Carnegie Hall Afterthoughts, 2005

We continued to get feedback throughout the week. Guys, you are definitely doing something right, AND HOW! The young people who came (well young for me, anyhow, because they ranged from 20 to 40 and represent today's potential audience for opera) could not stop talking about it. They just thought you were terrific. They had no idea that opera could be so enjoyable. They all want to come to the next concert. Let's hope they do not tune into a TV opera done badly or go to an opera performed badly in the meantime, or we lose that younger audience which is so vital to the survival of opera. There is a certain elitism preached by some teachers or teaching institutes and even some theaters that opera is for the few. Sorry, opera and song are for everybody. The opera was for the masses in Mozart's day. Tunes made an indelible impression and the public came away from Marriage of Figaro or Don Giovanni, the forerunners of modern opera, whistling or humming the tunes. It was mass entertainment. Puccini was feted like a lion. Verdi was treated as a national treasure. Gigli drew more crowds than the Beetles. The public was lined up for six New York city blocks trying to get tickets for the Old Met production of Mefistofole with Chaliapin and Gigli. So what went wrong? Bad singing was not the whole cause. Singers of yesterday balanced their voices with their colleagues and reacted to the lines being sung just as you did at Carnegie Hall. Singers acted just as you did at Carnegie Hall. Even Melba, who was somewhat of a cold fish, could act on stage. John McCormack in an interview said, "She was so enticing as Mimi, that when I took her by the waist, she whispered to me, 'don't hold me so tightly, I am rather fragile, I'm not a young woman, you know.' I suddenly remembered she was 73 but she sang and acted like a young Mimi that I was quite carried away."

The problem with opera today is that the singers are not artists. Many do not understand the language they are singing. Many of them favor tone over diction and so they leave their audience totally in the dark. Many of them think the drama and acting are not important. Puccini would have sacked all who thought like that. Well I saw many of the stars of yesteryear including Kipniss, Schipa, Gigli, Tibbet, etc. and whether they were in opera or on the concert stage, they understood every word they sang and brought every word, nuanced and inflected with the right emotional shading to their audience. They were artists. They understood the drama of their art.

Some of you have had these two extracts before but most have not. Therefore to emphasise how important the drama is, I give you two samples from Gigli and Chaliapin:

Re: Chaliapin by Henry Pleasance The quotations are from Chaliapin's Book, "Man and Mask"

"I thought of singers I knew, with magnificent voices, so perfectly trained that at any moment they could sing piano or forte, but who nearly all sang notes to which the words were merely of secondary importance. In fact, so little stress was laid on the words that more often than not the audience could not make out a syllable of what they were supposed to be saying. Singers in this category sing in an agreeable manner, their voices never sound strained, and are produced effortlessly; but should they have to sing several times in an evening, no one song would sound very different from the other. Love or hate—there is really nothing to distinguish them! I don’t know what impression this makes on the average listener, but I do know that I am bored after the second song on the program."

From that time on, Chaliapin, then in his, early twenties, spent his free evenings in the theater rather than in the opera house. Actors rather than singers were his models, and he even thought for a time of becoming an actor. But not for long. "I was bound to opera by my very heart-strings," he recalled; "for my heart bore forever the ‘divine stigmata’ of music, as Pushkin expresses it."

He also spent much time in art museums and with painters. An older friend had discouraged his early enthusiasms for pictures that gave merely an admirable reproduction of an object. The camera, the friend had said, was a wearisome invention; it cannot make the forest path or the garden alley eloquent. It can only accurately represent them. And so Chaliapin studied the Russian moderns—Vroubel, Sierov, Vasnetsov and Riepin. And "now I understood that care must be taken not simply to copy . . . in order to make the maximum effect. The Logos, or Word, might be found in color, line, gesture, speech; and from this newfound knowledge I drew conclusions relevant to my own art as an opera singer?

With this feeling for line and color, for artful distortion, it was inevitable that Chaliapin would be a master of makeup. But he was also aware that makeup is only an auxiliary. Its chief value, he used to say, is that it hides the actor’s own features; and he gave more importance to what he called "psychological make-up." There was no achievement of which he was more proud than a performance he gave at a dress rehearsal of Boris Godunov in Paris in 1908. The costumes had not arrived, and he played the part without makeup and in street clothes.

"Perhaps I should never have realized how natural my words and monologue sounded," he tells us, "had I not heard, at the moment when I rose up, glancing fearfully toward a corner of the stage, to declaim:

‘What’s that? There’s something in the ingle-nook,
Something that stirs...

had I not heard, I say, a strange sound in the auditorium that disturbed me. I looked askance to see what was happening, and this is what I saw:

the spectators had risen to their feet, some of them were even standing on their seats, and all were gazing toward that corner of the stage toward which I myself was peering. . . - I was singing in Russian; my words were incomprehensible to them, but from the expression in my eyes, they were aware that I was afraid of something."

Gigli on his own acting and the acting of others from his own autobiography:

BH Note: Gigli, in certain roles, was a superb actor on stage. There were two Giglis. One the Gigli of the concert hall who stood stock still and acted with voice alone. The other, the Gigli of the operatic stage. His acting was so thoroughly convincing as Andrea Chenier, Des Grieux, Turiddu, Mario, etc., that it was hard to ever imagine anyone else in the role. He was never satisfied with his acting and so, here, he remains very modest. However the audience was more than satisfied with his acting. They were thrilled.

"When the Metropolitan season opened in November, 1922, I was twenty pounds lighter. My first appearance was in ‘Traviata’ with Lucrezia Bori, on the first night of the Brooklyn Academy season. On November 18th I took part in a gala performance of ‘Mefistofele’ at which Clemenceau (The French President) then on an official visit to the United States, was present.

The sensation of the evening was not Clemenceau, however; it was Chaliapin. Breaking the vow he had made never to set foot in New York again, the great Russian had returned to sing the role of the Devil, in which he had made his debut at the Metropolitan on November 20th, 1907, almost exactly fifteen years earlier. Those who had heard him both on that occasion and on this, declared that he had greatly deepened and broadened his conception of the role; I, who was hearing him for the first time, could certainly imagine no finer rendering of it.

To begin with, he looked the part. With his towering, lithe figure, his half-bared breast, and the cruel, terrifying expressions in which he cast his mobile features, the appearance he presented was quite unnervinghy diabolical. Diverging at many points from what I knew by now to be the traditional Met interpretation of the role, his own rendering of it seemed to me invariably truer and artistically more coherent. In the ‘Prologue in the Heavens’, for example, instead of emerging among the clouds, he entered from below, huge and menacing, shambling about like a great spider, his long black hair gathered into a sort of scalp—lock that gave his face the look of a Japanese devil-mask. And at the end, instead of descending hurriedly into the pit, he pawed feebly at the celestial rose-leaves that were searing his flesh, crumpled slowly to the ground, and lay sprawling and motionless. Faust had won.

His singing was as great as his acting. His voice was beautiful in texture, perfectly produced, thrilling in range and power; his vocalism was an astounding exhibition of breath control, tonal production and phrasing. The ovation that greeted him when the last curtain fell proved overwhelmingly that New Yorkers had forgiven him his past tantrums.

My own performance was rather submerged on this occasion. Although he amiably yielded me the place of honour in several curtain calls, Chaliapin could scarcely help stealing the show. But I felt such genuine admiration for him that I did not mind.

Chaliapin was a great Mefisto and a great Boris Godounov not only because he could sing - although that, of course, was the primary requirement - but also because he could act. Caruso was a great Canio, a great Rodolfo, a great Eleazar, a great John of Leyden for the same reason. Yet when all is said and done, opera is generally too implausible to be a realistic vehicle for acting. This is the anomalous situation in which every singer finds himself; this is the problem which every singer has got to work out for himself. How can Romeo die convincingly when, having taken poison, he must linger on and on, in a semi-recumbent position, singing as exquisitely as possible?

One can only compromise. The music is the all-important thing; for its sake one must try to act in spite of the absurdities. A good libretto helps. The rest is illusion. The audience must be hypnotized into accepting the make-believe.

For me the problem was more difficult than it can have been for either Chalapin or Caruso because, although fully aware of its implications, I lacked the talent which helped them to solve it. I was no actor.

I had begun my career by trying, gropingly, to act, and it was a failure. 1 was criticized for being wooden, and wooden no doubt I was. My acting had probably not progressed very far beyond the level of the burnt-cork-moustache Sunday afternoon entertainments which my brother Abramo used to devise in the parish hall in Recanati. Still, the problem was there, facing me; and gradually I evolved my own approach to it. Whenever a role was assigned to me, I accepted it as a reality - or tried to - blindlly and totally, no matter how improbable or inconsistent it might be. I tried to identify myself with it, to become, for the time being, the character I was supposed to impersonate; or if that was impossible, then at least his twin brother, or his dearest friend. I tried to imagine his reactions, to feel with his feelings. I would find myself talking to him, arguing with him. Feeling That was the keynote of my method, if it can be called a method. I tried to pour feeling into the role, to make it come alive through feeling. Not every opera responded to this treatment. ‘Gianni Schicchi’ never did, for instance, nor ‘Iris’. Some roles defeated me. Others, such as Andrea Chenier, or Puccini’s Des Grieux, required practically no effort whatsoever; these were generally (but not always) the roles I sang best.

Rehearsals, apart from helping me to learn positions on the stage so as not to fall over other people, were never of much use to me. I needed the footlights and the inspiration of the audience, and then I could trust to impulse and throw myself completely into the part. Of course I could and did think out certain fundamental aspects of a role beforehand - I have described in an earlier chapter how I did so in ‘Tosca’ ; but I could never foresee exactly how it would work out afterwards, and it never worked out the same way twice. Even when, in giving an encore, I had to sing the same aria over again after a few minutes, I always gave an entirely different version of it the second time - not deliberately, but simply because the first moment had passed and my feelings had now flowed into a different mould. This can scarcely be called acting; but whatever it was, it served my purpose. It enabled me to shed real tears on the stage, to feel real passion and real despair.(emphasis by BH)

When Gatti-Casazza asked me to take the part of Romeo in Gounod’s opera ‘Romeo et Juliette’, I did more in the way of preparation than study the music and go on a slimming cure. First of all, I went to the theatre to see Shakespeare’s play, on which of course the opera is based ; but although I enjoyed it, the requirements of opera are so different that the fact of having seen it did not really help me very much. I read books about the history of the time period, studied costumes of the period in the art galleries, and pondered over photographs of Verona. Above all, I tried to feel with Romeo’s heart. Only then did I consider myself ready to ask Maestro Rosati to come to the piano and start going over the score."