by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran Charles a VAI (stands for Video Artists International)
disc I’d got as a closeout from Daedalus Books: Montserrat Caballé in two
performances from the Teatro Real in Madrid, one in 1971 and one in 1979. The
1971 show was a concert performance of Act I of Bellini’s Norma (though Norma is in just two acts and therefore Act I consists of more than half the
opera!) and the 1979 one a recital of Caballé and pianist Miguel Zanetti in
songs and opera excerpts by Handel, Vivaldi (who usually isn’t thought of today
as a vocal composer, though he wrote quite a few operas and some of them have been revived lately — it was during the era that
composers churned out opera after opera by recycling their own music, either
from earlier operas or instrumental pieces, which was why, when one Vivaldi
opera had its Los Angeles premiere, the L. A. Times critic warned audiences that two of the arias would
be joltingly familiar because they were based on themes Vivaldi also used in The
Four Seasons) and Granados. Charles noted
that in 1971 dictator Francisco Franco was still the absolute ruler of Spain,
and therefore suggested that Norma
was a “safer” project for the Teatro Real in Madrid to perform than, say, Tosca. Also, Spanish TV was still in black-and-white in
1971, and between the rather murky lighting of the Teatro Real, the black dress
Caballé was wearing as Norma and the black suits of the three male participants
— bland tenor Robierto Merolla as Pollione, up-and-coming bass James Morris as
Oroveso and an unidentified singer as Pollione’s servant and sidekick, Flavio —
the singers tended to get lost among the orchestra members and the overall
murk. The one who didn’t was the Adalgisa, Margreta Elkins (that odd spelling
of her first name is correct),
who was wearing a white gown and stood about a head taller than both Caballé
and Merolla in their big trio at the end of the act. Norma is an extraordinary opera by the composer I consider
by far the best of the three most commonly associated with the bel
canto style; compared to Rossini and
Donizetti, Bellini seems to have been the most dramatically and musically sophisticated — even Wagner admitted that
he learned from Bellini (most notably ideas on how to use the brass
instruments) and he carefully left Bellini out of his attacks on Italian
composers, just as he carefully left Jacques Fromental Hálevy, who wrote La
Juive (an attack on anti-Semitism and an
opera Wagner loved despite his own anti-Semitic prejudices), out of his attacks
on Jewish composers.
Its plot, relatively simple, derives from a French poetic
drama by the now otherwise forgotten Alexandre Soumet, which in turn derives
from the Medea myth: Norma is the high priestess of the moon in a Druidic
religious cult during the times that the Romans were trying to conquer the
British isles. However, despite her position of power with the Romans’
adversaries and her vow of
chastity, she’s not only fallen in love with the Roman proconsul Pollione,
she’s born him two children — even though the job includes having to make at
least one big public appearance every month when the moon is in its crescent
phase, and one would think people would notice if a pregnant woman were doing this. (Then again,
maybe one of the justifications for casting zaftig sopranos like Caballé or Joan Sutherland in this
role was to make it believable that Norma was a woman so large you wouldn’t notice if she were pregnant.) But Pollione has not only
decided to dump Norma, he’s set his sights on her assistant priestess,
Adalgisa, and wants her to break her
vows and run away with him to Rome. The act we saw in this production starts
with Norma’s father Oroveso assembling the Druids and demanding that they rebel
against the Romans. Then we get Pollione’s aria about a dream he had in which
he and Adalgisa were standing together on the steps of the Temple of Venus back
in Rome, and his concern that Norma will somehow figure out what’s going on and
queer the deal. At that point
Norma enters and leads the Druids in the ritual prayer to the moon, “Casta
diva” — one of Bellini’s (or anyone else’s) most ravishingly beautiful arias —
which is also her plea to the Druids to keep the peace and not rebel. When the
service is done (though Norma is still standing there in front of everybody)
she sings a flashy cabaletta, “Ah! Bello a me ritorna,” in which she says she
hopes Pollione will soon return to her. (Remember that this is intended to be
an aside because the relationship between Norma and Pollione is supposed to be
a big secret.) Then Adalgisa comes in to see Norma privately, and the two sing
a lovely duet in which Norma says that she won’t hold Adalgisa to her vows but
will set her free to join her beloved. Of course, Norma doesn’t yet know that
her boyfriend and Adalgisa’s are one and the same — and when Adalgisa lets her
in on the secret of just who the guy she has the hots for is, Norma is furious.
Pollione enters and the three of them sing an angry, seething trio that ends
Act I.
In Act II (not included here) Norma decides to avenge herself against Pollione by murdering
the two children they had together, and in Soumet’s play she actually does so —
but Bellini’s librettist, Felice Romani, had a better idea; Norma prepares to kill her kids but can’t go through with the deed.
Instead she appears at the next Druid version of a general assembly, announces
that she’s dropping her opposition to the Druids who want to rebel against the
Romans, condemns both Pollione and Adalgisa, then has a turn of heart,
announces that she is the traitor
who betrayed her people for the love of the Roman general, and commits suicide
by hurling herself off a convenient cliff, leaving the kids in the hands of her
father Oroveso (as Anna Russell might have said, “Ya remember Oroveso?”) to raise. The Act I presented here is actually
pretty dull; Caballé is in good form vocally and Elkins (a second-tier mezzo
from La Scala’s 1950’s glory days who had previously sung with Maria Callas) is
also good (their duet is radiant), but the guys aren’t all that interesting and
conductor Enrique Garcia Asensio rather plods through the score, missing almost
all the obvious opportunities for drama and intensity. Maybe it was because he
was conducting it in concert — and the singers weren’t helping maintain the
mood much by milking the audience applause after every aria and ensemble for
all it was worth — but this Act I of Norma was surprisingly dull, and for that I tend to blame
Garcia Asensio more than the singers or Bellini. (It was also amusing that the
performance was filmed in Madrid but all the post-production work was done at
studios in Barcelona.)
The recital presented on the rest of the disc was marked
as a bonus item, but it was consistently more interesting than Norma, partly because Caballé seemed to have matured as an
artist in the intervening eight years (it also helped that in between 1971 and
1979, Franco had fallen and, probably purely coincidentally, Spanish TV had
adopted color) and partly because her accompanist, pianist Miguel Zanetti,
seemed like a much more interesting musician than Garcia Asensio, coloring and
shaping the music in ways the conductor had been unwilling or unable to do with
his orchestra (“RTVE,” the initials of the network that had broadcast the show)
in Norma. The repertoire wasn’t
exactly your run-of-the-mill vocal recital program, either; it began with three
selections by Handel — two from his Italian operas (the little-known “An, no
son io che parlo” from Ezio and
the well-known “Care Selve” from Atalanta — misspelled “Atlanta” on the on-screen credit!) and one, “O, had I
Jubal’s lyre,” from the oratorio Joshua — which I found amusing because Caballé’s English diction, though no
great shakes (and in an aria featuring lots of vocal ornamentation that tends
to make the text indecipherable in any language), was at least better than Joan Sutherland’s even though
Sutherland, unlike Caballé, came from an English-speaking country. Then she did
five selections by Vivaldi, one a separate song (“Vieni, vieni, o mio diletto”)
and the others excerpts from his
operas, and though the historically-informed performance fascists would
probably pick her to pieces, Caballé’s singing here was spirited and lively.
After a bit of Cherubini’s opera Demofonte (ironically Cherubini’s only opera even tangentially in the standard
repertory, Medée, was written by
an Italian composer living in France and was therefore in French, though
virtually all modern performances are in an Italian-language adaptation by
Franz Lachner, a German, who replaced the original’s spoken dialogue with sung
recitatives) Caballé did three songs by Granados, “Cançi d’amor,” “L’oeil
profeta” and “Elegia eterna.” I joked that we were finally hearing Caballé sing in her native language, Spanish
— and Charles pointed out to me that the “ç” with a tail isn’t used in standard
Spanish and therefore that song was either in Portuguese or a regional dialect
of Spanish like Catalán or Galician. (I remember encountering a video in
Catalán about a community doing their own water project — and the title spelled
the word “agua” with an “i,” “aigua.”) Caballé seemed more at home in the music
of Granados than she had in the Baroque arias of Handel and Vivaldi or the
classical-era Cherubini selection, and she did her most spirited singing of the
night in her two encores: “Carceleras” from Roberto Chapí’s Las Hijas
del Zebedeo and “Me llaman la primorosa”
from a version of The Barber of Seville by Gerónimo Giménez and Manuel Nieto. It’s interesting that there’s a zarzuela version of this story to set alongside the
full-length operas by Paisiello and Rossini, and even more interesting that in
these lighter zarzuela arias both
Caballé and Zanetti seemed to be letting their hair down and really having fun
with the music. Despite VAI’s decision to give us English subtitles only for Norma
and not for the songs, this was an interesting disc and the song recital was
especially commendable.
