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Jussi Björling
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| It is a measure of Jussi Björling's prodigious natural gifts that when he was still in his twentieth year John Forsell, Björling's voice teacher and the Director of the Swedish Royal Opera, considered him ready for a professional career.
By the time he was 24 (the age at which the great Beniamino Gigli, for instance, made his debut) Björling had notched up the astonishing total of 44 roles with the Royal Opera, including such perilous challenges as Dick Johnson in Puccini's La Fanciulla del West, Arnold in Rossini's Guillaume Tell and Florestan in Fidelio, and at the age of 25 he made his first important international debut, singing Radamès in the Vienna State Opera.
In 1937 he appeared in Salzburg singing Don Ottavio and the Verdi Requiem under Toscanini and also made his American stage debut as the Duke in Rigoletto in Chicago, in 1938 came his Met debut as Rodolfo in La Bohème, and in 1939 his Covent Garden debut as Manrico in When one listens to the Björling of those days it is not hard to understand why the leading operatic citadels of the world should have surrendered in such rapid succession.
Apart from his vocal prowess Björling was gifted with an exceptional degree of musicianship, made evident not only by the speed with which he memorised new roles but also by the eloquence of his delivery.
Those who felt that Gigli overdid the sob, the sigh and the inserted aspirate were particularly appreciative of Björling's willingness to mount the arching phrases of an aria such as 'E lucevan le stelle' with never an extraneous gulp to help him on his way, and any tenor who is prepared to relinquish a high B flat as brilliant and secure as Björling's at the climax of 'Recondita armonia' without fighting the conductor for at least an extra second or two is bound to win ten out of ten from the more fastidious of the critics.
The young phenomenon's one Achilles heel lay, it always seems to me, in his linguistic limitations.
At this early stage of his career Björling's Italian and French were peppered with mispronunciations, and his unfamiliarity with the languages, despite the passion behind the voice, occasionally results in a somewhat generalised outpouring of emotion rather than an idiomatic use of the text.
It is odd to recall that when he sang that first Radamès in Vienna he did so in Swedish, and perhaps even more surprisingly he was still reverting to his native tongue for certain passages in the Chicago Rigoletto.
To set against this, however, there is the compensation of Björling's glorious youthfulness of tone. It is one of the anomalies of opera that by the time a tenor can handle the physical and technical demands of this particular repertoire he is usually a dozen years or so older than the characters he is portraying. Björling's 'juvenile leads', on the other hand, genuinely abound in the ardour, arrogance and vulnerability of youth, and this is perhaps even more self-evidently the case with the three figures included on the present CD from the pages of operetta. The elegance with which Björling flicks through the strenuous tessitura of Paris's narration and the élan with which his Beggar Student challenges Fate to do its worst (high D flat and all) give both these young extroverts exactly the dash of impudence that they require, while for mature technical mastery it would be hard to beat Barinkay's final B flat in the Zigeunerbaron duet - a lovely clean forte on the attack, followed by an instant diminuendo into the tenderest of pianissimi. Which brings me back to the subject of language - in Björling's early recordings it is when he sings in Swedish (as he does in these operetta numbers) that he always sounds to me most marvellously himself, as if some paper-thin layer of inhibition has been removed. The gentle wistfulness of 'Tonerna' and 'Skogen sover' or the thundering declamation of 'Morgon'(the opening phrase of which makes you wonder if you are listening to a Heldenbariton) seem to belong entirely to the world of Björling's own imagination; and as for his renderings of Sibelius' 'Svarta rosor' and 'Säv, säv, susa', these are classic examples of a singer being right inside the skin of a song. Though one may feel less convincedof his emotional absorption in German Lieder it would be hard not to applaud the unforced lyricism and flawless vocalisation, and with one particular recording he achieved a magic all of his own - Beethoven's 'Adelaide'. If ever Björling's voice earned the soubriquet 'silvery' it is surely here. The vocal line is a steady thread of wonderfully sustained piano singing, swelling into the occasional full-voiced phrase, capped by a matchless mezza voce high A on the phrase 'strahlt dein Bildnis', and it is a performance which absolutely captures the spirit and enchantment of Matthisson's poem as well as Beethoven's setting of it. With a performance such as this we have moved a long way from the limited image of the 'ex officio Italian tenor'. When Björling died at the age of only 49 he left behind him an extraordinary wealth and variety of achievement on the operatic stage, on the concert platform and in the recording studio. Perhaps the neatest summing up of Björling's career that I have ever heard lay in the words of Kurt Bendix, who conducted him on countless occasions in the Royal Opera, Stockholm - "Jussi was the kind of vocal and musical genius whom one is lucky to encounter just once in a lifetime". |
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