parterre box

47 comments

• Cocky Kurwenal says:

  Will, it’s true that they took on a more diverse range of roles back in the day, but have you actually heard Lilli Lehmann? It isn’t terribly pleasant, and not just for reasons of style which has obviously changed a great deal since she was active. It doesn’t sound like a particularly impressive techinque as we understand the word today, more just a certain facility, coupled with the fact that, as you rightly point out, audience expectations regarding the type of voice they expected to hear in a specific role simply did not exist.

  on October 9, 2009 at 2:42 PM
• Will says:

  Cocky, I have good transcriptions of all of her extant recordings. Yes indeed, I have heard her recordings–it has to be kept in mind that she recorded at an advanced age, 58 and 59, after a very long and varied career. It would be wonderful if she could have been recorded fifteen or twenty years earlier but that’s not what happened.

  The same is true of Tamagno and several others of that era–the recording process captured them past their primes. But there are wonderful things to be heard, technical facility and an approach to singing that can easily be discerned even if, as is certainly true in some–not all–of Lehmann’s records, the tone is worn or breathing effortful. Consider, though, that if all we had of Callas was only what got recorded in the mid- to late-1960s, her reputation simply as a singer would be severely compromised, too.

  on October 9, 2009 at 5:00 PM
• Will says:

  Apologies and correction–the 2 I had intended to strike didn’t “print”:

  The premiere of the Adriana Lecouvreur production was January 21, 1963, not January 1.

  on October 9, 2009 at 5:08 PM
• Cocky Kurwenal says:

  I know what you mean, Will, but I think it is still possible to get a pretty good idea of the voice, because any informed listener stands a decent chance of identifying what is down to the ravages of age and what the singing may have been like without those issues. Sure, I acknowledge that it’s guess work, but guess work bourne of experience and therefore not completely meaningless. And I still contend that your idea that Lilli Lehmann and her ilk really knew what technique was, and the implication that later singers didn’t or don’t, isn’t supported by the recorded evidence, and that in addition, a greater variety of roles was possible not due to better technique, but because the audience simply didn’t have the baggage or weight of expectation and would not therefore say she can’t sing Isolde, she’s a Constanze, or whatever.

  Of course, it depends on what your definition of good technique is – a very divisive and entirely seperate issue, I guess.

  on October 9, 2009 at 5:32 PM
• Byrnham Woode says:

  Mea culpa all over the place.

  My good friend Will (we go waaaayyy back) correctly points out that the longest lived production in recent MET repertory isn’t the 1964 FALSTAFF, but the 1963 ADRIANA LECOUVREUR.

  Rudy Bing would turn over in his grave if he knew the show was still in use. He did it back then because Tebaldi demanded it or else she wouldn’t come to NY at all. And then she got ill, and is he put it, “I had to do the damned thing without her”.

  It hasn’t been revived all that often, but I daresay we’ll get another go-round of this 40+ year old sets the next time some aging diva requests it.

  on October 9, 2009 at 5:34 PM
• Will says:

  The current production of Adriana Lecouvreur has been performed 70 times in New York and on tour since its 1963 premiere. The premiere production in which Caruso sang was dropped after only 3 performances, for a MET total of 70.

  Kolodin whose review of the premiere of the current production reveals that he hated every aspect of it except Franco Corelli, mentions that after plans to have Cecil Beaton design it fell through, Bing decided to copy a then-current Naples production. That production is probably the one that Olivero (subbing for Tebaldi), Corelli, Bastianini and Simionato were performing in the famous, incendiary “pirate” that is the best possible realization of the opera many of us can imagine.

  on October 9, 2009 at 5:54 PM
• Will says:

  Typos! “for a Met total of 73.”

  on October 9, 2009 at 5:55 PM