— Teatro Nuovo

But Those Days I Find No More

Pol Plançon had been a star bass at the Paris Opéra since 1883, Covent Garden since 1891, and the Metropolitan since 1893. So when the Victor Record Company set out in 1903 to compete for opera’s international luminaries - engaging the baritone Emilio de Gogorza as agent and supervisor for the celebrity red-label series - their prime target for the bass repertory was obvious. Surprisingly, Plançon appears to have been reluctant.

He was not a recording virgin - he had made primitive discs in London a year or two before - but he was nervous. “At my age this is not dignified,” he told De Gogorza (the bass was fifty-two, and perhaps sensitive to comparison with younger phenoms like Caruso and Chaliapin who had begun to exploit the new technology). He fortified himself with “a bottle of claret and several brandies” over lunch. In that condition and that frame of mind, he followed his colleague to the studios, where he laid down five selections, starting with the Bellini aria heard here.

Plançon was celebrated for his brilliance in florid music, and was featured for it in Record of the Week no. 5. (De Gogorza wished he could have recorded the basso’s party trick of singing the Shadow Song from Dinorah in falsetto; so do I.) But there’s nothing of that sort here; no trills, no ornamentation, only a very modest bit of running in the simple cadenza. It’s a different kind of virtuosity that makes this a touchstone of Bel Canto.

First there is the legato: portamento as smooth as velvet; consonants clear as crystal without ever grabbing or bumping; every note and dynamic proportionate to its neighbors. “It has to flow like oil,” said Girolamo Crescentini to his students in Bellini’s childhood, and if you think for a moment how oil flows you grasp that this was not a random simile. Not like toothpaste squeezed from the tube by pressure; not like water skittering everywhere; not like sand or gravel whose components split off and disperse, but like oil, running fluently and steadily while bound by its own viscosity.

Next the rhythm: it lilts along with the poetry, and befriends the triplets of the accompaniment instead of trying to fight them. Not by aligning to them mechanically, though: Plançon’s step is light, and nothing so bluntly arithmetical as notation could define it.

Finally the tempo, whose shifts might almost be missed on a first hearing because they seem so natural. If you tap your finger with each triplet as the record goes by - three taps per beat, four beats per bar - you quickly discover what every orchestra player in Bellini’s day had to understand.

Plançon starts at a tempo of about mm=46, a nice rolling larghetto, at which pace each beat lasts about 1.3 seconds. But already on the fourth beat of singing, he takes 1.6 seconds, which would be a tempo of mm=37 if he turned it into a “tempo” - but he doesn’t, it’s just a stretch. Still within the opening lines, as he approaches the highest note he presses forward to about mm=53, and he has much more pronounced surges and hold-backs yet to come; individual beats in the continuous portions of the song range from 0.8 to 4.6 seconds long.

“Vi ravviso” lasts 28 bars and has two silences marked with fermatas, but not a single indication to accelerate or retard the tempo. Plançon does both constantly. Why? For him, those things were obviously governed by the contours of the melody and the progress of the harmony, not by waiting to be told what to do. Certainly not by watching somebody send signals with a baton.

Of course, conductors can enjoy accelerations and ritards too - they’re musical people - but they don’t generally feel them in pieces like this. Perhaps because they lack experience producing melodies out of their own bodies and breath? As they took over more and more responsibility for operatic interpretation, the nuances gradually disappeared. In the most recent complete recording of the opera, with Ildebrando D’Arcangelo singing and Alessandro De Marchi conducting, the basic tempo is only a little faster (about 50, meaning about 1.2 seconds per beat), but it almost never bends, and the range of timings for individual beats from about 1.35 for the slowest to 1.1 for the fastest. If you want that in metronomic values, it’s from about 44 to about 54 for the quarter note. Plançon’s span is from about 13 to 75 (or even if you leave out his two biggest rallentandos, 28 to 75). Something has really changed.

“Cari luoghi, io vi trovai, ma quei dì non trovo più,” sings Count Rodolfo in the last line of the nostalgic verses: “Dear scenes, I’ve found you again, but those days I find no more.” Plançon was probably already a little old-fashioned in 1903. But are old fashions really lost forever? Not in couture they aren’t; they can come back in different ways, as new designers take hints from the past. In music? Worth a try!

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.