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.
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