The Era of Adelina Patti

Note by J.B. Steane











'PATTI IS SINGING HERE TODAY!' The laws of our land would probably forbid any such advertisement nowadays, but in February 1906 the record shops of Great Britain bore banners with this quaint device, and from within might come sounds of the fabled voice, transportable from the shop to the home, on records labelled in a pretty pink, twelve-inches in diameter, playable on one side only and costing no less than one pound in money. It should be said that in those days children considered themselves rich on a penny, and that a book entitled How Paul's Penny became a Pound seemed to offer the key to riches unimaginable. A pound, in other words, was serious money.

The addition of Patti's name to the list of celebrities to be heard on the gramophone ('phonograph' in the USA) was like the stamp of a royal seal. She, after all, was 'the Queen of Song'. That indeed was how the HMV catalogues commended her to the attention of the record-buying public after her death in 1919 in years when her records, almost uniquely, survived in their original single-sided format:

For over fifty years Adelina Patti reigned in the world undisputed as the 'Queen of Song'. Born in Madrid in 1843, she made her debut in New York (whither her parents had migrated) when only sixteen, and achieved such a success that she was brought back to Europe. At Covent Garden, when barely eighteen, her first appearance took place in 1861, and thereafter Madame Patti sang there until 1895. During all those years she was an idolised singer in every capital in Europe, and also in America. Madame Patti was the first singer to undertake extensive tours in the US, where she received as much as £2000 for a single concert.

Here, then, was History, financial as well as artistic. There was a strong and shrewdly-based feeling in those early years of the gramophone that wealth attracts wealth, and that prestige-prices for special records aided the move, as we would say, 'up-market'. Patti's one-pound record had by that time been devalued to fourteen shillings and sixpence and was to shed two shillings more by the outbreak of World War Two, but that was still more than twice the cost of a double-sided twelve-inch record at the standard 'celebrity' price.

What people thought of those expensively purchased records when they took them home to play on the wind-up portable or grander cabinet model is more a matter for speculation. My own first memory of them may not be typical but it was fairly dramatic. The year would be 1943 or '44, when the bombs were still falling but usually with rather more warning given than with the eruption into our local record shop of an enraged woman loudly demanding the return of her money. The records were frauds! 'Madame Patti' it said on the label, but 'Madame Patti' it could not be: she refused to believe it. The shop-assistant gently remarked that the records were quite old and so at the time of making them had been Madame Patti herself, but the customer was having none of it. Money back or else. So there it was, and there was I, interested to hear for myself the cause of such annoyance. I remember thinking that the outraged woman was not being so entirely unreasonable as her manner suggested.

Patti was of course in her early sixties when the records were made; more to the point, she had been before the public for even longer than the HMV catalogue stated, her earliest appearances dating back to 1850, when she was a prodigy of seven years old. Still more influential, no doubt, in the forming of an unfavourable opinion would have been the reproduction of the records in the 1930s and 40s. They would probably have been played at a wrong speed (still a subject of debate), and they would in various ways have seemed more antique than they do, well-reproduced, at this much later date. As heard in the present collection, they show a voice working within evident limitations, but its surviving beauty is unmistakable, and so, for much of the time, are both the boldness and the delicacy of its usage.

It is the delicacy that so impresses when we hear her in the first of her solos; that, and the fact that this, whatever the effect of the years, is the voice of the singer whom the critic of The Times acclaimed in 1861 as having "an abiding charm in every vocal accent, an earnestness in every look, and an intelligence in every movement and gesture that undeniably proclaim an artist 'native and to the manner born'". Moreover, this music is from the opera of that debut, in which the aria 'Ah, non credea mirarti' was given "with the truest expression" - as here. The Mozart arias have obvious faults on the part of the singer and the habits of her period, yet the 'Voi che sapete' is a wonderfully live and detailed piece of singing, smiling, ardent, thoroughly in character. As for the songs, they too constituted a famous part of the Patti repertoire, and we are always made aware of a communicative artist, sprightly in her Scottish songs, joyously uninhibited in the Spanish one (which proved all rather too much for her husband, Baron Cederstrom, to gratify whom it was promptly withdrawn from circulation), and with lingering affection in 'Home, sweet home'. That, incidentally, had been originally announced for a concert at Covent Garden in 1862, to be sung "for the first and only time"; needless to say, it featured prominently in her farewell recital at the Albert Hall in 1908.

In 1894 the merits of 'home' ("be it never so humble") were melodiously commended to Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle. It was a happy and gracious occasion:

Her Majesty received me with the utmost amiability, and expressed great pleasure at hearing me again after many years. She conversed with me in the sweetest manner between each of my pieces. Naturally, at the end I sang 'Home, sweet home', and I could see that it brought tears to the dear Queen's eyes.

The song's origin as an operatic aria (the 'Sicilian Air' in Bishop's Clari or The Maid of Milan) had been virtually lost to view, and by this time it was simply 'Home, sweet home', popular and indeed hackneyed, so that musicians would sigh and resign themselves or make a dash for the exit when they sensed that it was imminent. It and its kind nevertheless had an assured place in the concert repertoire of most celebrity singers. When Patti was no longer able to sing it, there was still Melba. Emma Calvé, the great Carmen of the age, would sing 'Old Folks at Home', Marcella Sembrich 'The Last Rose of Summer', and the formidable Emma Eames would sometimes oblige with 'Dixie'. And if such songs brought a tear to the eye of the Queen herself, it was no use musicians objecting that they lacked opus numbers: moreover, they helped to keep singers of grand opera in touch with ordinary folk.

Not that opera was utterly remote from popular culture. Tunes such as that of the Habanera from Carmen, so beguilingly sung by Calvé on our first disc, were eminently whistleable; and of course they were also relatively modern. Massenet, composer of three of the French arias included here, was distinctly modern. Hérodiade (in which we hear Tamagno and Renaud) was written in 1881, Manon (from which De Lucia sings the Dream Song) in 1884, which means that in these early years of recording they were of considerably more recent date than is, say, Peter Grimes to us in the present.

Singers of Patti's time are often represented as having been narrow and unprogressive, and it is true in some ways. But a high proportion of what they sang was written by composers who were alive in some part of the singer's lifetime. Francesco Tamagno, for instance, mentioned just now as singing the tenor solo from Massenet's Hérodiade, was very much part of the modern movement of his time, surprising as that may seem to us now. It was he, after all, who, with a voice that rattled the chandeliers with its power and vibrancy, sang Verdi's Otello at the world premiere in 1887: he is perhaps the most famous 'creator' among singers on records. It is amazing that the primitive recording processes of his day could have coped as well as they did with this enormous resonance. He was one of the early gramophone's great catches, and, as with Patti, the records were made in his own home; he is said to have embraced the machine when it first played his voice back to him, and a similar story is told of Patti.

1903, the year of this recording, was also the year in which at Monte Carlo he sang the role of John the Baptist in Hérodiade to Calvé's Salome. She and Nellie Melba are both listed as Marchesi pupils, Mathilde Marchesi, being the most famous of singing teachers then active, (though when one comes to look at it, Melba studied with her for not more than nine months and Calvé even more briefly than that). A third and almost equally famous product of the Marchesi school was Emma Eames, whose lovely voice is heard here in Tosti's song 'Dopo'. She was one of a long procession of American girls who began their training at home and then went to Paris to be 'finished'.

In the meantime several very well-finished French singers would make the Atlantic crossing the other way. Of these none gained more respect as a singer at New York's Metropolitan Opera than the bass Pol Plançon, than whom (as one of New York's most exacting critics wrote) there probably never was a more consummate artist. The examples included here illustrate just what that meant. The cello-tones of his voice in the melody of the air from Adam's Le Chalet, are only part of the story, for the supple scales and arpeggios that follow might be the envy of any Marchesi-trained coloratura soprano. Then, in King Philip's great solo from Don Carlos, we hear this same technical mastery and beauty of tone put to the service of a richly expressive art, exercised with great depth of feeling. It is not true (and we notice this repeatedly) that these were singers who paid no attention to the emotional and dramatic side of their art. The contribution of the other French singer here, Maurice Renaud, is a striking example: his magnificent baritone conveys genuine dramatic intensity in the 'Vision fugitive', and even in the restrained idiom of Gounod's little song 'Le soir', we sense that this is an artist fastidious in his care for mood and words as he is about the evenness and elegance of his voice-production.

Another of the singers heard here in Massenet is the tenor Fernando De Lucia. To him belongs the reputation of a mastersinger in the old Italian school, his name frequently being coupled with that of the baritone Mattia Battistini, heard at his characteristic best in the aria from Ernani. These two bear in their singing a command, an assurance that they have the fascinated attention of their unseen audience. De Lucia's command, admittedly, was subject to a limited upward range, so that most of his singing, in his years of recording, is now widely accepted as involving frequent downward transposition of his music by a semitone and sometimes more. The grace and flexibility remain continually astonishing, as does Battistini's combination of an almost reckless boldness with a classically disciplined control. Mario Ancona, the other Italian baritone heard here, sings in that same noble tradition of genuine legato. Throughout the 1890s one of the mainstays of both Covent Garden and the Metropolitan, he was a singer who sounds equally at home in the so-called bel canto operas and in the new verismo, in Mozart and Wagner as well as Verdi and Massenet.

Wagner was the composer who most divided public and critical opinion in this period. To be a Wagnerite was to be 'advanced', 'progressive', almost revolutionary. The remarkable thing is that the singers themselves were so ready to take him on board. He presented a severe challenge even to German, or German-trained, singers, and it was some time before they learned to cope successfully. One who did so was the Bohemian bass, Wilhelm Hesch, a noted Mozart singer at Salzburg and one of the stalwarts of Mahler's great company at Vienna. In his recording of Pogner's address in Die Meistersinger heard in this present collection, we note how this voice of great sonority and depth meets the demands of an increasingly high tessitura, and how he retains his steadiness of production without any sign of the slow beat that invaded so many of these big voices. By the rest of the operatic world, Wagner was assimilated partly by the simple expedient of having him sung in Italian. The Italians too played their part, with De Lucia singing a notable Lohengrin, Battistini admired by Wagner himself for his Wolfram in Tannhäuser, and Ancona's Hans Sachs (given at a single performance in 1894) described as 'one of the best parts in which he has been seen'.

Among the women who normally confined themselves to Italian and French works, Melba sang Elsa and Elisabeth and (a famous once-only) the Siegfried Brünnhilde. Eames had Lohengrin in her repertoire, Sembrich Lohengrin and Die Meistersinger, and even Patti eventually included Elisabeth's Prayer from Tannhäuser and 'Träume' from the Wesendonck Lieder in her programmes. But the great and regular Wagnerian sopranos of those times were Lilli Lehmann, Félia Litvinne and Lilian Nordica. Not surprisingly, such Wagnerian records as they made are not among their most successful, but Litvinne's account of Elsa's Dream shows the well-tempered heroic quality of her voice, and Nordica's singing of the solo from Erkel's Hunyadi László Her inclusion among these artists also reminds us of another and quite different point: the matter of Anno Domini. Lehmann was born in 1848, and she made most of her records in 1907: at an age, in other words, not far off sixty. In fact none of these singers heard here was younger than 43 at the time of recording: the youngest of them is the Spaniard Viñas, who produces such ringing tones in the aria from Meyerbeer's Le Prophète and who was also England's first Turiddu in Cavalleria rusticana, back in 1893. Some, such as the tenor Marconi, in his mid-fifties, belong more to the nineteenth century than to the twentieth. Others, like Victor Maurel, 'creator' of Iago and Falstaff, were distinctly anachronisms by this time. And there are others who, as singers, were by any standards very old indeed. Battistini, heard first as a stripling of fifty in the Ernani aria, sings 'Senza tetto' from Il Guarany in one of his last recordings, made in 1924 at the age of 72. Perhaps the tone has dried a little, but what brilliance remains! The energy and command of voice, still so elegant in cut, so unstinting in delivery: it is a marvellous testimony to the training of his youth and the practice of a lifetime. Then, at 79, we have Sir Charles Santley who made his debut one year after Battistini was born. No one could mistake this for the voice of a young man, but again what a triumph of method it is that enables him to sing with this steadiness, and what a joy in old age is caught in the humour and humanity of his performance. A year older still, at the time of recording, an unbelievable 80-year-old, Lucien Fugère sings with an elegance and freshness that might put to shame men half his age. Whether in the charming little song about a murmuring stream, sung by the character Vertigo in Gluck's Les Pèlerins de la Mecque (or La rencontre imprévue) or in the arrangement of Rameau's harpsichord piece, he sings with impeccable grace and apparently dateless youth.

Fugère's are perhaps the most surprising contributions to the collection on the grounds of repertoire. Or maybe he shares the distinction with Edouard de Reszke. De Reszke! We knew there was one missing among all these singers. Edouard de Reszke stands there in immense presence, familiar to many of us no doubt through photographs of him as Hagen or one of the other 'giant' roles in Wagner, and now surprising us with his trills in the song from Martha. But where is his brother? Without him the collection is certainly incomplete, for the period which is here called 'The Era of Patti' is also known as 'The Age of de Reszke'. Unhappily, we are recordless. We know that he recorded two solos, but neither was published, and all that remains are those cylinders in which he can just be heard in a few barely recognisable passages from the stage of the Metropolitan in 1900. Even so, none, not even the dear Queen in Windsor, it would be safe to say, ever assembled a galaxy that could quite match this: such is the privilege of the collector of ancient records, and to that larger number who can now here them in such a choice selection as this.


© 1993 J.B. Steane

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