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Queen of Song

Patti as Rosina, c. 1861 - photo by Camille Léon Louis Silvy

Let Verdi stand in for all of them: “An artistic nature so complete that perhaps there has never been its equal! Marvellous voice; an extremely pure singing style; stupendous actress; with a charm and a naturalness that no one else has.” He was writing (in 1877, and not for the first or last time) about Adelina Patti, whose singing he had admired since he first encountered her in 1861. He had just heard her as Violetta in Genova, where he habitually spent the winter months. “Indescribable enthusiasm,” he reported of the public’s reaction, “and merited.” Practically everyone in the musical world agreed with him. 

When I advise young singers to immerse themselves in old records, I’m always a little worried they will find their way to Patti – she was so famous, and her discs are so available out there on YouTube and whatever other platforms, and they are, let’s say, problematic. So, a few facts and a bit of explanation before we listen…

Patti was born into the Italian operatic diaspora in February 1843, to a Roman mother and Sicilian father who were singing in Madrid at the time. Both parents had, at different times, sung with Donizetti in premieres of his operas. Adelina was the youngest of four siblings and four more half-siblings, all of whom made successful careers in opera. The clan moved to New York while she was a toddler, and it was there (after some years touring as a child prodigy in concerts) that she eventually made her operatic debut at age 16. In that first season she sang Lucia di Lammermoor, La sonnambula, Don Giovanni, Il Barbiere di Siviglia, I Puritani, Martha, Don Pasquale, and Mosè in Egitto in Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, and Washington as well as New York. At 18 she triumphed at London’s Covent Garden (Verdi first heard her then), having meanwhile added La Traviata, Linda di Chamounix, Il Trovatore, Rigoletto, Les Huguenots, and Dinorah to her repertory.

Patti in her early touring years, aged about 11 - Photo: Frederick Debourg Richards

From that point on her career took her wherever her fees could be afforded. She was called “the Queen of Song” so regularly that one of the first full-length biographies could be entitled The Reign of Patti. Her frequent conductors were Muzio, Costa, Bevignani, Arditi, Faccio, Mancinelli; her stage colleagues included Ronconi, Mario, Grisi, Fraschini, Delle Sedie, Trebelli, Frezzolini. To avid readers of opera history each of those names speaks a volume. Even though Patti never resided in her parents’ homeland and visited its leading theaters only as a celebrated guest, no other singer we can hear today was so thoroughly integrated into the pre-verismo mainstream of Italian opera. We have every reason to search the records she made in 1905 and 1906 for clues about its style.  

But when we search we confront the problem, as John Steane delicately put it, of “the actual sounds the Queen of Song appeared to have made.” Some are regrettable. And widely-read students of operatic lore might have seen this coming: while a few soprano voices have survived nearly intact into their owners’ sixties, Patti’s was not among them. 

“A strange thing, her high notes are now forced” wrote Verdi’s favorite Aida, Teresa Stolz, after hearing Patti in the same role as far back as 1878. Hugo Wolf, reviewing her “adieux à Vienne” as Rosina in 1883, found much still to admire but allowed that the time for farewell had indeed come. It would extend for decades in concerts. After one at the Royal Albert Hall in 1893, G. B. Shaw observed that “time has transposed Patti down a minor third.” By the time she recorded in December of 1905, it had transposed her farther still, and she didn’t always deal with it gracefully. 

So before we either look to Patti for secrets of the golden age or dismiss her as evidence that its standards were not so high after all, we must situate her clearly. This was a singer whose prime was so glorious, and whose merits were so universally acknowledged, that she could still sell tickets and command loyalty when competent observers had conceded for more than a quarter century that her instrument was in notable decline. Whatever she was still able to do in 1905-06 stands in highly uncertain relationship to the period of her supremacy. 

The comments above center on the most obvious obstacle: much of Patti’s repertory, however low she might transpose it, involved the effect of “high notes,” and the top of her voice was in a state of outright ruin. The days when she touched the F above the staff were long gone, but now even the ordinary upper range of a mezzo-soprano was out of reach.  In her recording sessions Patti attempted several A-naturals and two B-flats, but in fact there is scarcely a healthy-sounding note above G in the whole series. The sense of distress in every attempt to sustain a higher one is immediately apparent to the ear and, if you sing, to the viscera. 

Spectrography lets the eye analyze what is happening. She can start the note, but within half-a-second or less panic seems to set in, presumably because the muscles no longer have the strength or elasticity to answer the familiar signal. The vibrato becomes chaotic and fragmented; occasionally it recovers a regular wave-form but more often it does not; the pitch may sag; and in any case the note is always abandoned before even two seconds go by. 

Patti's vibrato waveform on a successful G and an attempted B-flat

 

In performance - given the public’s memories of earlier times, the brevity of each crisis, and the fact that for at least an instant the note had undeniably been reached - these sallies must have sufficed to bring Patti’s numbers to a tolerable conclusion. On recording, they are suggestive of pain, and few if any of her successors in the studio have permitted such sounds to be immortalized. 

There are also medium-high passages that involve the diva in some hard-toned, charmless marcato, more than a few spots where her supply of breath falls short of what she seems to have anticipated, and some quite ungainly huffing and puffing at the ends of phrases. And did she really scoop up to so many notes from an attack below pitch when she was earning Verdi’s commendation for “stile di canto purissimo”? The rest of the earliest recorded Italians don’t do this. We can’t know for sure, but I suspect it was a mannerism that developed in later years along with her vocal difficulties. 

Patti near the time of her recordings, with score of Götterdämmerung

At times even the most sympathetic listener must surrender either to hilarity or disgust, and it is a constant struggle to remember that we should not blame Patti or think her a fool. When Joan Sutherland, Edita Gruberova, or Mirella Freni made records in their sixties, they were supported by a lifetime of judging playbacks for approval or remake. They had every chance to adapt their methods gradually and self-critically to the changes in their physical powers; Patti had none. 

But she still had a lot of personality, and some voice, and so a careful journey through her records is still rewarding. She’s best when singing at low or medium volume, in the middle range, and in phrases that don’t tax her breath span. And - dotted here and there through her discs - there are enough of those phrases to give a glimpse of the charisma and beauty that must have infused everything she sang in her early reign. 

My favorite is Tosti’s “Serenata,” 1906 version, for the brio of its crescendos, the pearly perfection of attack at the start of the second verse, and at the lines “e ai baci miei ricusa ancor un nido” a lilt that could decently answer to Verdi’s “un naturale che nissuna ha.” 

Of her virtuoso technique, at least one feature remained: a serene, fine-grained trill. We can hear it on a middle A-sharp in Lotti’s “Pur dicesti,” where the note is sustained in an even pianissimo in the first section and then trilled at the repeat. The spectrograph again shows the detail behind what the ear perceives: the speed of the plain vibrato matches exactly to that of the trill, and both are of near-perfect evenness.

 

image 5 - spectrograph of plain and trilled A-sharp

 

Patti as Amina, c. 1861 - photo by Camille Léon Louis Silvy

And if we are still on the lookout for clues to performance practice in the middle 1800s when she was learning her craft, the best sample is the beginning of “Ah non credea mirarti,” an aria she had been singing since her child prodigy days at the end of the 1840s, from a role that was a mainstay of her stage repertory from 1859 to sometime in the 1880s. This is wonderfully expressive of Amina’s quiet, passive sadness as she ponders the faded flower in her half-dreaming state. It has ornaments for the musicologist’s information - simple, fluent, beautifully integrated into the line, hypnotically prolonged at the cadence - but even more important, it takes us mentally onto the stage that Patti ruled for so many years. 

All of Patti’s 27 discs can be found somewhere or other on the internet. If the listener is patient with their shortcomings and bears in mind the explanations for them, more moments like these can be found, and a vivid, valuable artist comes gradually into focus. “Better a singer past her prime than one who has no prime” – I wish I knew who first invented that bon mot. Patti puts it to the test, severely at times, but in the end she proves it true. 

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.