I don’t get this praise of Caballe’s Fiordiligi – as stated above, I’m a huge Caballe fan, but find her very wide of the mark in this particular recording. I’ve seen it singled out fairly often as an example of good Caballe for those who don’t tend to like her, which makes it even harder for me to understand why I don’t like it…

I’ve never heard the Leinsdorf Cosi, and I see that it’s awaiting another cheap reissue. I never thought Leontyne had the chops to get through Fiordiligi without cutting corners. I’m tempted to get it because of Troyanos, whom I adore. Has anyone else heard it? I would imagine the conducting would be a little more generic than what would come in the 70s and 80s, maybe even as slow as HvK’s mono version for EMI, with Schwarzkopf and Merriman.

A friend of mine was with Caballe when that Cosi was taped. She apparently pitched up a day or two before and cancelled the first recording session as she wanted to go shopping. The night before the first session she took out her score to (re)learn the music and was telling everyone the next day how to sing the recits… LOL. I recall reading somewhere that the recording won awards?

Caballe at her best was stunning. And her very best was a relaxed zarzuela late morning recital in Munich in 1979 when she let her hair down and clicked the castanets. Compensation for about a year earlier when I took a train into the city from New Brunswick on a snowy evening only to find Caballe had cancelled a Carnegie Hall recital at the last minute. Arrrgh!!!

I don’t think her fainting just before intermission at the matinee Vespri was faked. She hyperventilated. I was in a side box and could see the chorus ladies catch her as she started to fall. It was a broadcast performance so of course she returned after intermission to finish the performance.

I also saw her Met debut in Faust. Boring! But oh, the joint concert with Marilyn Horne. Sublime. Now if there were only a decent video of the Aix Semiramide with Caballe and Horne to be had…

I think the most gifted singers are often the ones who need the most guidance. Price could be extremely self indulgent during her later prime (’72-82), probably out of boredom and lack of self criticism, BUT listen to her performance of Leonora from Salzburg ’78 with HvK. She is unbelievably disciplined. The line as clean as a whistle. The sloppiness wasn’t due to technical faults. . . .

Most of Renee’s mannerisms are post-Solti. Since his death, she has had no musical mentor (who wasn’t on her payroll). No one to scold when and where necessary. . . .

But my favorite Caballe may be the Elisabetta, Regina D’Inghilterra (Rossini), which is just a stupendous piece of singing.

On a side note, I though the Vicar of Wakefield would like to know that Opera Depot now has the following performance available
Wagner: Tristan und Isolde

This all-Briton cast features the Amy Shuard as Isolde as well as Josephine Veasey, John Shirley-Quirk and Michael Langdon. Colin Davis conducts

The Carnegie Hall concert of ’79, however, was unforgettable. Such a mass of hysteria I’d never seen, nor never again have witnessed.
Lately, when I think upon the confection ary product known as “Renee Fleming” the little old rhyme ‘when she was good, she was very, VERY good, but when she was bad, she was HORRID! springs to mind.
Regrettably, that works in Caballe’s case as well.
I agree with luvtennis, above in 3) re Callas legacy. Not even Callas could do Callas that long!

The great sorrow and the pity, tho’, is it was not Caballe in no later than,say,’75 who introduced Il Pirata to the Met. Even if we would have had to submit to that jamon of a husband, Marti, it would have been worth it. Instead we got the Prom Queen screaming her head off and looking like an enticingly sumptuous wedding cake dolly.
I’ll never attend another Bellini opera @ the Met, so Help Me God! Between the Pirata screamfest, the Sonnambula Shenanigans, and that godawful Guleghina howling at the moon in Norma (a positively hallucinatory, maddening and infuriating excuse for bel canto)

JESUMARIA!

Luvtennis, you are exactly right! I remember one of the critics in the glory days of High Fidelity (can’t remember whom it was: they all went by initials, such as CLO, DSH, and so on) referred to her “miniaturized coluratura.”

One of her best recordings hasn’t been mentioned: Fiordiligi in Davis’s “Cosi.” She’s in great voice, and really seems to connect with the music and the character. Unfortunately, the other five cast members are almost unlistenable: Cotrubas is completely in over her head as Despina.

The “Turandot” recording story apparently came from Edward Greenfield being sent to report back to Gramophone on the sessions. I suppose that Montsy and Joan were considered rivals and that casting them both in Turandot was a bigger dare than casting Callas and Schwarzkopf together. Evidently, at the beginning of the first session, Caballe wove her way through the orchestral set up, through the cables and wires, holding a bouquet and then presenting it to Joan. The latter apparently cooed, “oooh, flowers for the diva!” Caballe corrected with a smile, “no, flowers from the diva.”

It was either at that recording session, or those for Norma with the Bonynges later, that Caballe poutingly objected to further takes–no perfectionist she–and was delighted when everything shut down for the day. She then whispered to Joan something about now being able to get to Harrod’s before it closed. There’s also a story somewhere I read that Joan and Montsy were together in Philadelphia in the 60s, when Caballe may have been reputed to be unwell, but still ate a bowl of pasta so large the steam from it collapsed her beehive. I don’t think there are many stories about Caballe that are truly unkind relative to the way she interacted with other singers–I know Kraus wasn’t fond of her, objecting to her throwing her arms around him during Manon, and she had some recurrent beef with Vicky D over local political issues surrounding the opera house. But, from what I read, both Joan and Marilyn Horne thought she was fun to be with. I know she and Grace Bumbry fell out at Covent Garden over the keys for “Mira, O Norma”–and, whether or not it’s true, I read that Grace then chose the same key Caballe wanted when she took over the prima role later in the run.

“The indispositions, headaches, and illnesses of artists come when they will, and the director cannot halt them. In this respect the musical dilettantes can be particularly dangerous. They have their own ideas. They insist that in this best of all possible worlds the opera company should contain only the finest artists, the finest operas and the artists should always be in good health.” [p. 185, Vienna House edition, 1973]

His book was published in 1940, was almost certainly completed by 1934 (according to the introduction), and reports dealings with opera singers going back into the 1890s and 1880s. We’ve read elsewhere that Colbran’s powers were almost certainly fading by the time she met Rossini, although her voice was still agile enough to inspire him to compose some of the most astounding coloratura passages for her.

All of this is to say: I’m surprised and amused that after at least 200 years of human evolution, opera singers and their fans are still locked in a battle over the perfect technique.

Stage Fright!!!!!

Never was that more appropriate than in the performance of ‘Traviata’ that I saw with her and Carreras in Philadelphia. She was having some trouble with the highest note (C sharp?D flat?) in the downward arpeggios in Sempre Libera, just didn’t sing them. There was a long interval after which someone came out and announced that Madame Caballe was not feeling well, but had graciously consented to continue the performance….in an armchair placed center stage. Not her finest moment. Yes, she was erratic, unreliable, lazy, but at her best, she was without a doubt one of the great singers of the last half of the 20th century. At her best she WAS involved and acted superbly through her voice. With her fabled breath control, she could spin out and inflect a vocal line like very few, with or without consonants…lol. Did she have mannerisms? sure, most every great diva does. And no, she didn’t have a trill, but her little flutter or shake, when it was there (and it wasn’t always) didn’t always bother me. It could be very effective, if not musically, then emotionally, at a moment when the composer called for it. I’d rather have something there than nothing, and it was more effective for me than the broken record revolving emphasis(lol, sorry, I don’t know how else to describe it) that is affected by many divas, L. Price among them.

1) Despite her reputation as a great bel cantista, she could be incredibly imprecise in florid music, too often relied on an unsupported half-voice to make it through the demanding fiorature, and had NO trill.

2) The Verdi spinto roles have one basic requirement – a strong, flexible upper register. Caballe’s top was not the best part of her voice, and I think her Leonoras and Aidas exacted a HUGE toll on her voice so that by ’74 what had been a seamless instrument had broken into three distinct parts. A luscious middle. A squally bottom. And a top that was raucous above mezzoforte, but sublime at ppp.

3) She sang too many different roles. I think too much emphasis is placed on versatility. In truth, I think that many singers suffer by not concentrating on their most suitable rep and singing too many different kinds of roles. The voice is not a violin or piano. Muscle memory is everything, and singing all kinds of roles under all kinds of conditions can lead to some real problems. Another negative Callas legacy.

And I’ve heard a commercial recording she made of caro nome – we may, of course, be talking about different accounts, but I didn’t hear a trill at the end, just the weird flutter to which other posters above refer.

I read some half-assed “explanation” that she was taught that flutter in Spain. If it was meant to be a substitute for a trill, it weren’t. It never made me swoon and I don’t think it’s any technical feat of finesse. As for her choosing not to trill, you’d have to ask huh. She’s the diva, after all, as she informed Dame Joan in that recording-session story when they were in Turandot together. She’s been called indolent and indifferent before. Honestly I think she had a virulent lazy streak. That said, she loved holding the final, descending three notes of “Vissi d’arte,” which other sopranos bust up (to the detriment of the line and the meaning). She gets some chips for that, I suppose.

She took a lot of crap for her lack of ‘dramatic commitment’ even at the beginning of her career–one critic wrote that frowning and/or flinging out her arms was okay and mildly forgiveable at a concert performance, but not quite enough for a staged appearance. Zefferelli famously called her an ‘armchair soprano.’ I forgive all of this because I love the singing.

I have the Spanish Butterfly in the basement on LP. I still can’t figure out how the copyright could be so coveted or contentious as to prevent the release of this recording, which got decent reviews in its day. (As both Mimi and Cio Cio San she was favorably compared to Vicky D). I want to hear it again but it won’t replace Freni 1, or Scotto 1, or either of Vicky D’s…

It’s not cause she wouldn’t
It’s not cause she shouldn’t
and you know darn well it’s not cause she couldn’t….

It’s just because she’s the laziest diva in town….(but sometimes wonderful too)

I too love the new DiDonato, and have listened to it almost as many times as danpatter, in 2 weeks. I’ll go to see Renee in the Armida HD broadcast, but I think it’ll be hard for her to top JDD, for me. Colleagues remind me that La Scoopenda’s early 90′s Armida was well-received …

I don’t like that little flutter/shudder thing she did at all.

Montsy could trill. There’s one Bellini aria, released on EMI, where she actually trilled at the end. It’s virtually the only time I can recall hearing it on record. In person I never heard it. I think she just chose not to–and I never liked the fluttering on one note. Not a bit.

As for her cancelations, I was meant to hear her in Ernani. No soap. I do recall reading one wag writing, in the late 80s, that “now that Madame Caballe has gone into semi-retirement, she’ll be available for fewer cancelations…”

I don’t think Renee can touch her in bel canto, or even Verdi. That Fleming “bel canto” album was the last Fleming CD I ever bought. Lovely in Mozart (at the beginning), she didn’t have the slancio for bel canto rep. It never sounded right to me, and I only listened to it once…