1890s, he was one of the singers who made Carmen and Pagliacci international hits as music theatre. The English and American critics praised his acting without noticing his technique. (Apart from the messa di voce, he was a very remarkable master of tenor coloratura: the tenor role of The Barber of Seville only takes off into the stratosphere when you hear it sung his way.)
De Lucia really was a mastersinger. Verdi is said once to have remarked at the end of his life: “The nineteenth century was the age of the singer, which was bad enough; the twentieth century was the age of the conductor, which will be much worse.” What this meant for de Lucia and his great baritone contemporary, Mattia Battistini, is that Verdi and Puccini never let them introduce roles in their operas because they might have put the premieres out of kilter as De Lucia Shows or Battistini Shows: like jazz singers of a few decades later, they ornamented and played with rhythm and melody. Puccini did consider de Lucia seriously for the premieres of La Bohème and Tosca, both of which de Lucia soon sang; he just wanted them to become hits in their own right. (Puccini only gave one premiere to Caruso, for that matter – La Fanciulla del West – even though he admired Caruso and knew the great success Caruso and his recordings gave to his, Puccini’s, music.) But once the opera was known to work in Turin without top-class singers, Puccini brought in de Lucia for its Milan premiere in the more prestigious La Scala; in 1897, the night before the Scala premiere, Puccini wrote to de Lucia:
“I feel the need to express to you once again my admiration and my gratitude for all the zeal and love that you continually show my work. Looking forward to having you as interpreter of my future works, I am happy to tell you, that, as I write Tosca, I think of you as my Mario, <a role> which I hope you will be the first to create.”
Interestingly, de Lucia took liberties with the Bohèmescore, ornaments; Puccini gave them his blessing, embracing and kissing de Lucia onstage at the end of the performance. The Bohème premiere the next night was an immense success; de Lucia’s “Che gelida manina” and the Act Three quartet were encored. When it came to Tosca (1900), Puccini was persuaded to give the premiere to a far less important tenor, but promptly approved of de Lucia’s introducing it to Covent Garden later that year. De Lucia’s 1902 recordings of Tosca arias again show the liberties he, like no other tenor, was allowed with the music – refinements rather than coarsenings.
Plenty of my friends don’t begin to admire him, but Claudia R.P. is another who fell hook, line, and sinker for him, almost thirty years ago in her case, forty in mine. In case you think I’m eccentric here, plenty of critics (a superior species you all invariably venerate, I know) think the same of this recording. J.B.Steane:
“…the flow of his singing is a feature that memory retains as one of his most remarkable characteristics… If one follows the score and de Lucia’s breathing there is no very remarkable span, yet so smooth is the production, with such fine instrumental “bowing” of the line, that one has the impression of completely unbroken melody. It all comes back to the exact and disciplined matching of technique and imaginativeness.”
Will Crutchfield:
“De Lucia builds a great arch to his fullest power and back, then finishes off the verse with a passionate accelerando and a floated high note of the purest quality.”
Michael Henstock writes of “the use of the head voice”, “the soft, high A, shimmering in its iridescent beauty,” and “the indolence, the willfulness with tempo”, and “the most subtle vocal colours.”
If you’re interested by him, try him in Neapolitan song, his specialty: O Sole mio, Fenesta che luciva, and Marechiare sound far less hackneyed and more personal when he sings them. What’s folk music? De Lucia was one of the generation of Neapolitan singers for whom these songs were written, who knew their composers, and who specialised in introducing them.
