— Teatro Nuovo

Teenagers

A young singer who follows this series wrote recently to convey, among other things, a certain distress over something noticed here. Our capsule career summaries often begin by noting the artists’ professional debuts, often mentioning their age at the time, and often (this was the cause of distress) that age is twenty or less. I’m not sure of my correspondent’s precise age, but I would guess 24 or 25, at which point the typical American opera singer is finishing up a master’s degree and looking to get into a resident Young Artists Program. Was I trying to imply that he and his peers were already showing up late to the game?

I responded with appropriate reassurances - it’s definitely not the fault of our talented aspirants, who are doing their best in the situation they find awaiting them - but he was right to wonder. We are definitely losing out on quite a few years of the physical prime of voices by getting them to stage-readiness so much later than used to be normal.

Just to take those who happened to catch my reader’s attention by being featured in a Record of the Week, there are Elisa Petri (Mefistofele at 20, both of the soprano leads), Luisa Tetrazzini (Ines in L’africaine at 19), Gabriella Besanzoni (Beppe in L’amico Fritz at 19 or 20), Eugenio Giraldoni (Escamillo at 20), Marie Gutheil-Schoder (Erste Dame at 17), Oreste Mieli (Count di Luna at 19), Georg Henschel (Hans Sachs at 18 - no, that isn’t a misprint), Marie Delna (Didon in Les Troyens at 16 - also not a misprint), Alice Verlet (Philine at 20), Medea Mei-Figner (Azucena at 16), Tito Schipa (Alfredo at 19), Lucrezia Bori (Micaela at 20), Antonio Pini-Corsi (Dandini at 19), Emilia Corsi (Micaela at 16), Giuseppina Huguet (Lakmé at 17), Guerrina Fabbri (Orsini and La Cieca at 19).

At this rate Mattia Battistini almost seems like a slacker for having started (as the king in La favorita) at 22. Then as now, male voices, especially lower ones or high-volume ones, may have taken longer to mature - but “longer” didn’t mean what it means today. The first-ever Canio in Pagliacci was 21 at the time; he had already sung Lohengrin and went on to every Wagner role from Erik to Parsifal. Friedrich Schorr sang his first professional Walküre Wotan at 23, Hans Hotter sang his at 22. Something different was going on.

Before we get to that, though - how did these folks actually sound at such tender ages? Can the human vocal apparatus really achieve the necessary physical development so soon after its disruption by puberty? We don’t have many examples to judge by, since recording contracts usually came a few years after debuts. But we do have a few, eight of whom are sampled here in recordings made when they were 14 to 19 years old.

Umberto Pini-Corsi, the tenor son of the baritone named above, is our youngest. He was born in Bologna on Dec. 25 1889, started out as a boy soprano in performances with his parents, and made his only recordings in 1904 (exact date unknown but likely before Christmas). The poor lad died of tuberculosis at just 21, after only a handful of concert and operatic appearances. It would have been fascinating to hear the mature work of a teenager who could sing “Ecco ridente in cielo” like this.

The birthdate of Elvira de Hidalgo, Maria Callas’s teacher, is uncertain; different reference works give 1888, 1891, and 1892. Most favor 1891, and critics at the time of her 1907 debut (San Carlo, Naples, in Il barbiere di Siviglia) understood her to be sixteen. Her first discs were cut in the same year, including the cavatina of Rosina, which would remain her calling-card role for a quarter century.

Talley, Ed. Steichen photo portrait, 1926

Marion Talley made a sensation in her native Kansas City at 15 as Philine in Mignon. The following year (1923) she was sent to New York for study with Frank La Forge, who proposed her for a Met debut and arranged for test recordings at the Victor studios. She had to wait until she was 19 for both the debut (as Gilda) and the Victor contract, but one of the earlier tests survived.

Graciela Pareto (“Graziella” in Italy) was 16 when she sang her first Micaela, and 18 when she made the first of her many records. Jussi Björling at the same age was still awaiting his stage debut (Don Ottavio and Arnold in Guillaume Tell would both be under his belt before he turned 20), but was already a popular presence in the new medium of radio.

Lucia Crestani sang her first Aida in Turin a month before turning 18 and went on to appear in the role 528 times; at 19 she reached La Scala as Catalani’s Loreley and made her few and rare records. Isabella de Frate sang Lucia at 16 and three years later recorded a whole series of demanding high-soprano scenes. A couple of years after that, also at 19 and fresh off her operetta debut in the previous season, Kirsten Flagstad cut her first discs in Oslo.

Flagstad in “Les cloches de Corneville,” 1914

So what do we hear in all this? Signs of youth, for sure. Pini-Corsi’s tenor is a little thin yet. De Hidalgo’s chest voice, though firm and secure, is distinctly less powerful than it soon became. There are a few moments of equivocal tuning scattered among the samples. Talley’s high-register trill is embryonic (it would be first-rate three years later). Björling has his unforgettable timbre but not yet his rapier thrust and inexorable follow-through. In other words, the kids were working things out.

But we also hear that a fully functional vocal structure has already been built. Every one supports every note, and has a sound worth supporting on every needed pitch. All are able to connect a legato line. Nobody is strangling, reaching, pushing, or out of their depth. They may not yet project riveting dramatic command, but they all sound confident in musical expression. They know their way around the voices they have. They’re green, but they’re ready for the further learning that comes from real-world experience on stage. And their twenties still lie ahead of them.

Of course, some of these singers had advantages not easily duplicated. Pini-Corsi’s operatic family has been mentioned already. Björling’s dad had been an apprentice tenor in the Metropolitan Opera School back in 1906, sharing the stage at least once with Caruso, and he trained his sons as a child trio that toured for years. Flagstad’s mom was the head coach at the national opera house. Pareto and De Frate were both daughters of well-known sopranos.

Such environments may account for most of the mid-teen prodigies, and one thing they suggest is that what happens before puberty may have a big impact on what is possible after it (and how fast). But what about the many hundreds of others who were in full career in their early twenties? Canio and Wotan at 21 or 22 seem wildly out of reach today. How did they do it?

De Hidalgo in Rosina’s lesson scene - 1912 drawing by Paul Charles Delaroche

Well, first: no college. Formal education other than their vocal studies ended for most singers at around 16 or earlier - much earlier if they were born into the working class. This doesn’t mean they went into adulthood as ignoramuses; those so inclined (and we know that many were) read widely, and singers were supposed to learn enough history and literature to interpret with authority the characters drawn from them. But it does mean that the years leading to their debuts were not devoted to a wide range of liberal arts and sciences, to a sampling of multiple possible career paths, to a university-style microcosm of the world’s hierarchy and diversity. They were devoted to getting as good as possible at singing.

They may have done so as conservatory students, or while still living with parents, or while already in the world of work (more than a few rose from coal mines or the factory floor through amateur choral societies to the opera stage). Some started with serious instrumental study, adding singing later when it became clear that a voice had unusual promise. The paths were diverse in that sense. Where they don’t seem to have been diverse is in the concentration of daily effort, and the nature of that effort, once the path of singing had been chosen.

Some of this may be irrecoverable in 21st-century life, but it’s worth thinking about. We understand what the period of prime physical capacity is for a gymnast or a tennis player, and we train youngsters with professional potential accordingly. Opera singing in its heyday was a far higher cultural priority than either of those, and now it is a far lower one, so there is less likely to be societal support for the divergence from “normal childhood” that we take for granted in top-level sport. And for that matter, the very concept of “normal childhood” is relatively new; it is based on keeping all options open up to university time at least, whereas through most of history a good portion of what we call “childhood” was already centered on what would become the child’s lifelong occupation.

These are bigger questions than the opera community can address. What is in our control is the attitude towards training once singing has been defined as the goal, whenever that happens. To put it in a few blunt words: the idea that singers can attain age-appropriate function on the basis of a weekly lesson amidst a busy undergraduate curriculum is insanity. It isn’t working even at our best schools; only a tiny handful of the most gifted and self-guided reach professional entry-level by the time they finish at 22. And that’s with an entry-level standard that is, in most ways, lower than would have been acceptable even fifty years ago. The great majority spend several more years in postgraduate programs and beyond, doing what is in effect remedial work - years they might have spent bringing opera to audiences and attaining their artistic maturity with an ample span left ahead to exercise it in top form. Maybe time for a re-think?

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: I see that the thoughtful YouTuber who runs the “Dead Tenors Society” channel has posted the same Pini-Corsi recording, and finds himself unable to believe that a 14-year-old could have sung it. He hypothesizes that the 1889 birthdate must be “a long forgotten typographical error that has been perpetuated over the decades.” But I assure him and our readers that the date has been scrupulously confirmed in municipal records by the tireless Italian researcher Francesco Sergi (see The Record Collector Vol. 48 p. 299). The artist’s age was also known and mentioned during his lifetime, for instance in the venerable French journal Le ménestrel, which described him in 1910 (vol. 76 p. 348) as “à peine âgé de vingt ans” (barely twenty, an age he would have reached in the final week of 1909).