— Teatro Nuovo

Ancient Vaccai

To accompany Teatro Nuovo’s video of Nicola Vaccai’s Metodo di Canto, this week’s records trace an unlikely relic of his long-ago operatic fame. None of Vaccai’s operas lasted beyond his lifetime (1790-1848) - but one scene did. It was the finale of Giulietta e Romeo, which was a big success in Milan in 1825, and had a peculiar afterlife. Bellini set the same libretto (by Felice Romani) as I Capuleti ed i Montecchi in 1830, and his opera soon eclipsed Vaccai’s. However, the superstar Maria Malibran had sung the earlier setting with great success, and when she later came to interpret Bellini’s Romeo, she retained the Vaccai version of the final scene.

It consists of a chorus of mourners; an eloquent recitative and aria for Romeo as he resolves to take poison and join Juliet in death; her awakening; the lovers’ anguished farewells; and Juliet’s collapse on Romeo’s body, presumably to die of grief. This is the same sequence followed by Bellini, though Romani provided a new text for Romeo’s aria, “Deh! tu, deh! tu, bell’anima.”

Why would Malibran mix another composer’s finale into Bellini’s opera? Perhaps simply because of the success she had already had with it. Perhaps because it is more extensive, with a cabaletta (Bellini skipped this) and a more developed duet (whose passionate phrases Malibran’s brother Manuel García Jr. singled out for their electrifying effect). It has sometimes been suggested that Malibran preferred to avoid the high tessitura of Bellini’s writing, but this is unlikely; she was a liberal transposer and expert adapter, and had arranged everything from Fidelio to La sonnambula to fit her deep mezzo-soprano voice.

Maybe she just loved the Vaccai aria. In a way its text is more poignant than the replacement: “Ah, if you are sleeping, awake and rise,” cries Romeo - and we know, as he does not, that she is sleeping and will waken, tragically too late. Its melody is lush and beautifully conceived for the contralto voice (score here).

Remarkably, this “pasticcio alla Malibran” did not vanish with the diva herself. Revivals of I capuleti using the Vaccai finale continued periodically as late as 1902, and Ricordi for many years kept it in print as an appendix to the Bellini score. That is probably why we have three ancient recordings of “Ah, se tu dormi” and none of the equivalent Bellini aria. All three are fascinating to anyone today interested in Vaccai, or Italian vocalism, or the contralto voice.

The terms “contralto” and “mezzosoprano” were already distinct from one another in turn-of-the-century Italy if you were having a discussion about the sound of individual voices, but in practice the inhabitants of both categories sang what would seem today a surprisingly uniform repertory. Practically every one of them performed Siebel and Urbain, Carmen and Mignon, Amneris and Azucena, Fidès and Ortrud, Maffio Orsini and Adalgisa. The idea of the “light” or “lyric” mezzo seems not to have existed; all those Azucenas were expected to have sufficient agility and finesse for the pageboy roles to be cast without resorting to small-voiced singers. Our three Vaccai interpreters give an idea how it was done.

Parsi-Pettinella - Esplugas photograph, Barcelona

Armida Parsi-Pettinella (1868-1949) made a debut as Azucena while still a 16-year-old student (probably jumping in as a substitute), but commenced her real career only in 1891. For two decades she was a leading interpreter of all the roles listed above at the principal Italian houses, and she left impressive recorded documents of all of them except Orsini. Outside Italy she was a particularly strong presence in Spain, Portugal, and South America. Her singing of the Vaccai aria is a classic model, practically a lesson. Elegant, lingering diminuendos; effortlessly fluid scales and mordents; chiseled pronunciation; vocal poise that never falters; and the flexibility to sing middle G with equal firmness and ease in head register or (at the end) in chest.

Guerrina Fabbri (1866-1946), though only two years older, belongs to a slightly earlier phase of vocal history, because her debut at 19 (Orsini in Lucrezia Borgia, followed immediately by La Cieca in La gioconda) established her immediately in elite international casts with singers of the previous generation. At 21 she was already in London singing Verdi opposite Jean de Reszke and Mattia Battistini. When Adelina Patti carried Rossini’s ultra-virtuosic Semiramide into its last phase as a standard-repertory opera, Fabbri was her Arsace in at least eight cities between 1888 and 1892. By that year she was a serious candidate to be the first Quickly in Falstaff. The premiere went instead to Giuseppina Pasqua, but Fabbri soon sang it all over the world, sometimes with members of the original cast around her and Toscanini conducting. Her stage career continued at least to 1928, and she was the Romeo of that last-documented revival of the Bellini-Vaccai score (Florence 1902; she had previously sung it in Madrid and Lisbon).

Fabbri recorded both the Bellini entrance aria and the Vaccai final aria at her sole gramophone session in 1903. They’re a little hard for modern ears to take. The voice is clearly grand and powerful; there is noble legato and fluent ornamentation, but “poise” is not exactly the word. She sometimes pushes the tone to the point of scratchy or ungainly sounds, and the accentuation has a “verismo” flavor that may strike us as emotionally exaggerated.

It doesn’t help that the arias were obviously not rehearsed with the accompanist - it took a while for record companies to learn that this was a necessary precaution. Salvatore Cottone, who played perfectly well for other singers in more familiar music, is easily confused by Fabbri’s decorations and rubato, and in “Ah se tu dormi,” just before the cadenza, he interrupts a spacious ornamental arpeggio with a premature chord, turning what could have been a beautiful moment into a chaotic scramble. It’s a reminder of the limitations we face in interpreting primitive audio. If she had tried again, would she have left something more in line with her real-life reputation? We’ll never know, but if we listen with a certain care to get past the surface faults, these discs are souvenirs of a major artist from whom we can still learn a lot.

Elisa Petri (1869-1929, already heard in Record of the Week No. 6) spent the first half of her three-decade career in pure soprano repertory, with a debut at 20 in the double role of Margherita and Elena in Mefistofele. She was quickly busy throughout Italy in operas ranging from Lucia, I puritani, and La traviata to Aida, Cavalleria, and Die Walküre (as Sieglinde). Around 1906-07 she shifted to lower-tessitura parts, and her long series of Fonotipia records starting in 1904 catches her on both sides of the transition. In soprano repertory, her top notes sound fine up to B-flat, but she avoids anything higher (editing out B-naturals from “Dich teure Halle” and a Linda di Chamounix duet). Obviously a youthful facility on top had departed during her thirties, much as it later did for Rosa Ponselle. After the shift, Petri sounds downright thrilling as Amneris, Laura, and Azucena, and though it remains a higher-set voice than the other two, her low notes are beautiful and more than adequate to her new roles.

The Vaccai record is a little disappointing compared to Petri’s best, in that it sounds like a good musician reading a piece she hasn’t lived with in performance. (Petri obviously was that good musician - she made dozens of records from outside her stage repertory, including a long series of operetta excerpts under the pseudonym “Lison.”) Her “Ah, se tu dormi” has no ornamentation and lacks the personal shadings and rubatos of the other two - but the same vocal virtues are abundantly present, and in an even smoother legato line. The other point of interest is that she includes much of the following scene - the short cabaletta and subsequent recitative. One could wish for it to be more inspired, but the vocalism is first-rate and the low register really shines.

What about the ornaments? Petri, as noted, adds none; Parsi-Pettinella’s are few and tasteful; Fabbri’s are somewhat bolder. She preserves an echo of Bel Canto practice - but only a faint echo. Two transcriptions of Malibran’s own ornaments have survived, and she added approximately fifteen times as many “little notes” as Fabbri.

Teatro Nuovo puts great emphasis on learning from the singers who had never heard, or heard of, microphone singing - primitive recordings from more than a century ago, forming a link to the traditions of opera’s heyday and the infinite potential of the natural, unassisted human voice. Check this space regularly for samples, and click here for some pointers on how to listen.