— Teatro Nuovo

Illusion

Butterfly’s entrance is one of the great tours de force in the history of dramatic composition. When the nattering marriage-broker is interrupted by the tremolo of the violas, the harmonics and arpeggios of the harp, the delicate ring of the pitched bells, the tentative chant of a few solo strings detached from the orchestra, the atmosphere changes beyond what any lighting designer could dream of showing our eyes. The augmented triads leapfrogging into one another (one of the tricks Puccini learned from Wagner) give a magical sense of excited anticipation. The sequences could go on forever, yet always seem on the verge of arrival; each arrival is deliciously satisfying yet capable of giving way to another sequence. We can’t know when the music will settle, or where, but by the time Cio-Cio San appears we can hardly fail to give her our hearts.

We hear her before we see her, and what we hear is what Lt. Pinkerton sees: an apparition of unimaginable beauty and vulnerability. This is part of why it’s always more important how Cio-Cio San sounds than how she looks: her sound is the part of her that participates on the plane where Puccini is working. Anybody can place a sexually attractive woman on a stage, but a composer of genius can make us feel - through our ears - what it is like to be that woman, or to desire her, or to fear for what’s likely to become of her, or all that at once. Puccini can provoke something like the surges of emotion we experience in comparable contexts in real life, and clothe them in a beauty nothing else but music can provide. The soprano’s looks, like the scenery, should be as good as possible - they are part of the ideal - but they’re not the part that makes the magic.

This recording was made in 1924, the last year of “acoustical” (pre-microphone) technology, so it can only hint at the orchestral colors, but it has magic from the first notes. The high B-flat at 1’07’’ is an ideal in itself, appearing out of nowhere, fully-formed gorgeousness without any sign of effort, sensuous and available without demands, like the fantasy-bride Cio-Cio San is supposed to be. Behind the fantasy is a human being with her own conflicts, experiences, and needs; behind the “effortless” note is a laboriously built and athletically maintained technique; but illusion is a part of the drama being enacted here, and Edith Mason supplies it perfectly.

She was born in 1892 in St. Louis and studied in Cincinnati, Paris, and Boston, where she made her professional debut at 19 as Nedda. There soon followed a two-season stint in “sweet young thing” roles at the Met (Sophie, Gretel, First Flowermaiden, Papagena, Marzelline, Oscar - but also another Nedda). She didn’t stay; the Chicago Opera offered juicier opportunities, and there she became a favorite. Her staple roles season after season were Mimì, Butterfly, Marguerite, and Violetta, and in the last three of those she briefly returned to the Met in 1935-36.

Meanwhile her European career had taken her to the Paris Opéra, Covent Garden, Salzburg, and La Scala (where she was booked to sing Liù in the premiere of Turandot, but instead became a mother just then). Back in Chicago she added Desdemona when Martinelli and Tibbett first took on their classic pairing as Otello and Iago. At the same house she made her farewell with a final Mimì in 1941, shortly after her fifth marriage (two of the earlier ones had been with the Italian conductor Giorgio Polacco).

Mason stayed connected to opera in her long years of retirement (she was an enthusiastic Callas fan in the 1950s). But her name faded from operatic lore - partly because the American chapter of that lore centers on the Met, partly because she made so few records, and especially because those few were for a company that left the classical field in the Great Depression, so there was no major label to reissue her discs in the vinyl era. But the age of YouTube means that everything, or almost, can be found if you know how to search. She’s worth searching.

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.