— Teatro Nuovo

Les adieux de Verdi

Rehearsing with Verdi seems to have been a peak experience for everyone who did it, and many did - he was famous for the energy and detail with which he supervised his new operas. Dozens of participants and observers left vivid accounts, especially of the preparations for Otello (1887) and Falstaff (1893) at La Scala.

Those were Verdi’s last operas, but not his last productions. In 1894, in two long trips to Paris, he rehearsed both shows again with their first French casts. Those were his true farewell to the theater, and it happens that ancient recordings actually allow us to hear more of his direct Parisian collaborators than of his Italian ones.

Only one singer appeared in both operas: Victor Maurel (1848-1923), the Frenchman who had likewise anchored the Milan casts. Verdi admired Maurel intensely for many years, even while finding him personally exasperating, pretentious in his financial and practical demands, infuriating in his lust for publicity, outrageous in his indiscreet and self-aggrandizing press statements. Almost every Verdi letter mentioning Maurel is a complaint. But what counted was the show when the curtain went up, and no one else was even considered for the roles of Iago and Falstaff.

Frustratingly, he is also the only member of the Paris casts whose records include any music from Otello or Falstaff. Maurel was regularly encored in Falstaff’s brief solo “Quand’ero paggio,” sometimes singing it as many as five times, and his record is a souvenir of this: twice through in Italian and a third time in French, heard here. (He also had Spanish and Portuguese versions at the ready, according to newspaper reports, for performances in those countries.) Nowadays, we think of encores as an impermissible interruption of the imaginary stage-world, but Verdi doesn’t seem to have felt that way at all. When a modern-thinking German critic praised the local success of Act Two without the encore, the composer wrote Boïto a wounded-sounding letter wondering why the guy wanted to bash such an innocuous little solo!

In Paris Falstaff came first, opening at the Opéra-Comique on 18 April. Verdi was happy: “Good performance onstage. Maurel and Quickly excellent. Marvelous orchestra. Complete effect!,” he wrote the next morning to Teresa Stolz, his favorite Aida and Elisabetta in years gone by. The production’s Alice Ford did not leave any recordings, but Nannetta, Quickly, Fenton, Ford, and Pistola all made dozens of them: Lise Landouzy (1865-1943), Marie Delna (1875-1932), Edmond Clément (1867-1928), Gabriel Soulacroix (1853-1905), and Hippolyte Belhomme (1854-1923). Falstaff is remarkable for the interweaving of brief lyrical episodes into a texture dominated by lively declamation, so our mashup of those five voices comes from ten different records, selected to represent both sides of the coin.

Otello followed in the autumn at the Opéra (12 October). There had been a proposal to do it in Italian, probably so that it could feature the original Francesco Tamagno in the title role. Verdi quashed that decisively and insisted on a proper translation, supervising Boïto and Du Locle (one of the Don Carlos librettists) in its preparation. He adjusted the notes and rhythms at dozens of points to give good declamatory shape to the new text (he did this for the French Aida and Falstaff as well, including a few spots in the bit Maurel recorded). He also added the ballet required for French grand operas, and a fascinatingly different, modern-sounding final ensemble in Act Three - his last music for the stage, fifty-eight years after he started work on his first opera.

Verdi was happy with the Otello singers as well, but we don’t have such a range of choices for hearing them. Of the Othello himself, Albert Saléza (1867-1916), only one studio recording survives, and that in only one known copy. It’s a very dimly recorded cylinder of Edgardo’s “Tu che a dio spiegasti l’ali,” made just a few years later in 1898 or 1899. The Desdemona, Rose Caron (1857-1930) made only seven records and the Emilia, Meyrianne Héglon, only four (all accompanied by Saint-Saëns). The other two documented artists were studio workhorses like some of the Falstaff singers: André Gresse (Lodovico; 1868-1937) made at least 123 titles, and Albert Vaguet (Cassio; 1865-1943) about three times that many.

This is a generational snapshot - eleven French (or French-Belgian) singers, all but one of them born between 1848 and 1868. (The outlier is Delna, who was 19 years old when she impressed Verdi with her “excellent” Quickly.) They were trained in a world whose dominant French composers were Gounod, Thomas, and the rising star Massenet, and in which the established international giants were Verdi and Wagner. Right at the heart of Romantic opera, you might say, and in this case bearing a certain stamp of approval from one of those giants. (Verdi didn’t necessarily love every singer he worked with, but he could and did veto the ones he disliked.)

So what do we hear? The first reaction is likely to be: what a set of smooth, lyrical voices! None seems to have to haul itself around by force. There isn’t an unruly vibrato in the lot. All are in control of dynamics. This is an interesting commentary on generational shifts, because in his dozens of letters about casting these operas, he expresses priorities like those only for the role of Desdemona. (“The best Desdemona will always be the one who sings best,” he wrote, but he did not apply that maxim to every part.)

The other general observation relates to something he did write about, and often: their bright, well-defined vowels and the vivacity of their diction. Verdi was adamant about this. I can’t imagine any French-speaker having serious trouble understanding every line in the mashups (nor an Italian-speaker failing to understand Saléza). Some might take a few tries, due to murky recording or texts that are a little hard to scan in any case, but still. Intelligibility was one of the basic requirements in 1894.

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.

Postscript: Photographs of Marie Delna, Hippolyte Belhomme, Meyrianne Héglon, and Albert Vaguet can be found in Records of the Week 24, 21, 15, and 36, respectively, along with additional samples of their voices.