November 2002
November 2002
THE MAGIC OF MONTSERRAT
LIFE IS A CABALLÉ!
BY IRA SIFF (Click here to go directly to Lucy Arner's comments)
In 1965, the bel canto revival was in full swing, with the opera public hungry for rarities by Bellini, Donizetti and Rossini. The high priestess of the movement, Maria Callas, was no longer able to negotiate the vehicles that had won her great acclaim during the preceding decade, and Joan Sutherland, who had inherited her mantle, could not be everywhere at once. Enter Allen Sven Oxenburg, whose American Opera Society had brought Callas to New York in a concert version of Bellini's Il Pirata in 1959 (when she was feuding with Met general manager Rudolf Bing), and who had introduced Sutherland and Marilyn Horne in the same composer's Beatrice di Tenda, in February of 1961, catapulting Horne to international attention. Now, anticipation and curiosity ran high, as Horne prepared to step into the prima donna's spotlight for the first time in the title role of Lucrezia Borgia at Carnegie Hall -- until she was forced to cancel by a difficult pregnancy. Oxenburg was suddenly left with a sold-out house for an impossible-to-cast rarity, with only a few weeks to go. Sutherland and Leyla Gencer were both busy. Frantic calls to agents yielded a recommendation from Bernard Lefort: an unknown Spanish soprano he had represented would be perfect.
Those of us present on April 20, 1965, had no idea what to expect, and an atmosphere of disappointment pervaded Carnegie Hall that evening, due to the lack of a star attraction. Virtually all of Donizetti's heroines make their entrances with a recitative and aria; in Lucrezia's case it is the lyrical, presumably unshowy "Com'č bello." Horne's replacement, a statuesque young woman, entered to polite applause and began to sing. People sat up suddenly and leafed through their programs to check out exactly what that name was. At the end of the recitative, a scale ascending to high B-flat was voiced in an ethereal pianissimo the like of which no one had heard for years, if ever. At the end of the aria, crowned with another breathtaking pianissimo, pandemonium ensued. Montserrat Caballé had arrived.
With that performance, a pattern of contrasting lines was drawn that has defined Caballé's career and reputation ever since as an assortment of paradoxes. An overnight sensation, she was no beginner. And, while new doors sprang open -- RCA representatives scurried backstage with a recording contract, and the Met rushed in with an offer of a hastily arranged debut (Marguerite in Faust) before the destruction of the historic old house -- Caballé, at just a week past thirty-two, already had a history. Unbelievably, that history did not include any bel canto repertoire, and the accident of Lucrezia Borgia as her breakthrough opera resulted in a significant career change.
By the time Caballé stood onstage at that Carnegie Hall Lucrezia, she was a fully formed artist, a solid musician, a prodigious vocal technician and veteran of a number of career "almosts" that left her with a strong, sober sense of priorities and an awareness of her worth. What was new was the power to negotiate for what she wanted, along with the world's perception of this young singer, who had established herself as a Mozart/Strauss soprano in Europe, as the next bel canto superstar.
Looking back now, almost four decades later, it is easy to fall into one of the two Caballé camps -- the one that thinks of her as a capricious diva known as much for her cancellations as for her artistry, or the one that fervently sides with Caballé (the victim of countless health problems), citing her enormous contribution to opera, as well as a voice that excuses almost anything. One thing speaks for itself, and that is the soprano's amazing track record. She has given more than 4,000 public performances in opera, concert and recital. Her opera roles number ninety, and she is planning to add at least two more (Massenet's Marie-Magdeleine, Donizetti's Maria Padilla). If one includes symphonic music, oratorios and liturgical music, she can claim more than 130 roles, and her song repertoire exceeds 800 titles. She has made thirty-four complete-opera recordings in the studio, of as many roles, and there are at least fifty more pirated documents of thirty-seven works, thirty-two of which she never recorded commercially. In addition, the soprano has committed to disc countless aria, song and zarzuela recitals, popular and theater songs, and even a collaboration with the late rock star Freddie Mercury.
Naysayers might well point to all this quantity and question the consistency of the quality; Caballé is known also for her less-than-assiduous sense of preparation. Jokes abound concerning her lack of connection to text, or the lack of text altogether in some cases. Be that as it may, a random listening-and-watching orgy, an exercise requiring days spent with LPs, CDs and videos, argues favorably for the diva's legacy, which encompasses such diverse interpretations as a definitive Salome, a likewise definitive Lucrezia Borgia, sublime zarzuela arias recorded at about the same time as sublime Richard Strauss songs, a white-hot Tosca on video, and the famous 1974 Norma filmed live at Orange, captured during the mistral, the diva's costumes billowing in the wind and Caballé, a bel canto goddess, in transcendent vocal and interpretive form.
The seeds for the Caballé controversy were planted almost from the start. When she was supposed to be learning the role of Lucrezia, Oxenburg was dismayed to walk in and find his prima donna feverishly at work with a commandeered repetiteur, not on the Donizetti but on the Marschallin for her subsequent Glyndebourne debut. At Glyndebourne, the tables were turned; the necessity of learning Lucrezia was cited as the explanation for the soprano's lack of familiarity with the Marschallin. As Rodney Milnes, former editor of Opera magazine, tells it, "The first thing here, she turns up at Glyndebourne to sing Rosenkavalier and doesn't know it. And they go into an absolute panic, but she doesn't. She simply learns it in a couple of days and does it. It was absolutely lovely. I don't think she knew what the opera was about, but she sang it wonderfully!"
Thus, her legendary eleventh-hour learning skills -- and practices -- were quickly discovered by the mainstream opera world. Of course, these skills were painstakingly developed during her splendid musical education at the Conservatori del Liceu in her native Barcelona. Caballé credits her vocal longevity to her training there with Eugenia Kemmeny, an athlete who became a Wagnerian soprano. "The color of the instrument is something that is born with you," Caballé said in a recent telephone interview. "You cannot change that. It's a matter of technique, which I learned from my teachers when I was quite young and have been using all my career, even now in this new repertoire. It is the way of breathing, you know, to make the line follow the composition. The feeling must come through the sound, and you can only produce the sound when you have a technique that is more than singing -- it is like a singing gymnastic -- can we say that in English?
"When I wake up in the morning, I lie down on the floor and do more than half an hour of this breathing work, developing the abdominal musculature, the way you support the diaphragm up and down, so the diaphragm has not to work alone. The diaphragm is a very sensitive and thin thing. It is not a muscle, it is a membrana. The abdominals going down to the bottom of your body support, so the diaphragm is free, the lungs are expanded as much as possible. As with a car, when you push the gas, it has to be all in one line, so the car doesn't go bump, bump, bump. One way to keep the diaphragm relaxed is to have a basis at the bottom. It's like a strong building; you need a basis at the bottom, so it will go up! What I think happens many times today, at least in Europe, is that they want to do a career very quick. You need a basis of technique, but also of music -- not only harmonies and composition, but everything that goes with it. Like a pianist, like a conductor."
Following her conservatory years, Caballé put in grueling apprentice years at the opera houses in Basel and Bremen. In Bremen, she hit bottom emotionally. As she described it in a 1981 documentary shown on PBS, La Caballé, "I felt really depressed. I'd signed a contract, but it all became a routine -- even when playing Tatyana in Eugene Onegin, a beautiful role. Like her, I wanted to leave. After five years, I'd had no success. It was a job like any other. With my knowledge of German and Italian, I could start a new career in Barcelona [as an interpreter]. So I decided to leave when the season ended." She discussed it with her brother Carlos, her most passionate fan. "Carlos was eighteen or nineteen at the time. Furious, he said I was crazy, to give up now would be to surrender before the battle had begun. We talked until 5 a.m. Then he said, 'I don't know how I'll do it [get bookings]. If I don't succeed, you can stay in Barcelona.'"
This was April, 1962. After a successful recital tour of Central America in 1963, she met and married (in 1964) tenor Bernabé Martí. Soon she made her opera debut in Mexico City as Manon, opposite Giuseppe di Stefano, who routinely skipped rehearsals. Caballé phoned the tenor at his hotel and begged him to help her through this important debut at the Palacio de las Bellas Artes. To the astonishment of the management, he turned up at the next rehearsal. Caballé's success was so great that di Stefano alerted Columbia Artists Management, who obtained contracts for her for Andrea Chénier in Philadelphia, opposite Franco Corelli, and La Traviata at Dallas Civic Opera, both for 1965. "When we got home, I was feeling pleased with myself, and suddenly Carlos asked me, 'Do you still want to give up your career, or are you continuing?' I had forgotten our conversation!" The diva dissolves into gales of laughter.
After that star-making Lucrezia Borgia in New York, Caballé began to make her debuts at the various great opera houses of the world, and she subsequently introduced her unique approach to the recital. Certain characteristics became evident. As early reviews of her Met performances attest, she possessed a slender, silver voice of great beauty but was an extremely reserved actress. She displayed far more personality in recital than temperament in opera. There have been exceptional evenings -- fiery Toscas and Normas, for instance. But this diva soon made it clear that the voice was all-important, communicating through the instrument paramount. It also became clear that she was truly a diva of the old school, possessing a strong sense of capriciousness and humor -- as well as charm that allowed her to get away with just about anything.
Says Rodney Milnes, a tremendous, although circumspect, Caballé admirer, "My terrible confession is that if I want to listen to Norma or Puritani, I listen to her, not to Callas. It's the sound, the phrasing, the incredible musicianship. I do think Bellini speaks through notes, not words, and so in that sort of music she's unbeatable, really. And there's something about the stage personality that I love. She can be so funny. I remember she did a Traviata here [in London] in that Visconti production, and of course she wasn't going to wear those boring black-and-white costumes. She brought her own and did Act I in black and Acts II and III in lavender, I think, a huge lavender crinoline. And she brought her own parasol, because that's how she did Traviata. At the first curtain call, she came out with her glass of champagne, there was a big ovation, and she very, very slowly poured the champagne over her bosom, which then glistened in a voluptuous fashion. The grin on her face! The audience just went berserk. Now, I know that hasn't got a huge amount to do with Traviata, but as an event.... Here's a girl with a smashing sense of humor, and wickedness!"
John Cox, who directed the diva's London stage outing in Il Viaggio a Reims in 1992, found the diva to be a delight, if a bit of a handful. "What I liked was that she was a megastar who entered the ensemble process very well. I was astonished when she turned up to get rehearsal notes with everyone. The voice was more than adequate to the role at that time. [Mme. Cortese is] a character role of great authority, the landlady of the inn, the queen bee, as it were. The apple is a great symbol of health, and as this was a spa hotel, we featured the apple in the set design. In the last act I had to devise an entrance for her. I thought it might be fun if she gave an apple a day to each of the singers. So, she came down the stairs, gave one to each singer, very nice, and suddenly said, 'And one for the maestro!' and tossed. Well, Montsy's aim wasn't very good, so she missed Carlo Rizzi and managed to strike the only pregnant second violinist in England. I was summoned to the executive office and presented with a letter from the musicians' union demanding that I guarantee it would never happen again."
In recital, Caballé's personal charm and humor found an appropriate platform, delighting most, but offending a few. Milnes recalls one recital during which the diva sang a Swiss folk song, "G'Schätzli." "It was a most wonderful send-up of Schwarzkopf. She said, 'I'm going to do this as a tribute to a very great singer,' and then absolutely slaughtered Schwarzkopf's way of singing." This stunt so disturbed the critic John Steane that he stopped attending Caballé's performances, writing, "On that night, also as an encore, she sang 'O mio babbino caro' to perfection, as never heard before or since, so the loss is mine." Met archives director Robert Tuggle, with regret, also stopped attending the soprano's recitals. "One of the great pleasures of living in New York, from when I came here in '57 to the early '70s, was hearing really wonderful singers in recital. And I associate her with sort of the breakdown of this. She was wonderful in recital. The personality was warm and outgoing, but there would always come a moment at the end of the program when it became little more than a wrestling match, where everybody in the audience was encouraged, if they knew the name of an aria, to scream it out loud. She would laugh, and the audience would laugh, and, no, they didn't want 'Casta Diva,' they wanted God knows what. It made the Three Tenors seem dignified!"
For others, including this writer, Caballé's recitals remained something to treasure into the mid-'80s. Of course there were moments of high-camp absurdity -- I will never forget the soprano sight-reading castanet parts from a music stand, as she made her way rather haltingly through Nin's Five Popular Andalusian Songs, singing and clicking away. With her hands full, one wondered how she would negotiate the inevitable page turn, something I never discovered, as I tend to laugh with my eyes closed. But there were also evenings filled with sublime vocalism: Spanish songs alternately gutsy ("El vito") and exquisitely delicate ("Del cabello mas sutil"), Baroque arias, zarzuelas, bel canto arias and songs, and the German lieder in which she excelled.
Caballé's heart-stopping rendition of Schubert's "Du bist die Ruh," justly famous, came up in conversation with Met assistant conductor Lucy Arner, who worked with the soprano at the Liceu between 1987 and '91. "A musicologist could sit and write a ten-page critique of what's wrong with it, and it simply doesn't matter at all. If you need to explain Montserrat Caballé to somebody, you play a tape of that rendition. Then you play five other totally correct, wonderful, expressive recordings that don't have a tenth of what it has. The weight of the silences throughout the song, the moments in which the rests are greater than the roar of anybody -- that silence and those pianissimos have a weight and a tension and a sound in and of themselves. It's an art-defining moment." One can only agree. And if one looks at the page and sees that the ascending lines are marked with a crescendo where Caballé floats a pianissimo, one can only conclude that the page is wrong.
Caballé avoids the typical older-diva condemnation of younger singers, but on the topic of "musical correctness" she is passionate. "Musically correct doesn't mean to sing like in the schoolroom," she tells me. "Remember, 90 percent of composers of opera, they say approximately this metronome [marking], not it has to be like this. It also has to depend on the feeling you create, the feeling you live during your singing. Forget where you are, and try to serve the creation the composer set down. Go inside, let the music come through, to your heart, to your veins, the blood flowing through your veins. Embrace! This is what I feel onstage, and this is what the audience has come to feel. It is beyond the human, it goes in another dimension. And when things don't go in the other dimension, it's only someone singing on a stage."
Caballé's idiosyncratic and spontaneous approach to music-making separates her from the musically correct artists in abundance today. Arner feels that this approach must be understood and appreciated, citing the case of Leonardo Balada's Cristóbal Colón, an opera commissioned by the Liceu for the 500th anniversary of the discovery of America. "Montserrat was Queen Isabella, with José Carreras in the title role. There was a second cast with Adelaide Negri as Isabella. Negri is one of those singers who can sing anything, and learn it in two days -- really amazing. It was a very expensive production of this piece, the quality of which was somewhat questionable. We rehearsed it with Negri, and at a certain point Montserrat came. Nobody on the music staff really loved the piece. Miss Negri came very well prepared and sang the piece perfectly.
"In comes Montserrat, and she starts doing her thing. After a few days we start to think, are we just getting used to this piece, or is it maybe not so bad? As Isabella, she had some of the most appealing music, and she would take great liberties, great rubatos with it. Later, we started rehearsing for the two additional performances which involved Negri. All the sour faces on the music staff returned. On looking closely, we realized that Miss Negri continued to sing the role with great accuracy, while Montserrat had semi-adjusted the recomposition of it in a way that made it sound much better, tailored perfectly to her brand of musical and vocal expression, a sort of contemporary zarzuela! I remember thinking to myself, there's a lesson to be learned here, perhaps a lesson that composers could learn from, in writing for singers."
At the basis of such musical freedom, there must be a solid musicality, as Richard Bonynge will attest: "I've never seen anyone that fast. She can sight-read to die, she's a very great musician."
"Where are the voices like that today?" asks Bonynge's wife, Joan Sutherland. "They seem to have no grasp of breath control. Some of my generation didn't do that well but had the basics and got by. But she had a great breath support."
Caballé also had the benefit of a keen musical curiosity. Eve Queler and the Opera Orchestra of New York showcased the diva in several rarities, including Donizetti's Gemma di Vergy and Parisina and Verdi's Aroldo. "Caballé was a revelation for me, in the way she thought out her phrases and her embellishments," says Queler. "I learned so much from her. I loved to look at her when she was singing. She had the most transported look on her face. At the top of her career, she was willing to learn repertoire just for me. Almost no other artist would do that at that stage."
Caballé's generosity, like her humor and her cancellations, is legendary. For instance, the break she got early on from di Stefano was repaid in 1975, when he was financially in need and she was at the top of her fame. Caballé dropped everything to record a duet album with him and cancelled another engagement in order to appear with him in Tokyo as Tosca, replacing Maria Callas and saving the performances. Others have benefited in a more private way. One is the Met's Joan Dornemann.
"It was a blessing, the first day I walked into Barcelona and played an audition for Clarice Carson, for a Liů there," Dornemann recalls. "Carlos Caballé [by this time, in 1970, a major European agent] was listening to her, and he said, 'I'll take the two of you.' And it was the best thing that ever happened to me, because I learned how to hear. Having Montserrat next to me on the piano bench studying music, it's the best sound I have inside my head.
"Montserrat is the most extraordinary combination of things -- a formidable, absolutely relentless singer. She knows every muscle, every joint, every ligature in the body. She could do an operation, that woman! Her responsibilities as a wife, a mother, a daughter and a sister were all equally strong. Maybe this gave rise to some of the criticisms that eventually assailed her. She has a fabulous eleventh-hour ear. I think people perceive it as a lack of musical integrity, which it never was. It was a way of fitting everything into her life: 'If I learn my music at eleven o'clock in the bathroom with a pitch pipe with Joan, it's all right because I read my kids their bedtime story.' It's controversial, but is it any worse than saying to your kids, 'No, I can't read to you, I have to learn my music'?"
As busy as ever at sixty-nine, with recitals and a renewed opera career, Caballé recalled her return to the Liceu in January 2002, as Catherine of Aragon in Saint-Saëns's Henry VIII. "It was very emotional, my first opera there since La Fiamma [in 1989]. I will do Marie-Magdeleine of Massenet -- they propose to do it for me at the Liceu and Rome next season, and they are looking at Marie Victoire of Respighi, which will be a world premiere, and they are looking to do Maria Padilla, the original version, of Donizetti, not the [more florid] remake done around the world." At the time we spoke, she looked forward to singing Cléopâtre of Massenet in Rome in July 2002: "It's a wonderful opera, and I'm singing it with Montserrat Martí, my daughter. She is singing the part of Octavia, a married woman, and I am, you know, the not nice one." Again, gales of laughter. "We are rivals onstage! Both in love with Marc Antoine! We've done recitals together all around Europe, Asia, Russia, but now she has her own career, and [scheduling] is a little complicated. In Maria Padilla, we are going to sing at the Liceu, we are again rivali!"
IRA SIFF is is a New York-based voice and interpretation coach, stage director, and artistic director of La Gran Scena Opera Co., appearing at the Liceu in Barcelona this month.
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photo credits: © Gerald Norman Fitzgerald 2002 (Manhattan recital); © Johan Elbers 2002 (dispatching Cornell MacNeil); © Reg Wilson 2002 (Borgia), Opera News Archives (cover); © Beth Bergman 2002 ( I Vespri Siciliani ); Opera News Archives (Otello rehearsal, Norma recording); Ira Nowinski/San Francisco Opera (Semiramide), Opera News Archives (Metropolitan Opera Guild gala)
OPERA NEWS, November 2002 Copyright © 2002 The Metropolitan Opera Guild, Inc.
