On a clear day you can “C” forever
Of course, we all know a Marilyn Horne anecdote without a four-letter word is about as plausible as a martini without gin, but the tale that kicks off her Q&A with Zachary Woolfe is particularly bracing. You’ll be both shaken and stirred by this interview in the current Capital New York.
Mr. Wolfe gott her Met debut date wrong: it was 1970, not 1960.
I think they’ve corrected it—and a very fine interview/article it is.
Das ist kein New York Observer.
And also a photo of a rather fine Mr. Woolfe that accompanies the interview.
OT: Hoffmann from Munich: Villazon sounds pretty good, although he oversings as usual. The top seem tone there. I did not much like Damrau’s Doll Song, too forceful and choppy; not sparkly and fun, but the audience loved it!
I’m guessing that it was better in the house with whatever crazy stage action was going taking place. An unusual Doll Song, though.
listening now. Villazon sounds average, at best. but I guess that is a miracle in and of itself.
WOW – Villazon singing “o dieu quelle invresse” or whatever. sounds amazing, except he is singing his own version…changed half the notes (and made it more difficult??!!!). probably a very theatrical performances, with damrau as a partner. Indeed, a miracle.
I had to rush afterwards to get an antidote:
Did you hear the huge applause for Angela Brower (“Nicklausse”)? Wow.
Did you think she deserved, Cruz? I didn’t hear this but I’ve seen her as the Priestess in Aida (where she was the best singer on stage – unfortunate, that) and some other minor things. Am glad she’s getting an upgrade to the Muse/Nicklause and Cherubino this year and hope she did well.
deserved “it” – the ovation
Durfort, I think she deserved it. But what really struck me was that her applause was bigger than for Relyea, who sang the villains, a much bigger role (set of roles).
Terrific. Thanks Cruz. Hope they rebroadcast it. They usually do. And of course it will be good to hear Villazon in hopefully decent form.
And the enthusiasm of the ovation can probably be accounted for by her being an ensemble member stepping up into a major role and doing well.
Durfort, in a lengthy interview at the 2nd intermission, Brower said this was her first major role at the company (about 2/3 of her answers were in German). She’s from Phoenix, AZ.
well Damrau mentioned in an interview she wanted to make her sound mechanical so maybe she succeeded if you say she sounded choppy. But I am surprised no one mentioned that she took the aria down a half tone since she said she needed rounder middle and bottom for the other two acts. I thought the Antonia was the best of the two women but then went to bed after the interview with Brower. Villazon sounded decent which considering all is not bad. I was disappointed that Damrau didnt sing the Doll Song in the original key. I guess that is the price you pay for singing Susannas and Paminas etc.
All four principals did well: Damrau (O/A/G), Brower (Nicklausse), Villazón, and Relyea (C/M/D), though Relyea made less impact than the others and this was reflected in the applause. It was a night of clean attacks, properly sustained notes, clear French, and detailed acting. Constantinos Carydis scored a triumph in the pit. Richard Jones embraced traditional stagecraft, with humor, ably realizing Acts I and II but losing much momentum in a largely bare and drab Act III (Giulietta); his team caught some boos. All in all, the strongest Munich premiere in 24 months.
i meant the top seems to be there
With all due respect to a fine piece, I lived through the 70s and don’t recall that the admirable Miss Horne was ever “the” public face of opera in America– though she has always been a great popularizer and due to her concertizing and TV work had big name recognition beyond the “opera fans”. She was “a” public face of opera, but first Leontyne and then Bubbles had more of a lock on that “the”. In the 50s, which I did NOT live through, I gather that was Rise Stevens.
Now of course, it is That Rolex Girl. Or worse, Josh Groban…
But of course Leonard Bernstein called La Divina a name that began with a ‘c’ … Callas!
By the way, I do think that is rather one of those diva non-stories (as once catalogued many years ago by La Cieca), like her other one about getting drunk with Judy Garland.
It’s nice to be nice about people, and let me say that I am broadly a fan of Horne and hugely admire her as a vocal technician and phenomenon, but at the same time it isn’t difficult in the least to imagine Callas finding Horne’s singing boring, unnuanced and not terribly sensitive. Sorry, but it’s true- on record at least, Horne often sounds unmusical. She seemed to operate on a whole different level from Callas, and I can’t imagine that either of them would have had all that much to say to the other about singing.
And in any case, it sounds as if Callas never really did give up on the idea of a return to the opera stage, so quite possibly the last person she wanted to meet was a technically amazing mezzo without one once of her own interpretative and scenic gifts.
Good point. And it’s not as if Horne was singing one of her specialities, like Rossini or Handel. She was singing Ravel’s Scheherazade. I can’t really imagine her being terribly interesting in that piece.
Horne’s Carmen is IMO the worst I have ever heard, and I have heard many a bad Carmens. Bernstein’s direction is unbelievably Teutonic. Maliponte almost saves the day. Not that Callas’ Carmen was such a blast. Forceful, unlovely if fascinating and as always, extremely musical. But not at her best.
Pitch against that Horne’s Arsace and THAT is magnificence personified. For the ages.
Carmen is a darn difficult role, C/F! Most singers are simply unable to do it in a way that makes sense and is not a cartoon.
So true…. But there are some lovely interpretations, for exmample Solange Michel or VDLA.
CerFar-
I don’t like Horne as Carmen either, but give a listen to Anna Moffo’s Carmen– an outright disaster, paired with late-career Corelli and miscast Cappuccilli.
Donath provides the only pleasure.
You clearly haven’t heard Barbieri’s Carmen.
in the house Bernstein and Horne in Carmen were quite weird, amazingly un-French, but definitely electric; it was a memorable evening, and I’m very glad I was there, but I can well imagine that Callas would not have admired it. . .
CF–I know just why you object to in the DG/Bernstein recording, although I find myself with perhaps a bit more tolerance for it. But I heard Horne do it in the house quite a bit later–in 1988. Domingo was “conducting” in his way, giving the singers plenty of leeway. For Horne, it was much more sympathetic support than Bernstein’s “look at me” heavy-handedness. Here, Horne offered the best-sung Carmen I’ve ever encountered: incredibly nuanced, as if she were singing lieder. I’ll always treasure that memory.
OK I’ll modify – the chief culprit of this studio Carmen is Bernstein, dragging this fragile beauty of a piece into horrorland. Horne just tags along. One would have never guessed, dropping the spoken language, that it is French music, on the basis of this recording. Bernstein should have recorded more Wagner, as I find his T & I colossal, his NYP Wagner Album with Farrell one of my prime library assets, and the radio broadcast Walkure act I immense, brooding and dangerous. Oh for a complete Tristan / Gotterdammerung with him and Farrell / Vickers! Not that Behrens doesn’t give a magisterial acccount along with Bernstein, of the 1st Tristan act, an interpretation that I find, despite shortcomings, the most immediate, compelling and emotionally involving on record. Along with 1952 Modl, that is.
I really need to get that Bernstein T & I.
I couldn’t agree more with what you’ve said. That Farrell/Bernstein Wagner disc is absolute perfection. I was listening to it again just yesterday.
Du bist mein Engel CF!, and you know the serendipity of it all, right around the time Hildegard was singing the first Walkure at the Met, probably right after, so in late 1986, Lenny Bernstein held what is generally acknowledged to have been the first AIDS Gala ever, so it could be said that it put the disease in people’s consciousness for the first time, while we already were being decimated by the thousands….. Participating were Bernardette Peters, Kevin Kline, Linda Ronstadt, Marvin Hammlisch, the very Marylyn Horne, and none other than Eileen Farrell and Hildegard Behrens! Farrell was absolutely extraordinary, her whole number really, as she strolled on stage at the sound, on Lenny’s piano, of the prelude to Act III of Siegfried, all portent and doom, and then suddenly turned the music to a very campy show tune (or country, can’t remember) and Eileen did her number, fabulous. Hildegard sang Marlene Dietrich’s songs in tuxedo and a plastic raincoat with an umbrella, it was delightful. But at the end, all of the assembled got on stage and sang Somehwere, there was not a dry eye in the theater, pure Lenny MAGIC! In 1994, we went to the Licia Albanese Puccini Foundation to hear a friend of mine who was singing (a wonderful mezzo in Europe now) and Eileen spotted Hildegard, and came rushing to greet her, and tell her much she admired her Brunnhilde at the Met, and then introduced her to all the other judges, that included a pale and completely gone Franco Corelli, who had absolutely no idea who Hildegard Behrens was.
I’ve been flogging my love for that Bernstein T&I forever. This is one of the few times Lenny’s interventionist “Look, Ma! I’m conducting!” strategies works very well for me. The recording is only intermittently available, and presently seems to be out of the catalogue. Perhaps Universal will include it in their next slug of re-releases. It’s the perfect antidote for people (like me) who find Boehm just a little too kappellmeisterisch at Bayreuth on the much-praised T&I.
I also find Ms. B in the first act appropriately ferocious, and the conducting in the second, for me, is transformative. Yet this is clearly not for everyone. The reading is controversial for good reasons.
Tubsinger – my thoughts exactly. My problem with the famous Bohm is that – as always – it sounds underrehearsed, driven and lacks nuance, charm and seductiveness. Yes, these qualities exist in Wagner. Just listen to what either Kleiber jr or Bernstein (or Furt or Karajan) do with the act 2 prologue.
And on it goes, Windgassen sounds tired, besides it sounds as if he actually felt happier with the Siegfried tessitura (not Goetterdaemmerung), Talvela is not on the Sotin / Moll level, Ludwig fine as always, and Nilsson, as ever, lacks that elusive quality of vulnerability, IMO essential to Isolde, especially the 1st act and the “ich bin’s” passage in act 3. Talking about sensitivity to harmonic shifts in the Minne speach to Brangaene? Bah. I prefer less topnote sturdier Isoldes and more warmth, emotional insight and, again, vulnerability. THAT Behrens had in spades.
MMII – thanks for those lovely memories !
I assume a tribute is called for and I do have one: there was nobody I ever heard who could sing the fioratura cadenzas in that fiendishly difficult cabaletta ‘Comme un eclair precipite’ in Meyerbeer’s Le Prophete at as fast a tempi as Horne could. I memorized her performance of it (saw her do it 3 times at the Met). But I have to be honest about my feelings: in spite of her incredibly well-disciplined technique in that special moment of the opera, overall she was my least favorite singer. In spite of her incredible skill, I always found her sound downright ugly and full of nothingness… I went to see her for the amazing mechanical proficiency of her methodology, but paid the price by having to listen her low-level non-distinctive vocal tone. Even as Fidès, for the entire performance of the role I much preferred the beautiful UNBROKEN legato of Florence Quivar, whom I also saw sing Fidès at the Met. But at least Horne didn’t display the ugly, strident intonation of the Berthe who sang with her.
Tend to agree with you.
I finally realized that J.B. Steane had no idea what he was talking about when he compared Horne to Ponselle(!!!) for velvety richness of tone.
Uneducated as I am, I didn’t know who J.B. Steane was, so I just looked up his bio. Considering all the singers he heard in his long career (and all the ariticle & books he wrote) perhaps he confused Horne with somebody else… Also, I didn’t know Horne sang that often in Great Britain for him to make such a sweeping judgement. I wonder if Steane ever gave hommage to Horne’s incredible (still unmatched) fast driven fioratura technique?
1. No, there’s no chance he was confusing Horne with anybody else; she was emerging to the forefront right as he wrote about her in The Grand Tradition. And 1971 (when he wrote that book) was a vantage point at which the main reference points would have been the early Decca recitals (including the collaborations with Sutherland) and the Norma. The comparison is not so out of line at that point in history; the Met Carmen was still to come. (And in a later book he was much more negative about that than even I would be, and drew a different conclusion looking back on the latter part of the career.)
2. She did sing in the UK at that time, and the book was mostly about people’s recorded legacies, so judging on those early Decca recordings was fair. (One comparison is “sweeping”?)
3. Yes, of course he did.
A nullity. Not one hand moved at her Carmen, so ingrained in New York was the remembered impact of my work in the role (which another fraud had monopolized for decades)