the Dearth of Divas

NYT
October 22, 2006
A Lamentation on the Dearth of Divas
By ANTHONY TOMMASINI

IN 1995, when Matthew Broderick was starring on Broadway in a popular revival of the Frank Loesser musical “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,” I asked him a rather naïve question during an interview.

Once the producers had decided to revive this show, I wondered, when did they approach him to take on the daunting lead role, J. Pierrepont Finch, a blithely self-assured corporate climber?

“They came to me first,” Mr. Broderick said, adding, “You don’t decide to put on ‘How to Succeed’ and then look for a Finch.”

His words apply just as well to reviving staples of the operatic repertory. Ideally, a company does not decide to put on a major production of, say, “Tosca,” “La Traviata” or “Aida” and then search for a soprano to sing the touchstone title role. So did Peter Gelb, the new general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, get things backward when planning the company’s new production of Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly”? To some opera fans, it looks that way.

Determined to revitalize the stodgy artistic profile of the Met and reach out to new audiences, Mr. Gelb boldly inaugurated his tenure last month with an arrestingly beautiful and highly stylized production of “Madama Butterfly” directed by the Academy Award-winning film director Anthony Minghella. To create more buzz, Mr. Gelb invited film-star associates of his and Mr. Minghella’s acquaintance to attend. And to counter the elitist trappings of a Met opening night, he simulcast the performance live before thousands of curious viewers in Lincoln Center Plaza and Times Square.

Mr. Gelb did everything right except for one thing: secure the services of a world-class soprano who could potentially take her place in the pantheon of greats who have sung this role at the Met — from Geraldine Farrar, who portrayed Cio-Cio-San (known as Madame Butterfly) at the 1907 Met premiere of the work, through Licia Albanese, Renata Tebaldi, Victoria de los Angeles and Leontyne Price.

To be fair, the Chilean soprano Cristina Gallardo-Domâs gave a courageous performance as Butterfly that night. Though her singing was sometimes patchy, pale and shaky on climactic top notes, she made up in intensity and vulnerability what she lacked in vocal allure.

Still, there may be an obvious reason that general managers like Mr. Gelb present staples like “Madama Butterfly” as directorial adventures and play down expectations of sublime vocalism. It has to do with the dearth of singers today who can truly claim to carry on the illustrious vocal tradition in this crucial core role of the Italian repertory.

Who is the great Cio-Cio-San of today, the soprano Mr. Gelb should have hired? No one I can think of. Mr. Gelb and like-minded general managers elsewhere may be striving to refashion opera as an exciting form of musical drama, a most worthy goal. Still, when it comes to staples of the Italian repertory, their hands are forced to a large degree by the lack of singers in the grand old style.

Consider the heritage of sopranos, to focus on one voice type. In the period before and, for a time, after World War II, sopranos in Europe with marvelous vocal talent were swept into the system and prepared, essentially, to cultivate a dozen or so roles that formed the foundation of the repertory.

There is a 1949 recording of the 27-year-old Tebaldi singing, in Italian, the “Jewel Song” from Gounod’s “Faust,” a French work. She sings with agile coloratura technique and bright, youthful tone. She might have continued in this lighter vocal vein. But no, by then she had already been steered to the lirico spinto repertory: roles that demand velvety legato phrasing as well as vocal heft and throbbing intensity, like Puccini’s Mimi, Tosca, Butterfly, Manon Lescaut and Liu, and Verdi’s Leonoras (in “Il Trovatore” and “La Forza del Destino”).

For lirico spinto sopranos who also had solid coloratura technique, there was Verdi’s Violetta. For those who had dark colorings and ample power, there was Verdi’s Aida. Ms. Tebaldi sang all these roles, and thank goodness for opera that she was pushed in this direction.

But things have changed. Though there is no lack of wonderful vocal talent today, young voices are not being nurtured for this particular repertory as they once were. Instead, fledgling singers have the option of forging a distinctive artistic persona in the much broader repertory that has been embraced by companies everywhere.

Take Renée Fleming. If she had come along during the Tebaldi era, she would probably have been pressured by teachers to build up her sound and steered by impresarios into the lirico spinto repertory. Her new Decca recording, “Homage: The Age of the Diva,” offers a hint of what might have been, with Ms. Fleming’s intimate and emotional account of the emblematic aria “Vissi d’arte” from “Tosca.”

But from the start, Ms. Fleming had wide-ranging musical interests and keen dramatic instincts. As she has often explained, she wanted no part of being compared endlessly to immortal divas in roles like Mimi and Butterfly, not when she could sing Mozart roles with such distinctive elegance or bring a lighter vocal touch and rich expressivity to Strauss roles like Arabella and the Marschallin. Dvorak’s Rusalka, a role in Czech, has become a calling card for her. Later this season at the Met she will sing a Russian role, Tatyana in Tchaikovsky’s “Yevgeny Onegin.” And then there are the roles she has created in new works, like Blanche in André Previn’s “Streetcar Named Desire.”

While sticking to her convictions, Ms. Fleming has gotten the Met to mount premiere productions of rarities like Bellini’s “Pirata,” Handel’s “Rodelinda” and the 1955 American opera “Susannah” by Carlisle Floyd for her. In the 2009-10 season, the imaginative stage director Mary Zimmerman is to direct another Met first for Ms. Fleming, Rossini’s “Armida,” in which a fearsome sorceress dispatches volleys of blazing coloratura.

So why should Ms. Fleming portray, say, Tosca, only to have many opera buffs, bloggers and critics carp that she is no Tebaldi? Look what happened when she took on Violetta at the Met in 2003. She gave a deeply personal and vocally elegant portrayal and enjoyed, over all, a fine success. Still, as predicted, a part of the opera world criticized her for daring to sing the role at all.

These days, it has often been said, most opera companies find it easier to cast works by Mozart, Rossini, Strauss, Janacek, Britten and other composers whose music demands of singers a literate feeling for text, solid musicianship and sophisticated dramatic instincts; works that rely less on the plush vocal richness essential to the core Puccini and Verdi repertory. Even Wagner is a little easier to cast today than, say, Verdi’s “Trovatore.”

A singer must have ample power, incisive attack and uncommon stamina to be a great Wagnerian. But unlike the Italian spinto tradition, the Wagner tradition has invited a wide range of vocal approaches and colorings. Both Birgit Nilsson, with her cool, gleaming, focused sound, and Nilsson’s contemporary Astrid Varnay, with her warm, dusky, vulnerable voice, were ideal as Isolde and Brünnhilde.

Yet in this Wagner wing of the repertory, too, some potentially legendary artists have been shying away from major roles in recent years, choosing instead to explore the new repertory options available to them. Deborah Voigt, for one, is a splendid interpreter of Wagner’s Sieglinde, Elisabeth and Elsa. To judge from a live recording of “Tristan und Isolde” at the Vienna State Opera in 2003 (a performance I attended), she might have the makings of a historic Isolde if she were to commit herself to the role. Then there is Brünnhilde in the “Ring” operas, a role Ms. Voigt would seem born to. She signed on to new productions of two of the works in the cycle, “Siegfried” and “Götterdämmerung,” for 2008 at the Vienna State Opera, and was also ready to sing the “Ring” at the Met. But then she withdrew.

Why? In an interview last year Ms. Voigt told me that, for one thing, she was still adjusting physically and vocally to her much slimmer body after highly publicized gastric bypass surgery. Beyond that, she asked, why take on Brünnhilde just to face the inevitable comparisons to the greats of the past? (As a gesture to the Vienna State Opera, she has now agreed to sing just in “Siegfried” in that 2008 production.)

From the start, Ms. Voigt has seized opportunities to make personal artistic statements in enticing, lesser-known Strauss roles, like the Empress in “Die Frau Ohne Schatten” and the title role of “Die Liebe der Danae,” which I heard her sing enchantingly at the Salzburg Festival in 2002. This season the Met is mounting a true rarity for her: Strauss’s “Ägyptische Helena.” And she has just begun a run at the Lyric Opera of Chicago in a new Francesca Zambello production of Strauss’s “Salome,” a role she always had the voice for but, before her weight loss, not the body.

The point is, even if elements of the vocal heritage have declined, on balance the field of opera is better off with the much broader repertory that is currently available, not to mention the growing curiosity among audiences and companies for new operas. But there is a trade-off. Nurturing a vocally luminous Butterfly, Tosca and Leonora takes careful work within a narrowly focused tradition.

It takes something extra to produce a true Cio-Cio-San. Among all the Puccini roles, this may be the hardest to cast. To convey the adolescent innocence of this fatally trusting geisha, Puccini composed gently lyrical, Asian-tinged melodic lines that should be sung with clear-toned beauty. Yet the role also calls for viscerally emotional outbursts and, in the final scene, chilling intensity.

Farrar’s voice encompassed the whole range of emotions and colorings. Albanese also excelled as Butterfly, singing the role about 80 times at the Met. Tebaldi, de los Angeles and Ms. Price were short-lived Butterflys who performed the role fewer than 15 times each at the Met, though all three made classic recordings.

Mr. Gelb seems to understand that an opera company can no longer count on a new Tebaldi to take on the touchstone Italian repertory, nor a Mirella Freni, who has been called “the last prima donna” by commentators who see her as the last soprano with a direct connection to the old school. Still, there are many major artists before the public today who have forged unconventional career paths, like the thrilling Finnish soprano Karita Mattila, who has brought her gleaming voice and stunning dramatic presence to an incomprehensibly wide range of roles, from Strauss’s Salome to, of all things, Puccini’s coquettish Musetta. This season she returns to the Met in her mesmerizing portrayal of Janacek’s Jenufa. Mr. Gelb has announced plans for a new production of “Tosca” starring Ms. Mattila in the 2009-10 season. Though this is an exciting prospect, Ms. Mattila will not bring to the role a Tosca voice in the storied Italian tradition.

Again, I welcome the broader repertory and new commitment to presenting opera as an adventurous genre of musical drama, as in the Met’s new “Madama Butterfly.” Still, I count myself lucky to have heard during my adolescence and early 20’s some of the legendary practitioners of that great tradition when it was still going strong. When you heard Tebaldi as Mimi, Nilsson as Brünnhilde, Ms. Price as Aida or Joan Sutherland as Lucia di Lammermoor, who even noticed the production?