Her voice is just better than everybody else's

My friends C. and D. and I spend a lot of time listening to music together, discovering new unearthed clips on youtube of our favourite singers, and looking out for new releases of live performances... Listening to opera and studying the art form is a passion for the three of us.

The thing that fascinates me most is how disparate our tastes are.  And yet, for the most part, even when one of the singers being featured during one of our weekly gatherings is not the other two's favourite, we can still realise and understand why that singer is important.  C. has distilled the reasoning for this in one simple phrase "Her voice is simply better than everybody else's"

Now for you singers out there reading this, please note the very important word choice: better.  I didn't say prettier, I didn't say more colorful, and I didn't say louder.  "Better."  What on Earth does that mean and how can you quantify that?  Well, I think it has to do as much with who they are as artists as with who they are as humans.  In order for your voice to be "better", you need to know what makes it special in the first place.  And in order to really discover that, you need to really know who you are as a human, and use that.  You see, being better is having the courage to use the best of you, and put yourself, your heart, and your soul on display.  That courage is what makes you "better."

When I listen to Tebaldi singing "Donde Lieta", I'm always on the verge of tears.  I'll use her as an example, because generations have argued over her, and therefore she is an interesting case.

Tebaldi singing Mimi, especially by today's standards, may seem ridiculous.  When she recorded it with Serafin in 1959, she was 37 years old.  She was a handsome woman, though by no means delicate.  Her voice was enormous and her top by then already had a tendency to veer a little flat.  Her other roles included Tosca, Minnie and Liu.  This is not what we think of today as a Mimi.  So how is her recording so successful?

Well, Tebaldi knew exactly with what deck of cards she was playing.  She was very tall, broad and did not move exceedingly well (perhaps this can attributed to polio, which she got at age three, and which caused her life long problems with her right hip).  She had to rely on her voice to play the drama.  Luckily for her, by Act III, Mimi is very ill, so does not require a lot of movement.  And luckily for us, she had developed her enormous voice and understood its most prized attributes: a melting piano in the middle voice, a plangency and urgency in the upper middle voice, and an incredible breath control that enabled her to go from one of the loudest fortes in the business to a caressing pianissimo.

Her donde lieta is a study of phrasing, crescendos and diminuendos.  But what makes her voice (and this version) "better" is how she uses these.  For the most part, she caresses the lines with melting pianos.  But when she deploys her voice to a fortissimo, it slaps you in the face.  You realise that she is using fortes to express the emotion Mimi can no longer hold in. And the difference between her piano, which sound so youthful and delicate, and the forte which express the desperation of Mimi, grabs at your heart.  You realise how torn, how sad and joyful Mimi is in this instant.

It's difficult to explain why, but when she sings this aria, she sounds so incredibly honest.  Tebaldi was questioned multiple times over her career over why she never married.  She never really answered the question, but did say that she had been in love many times.  There have been many speculations as to whether Tebaldi preferred the company of women, some going as far as saying that her Maid of 32 years, Tina Vigano, was much more than her maid.  Other speculations linked her her to such and such tenor, bass or conductor, though no one ever got a real response.

I think the reason "Donde lieta" is such a powerful piece when sung by Tebaldi is because, no matter what the truth of her personal relationships were, we hear her pain, not just Mimi's.  Tebaldi, who never discussed love, pours her soul into this piece and says, with Puccini's music and Illica and Giacosa'a text, what she could not in her own words.  Tebaldi clearly knew heart ache, and rather than discuss it, she used it to make her characterization of Mimi more fragile, more poignant, and more tragic.  When I hear her sing this aria, I immediately believe that Tebaldi knew great pain in her life, in whatever form it manifested itself, and that she used it to become Mimi.

That's what makes her, and many other artists, "better." When, in an almost imperceptible moment, an artist makes you feel that it is their heart that is singing, and not just their soul.  When there is only honesty left, and the sound is coming from the darkest secrets that can be made public for just a fleeting moment.  Those moments, which require such incredible courage, are what make me come back endlessly to my favourite artists.

When I was a little boy, tall as this fence...

How does the process of falling in love with opera begin?  Edward Lewis (Richard Gere), in Pretty Woman, explains to Vivian Ward (Julia Roberts) that "People's reactions to opera the first time they see it is very dramatic; they either love it or they hate it. If they love it, they will always love it. If they don't, they may learn to appreciate it, but it will never become part of their soul."

Well, I was seven years old, and my parents thought I was old enough to attend a performance, so they took me to see "Il Barbiere di Siviglia" at the Opéra Comique.  I was seated, with my father, in a side balcony box, on top of the orchestra (incidentally, balcony boxes have remained my favourite).  The performance began, and all I can remember is being completely enchanted and transported by what I was hearing.  An hour and twenty minutes or so later, the act ended, a man dressed in black approached my father, talked to him briefly in a hushed voice, and my father said "well, wasn't it great? Let's go home now."  I was thrilled I had attended my first opera, and went home still feeling the exuberance of Rossini's music.

It wasn't until I was a teenager, at a family dinner, that I learned I had never seen the second of Barber of Seville, when my mother made an comment about me getting kicked out of my first opera.  It turns out the music did more than impress me, it literally moved me.  From my seat, hanging over the ledge of the balcony box, I started conducting along, and moving in time to the music.  My father, apparently, tried to stop me a few times, but I just was so involved I never stopped.  The man in black who had spoken to my father at intermission was the house manager.  The singers onstage had noticed me.  Not only was I distracting them, but they were all afraid I was going to fall over into the pit.  The house manager had told my father that he either needed to make me stop, or remove me from the theater.  My father did the single best thing he could have done.  He simply pretended the show was over, so as to not crush my spirit.  He saw how enthusiastically I had responded to the music and the drama.  He did not see the point of quelling my excitement.  He did the right thing.

From that point on, my parents took me to as many performances as they possibly could. They gave me an opera subscription with my classmates by the time I was 11 (I saw unbelievable performances that year, including Natalie Dessay's Paris Opera debut as Olympia, and Gwyneth Jones and Leonie Rysanek in Elektra!)  They figured out music fed my soul, and they fostered that. I am deeply grateful to them that for prodding me along my musical education. Today, it still is music, more than any other art form, that can transport me.

When I was seven, I fell in love with Opera when I first heard it.  For those of you who also did, I hope this blog will help you explore and discover new things you might not already know.  For those of you who did not but are trying to learn to appreciate it, I'll do my best to try to show you why this art form is exceptional. 

I look forward to your comments and your experiences.

Amusing side notes: It took me 16 years before I ever got to see the second act of Barbiere.  It was at the Metropolitan Opera in 2002, and the cast included Vivica Genaux, Earle Patriarco and Juan Diego Florez! Also, when I was in college, I sang in the chorus of a production of Rigoletto.  The tenor in that production, Noel Espiritu, turned out to have been the one that had sung Almaviva on the night I got kicked out!