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Rosa Ponselle
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| If one were searching for a single word to describe the career of Rosa Ponselle I think it would have to be the word 'extraordinary', taken in its most literal sense.
There was simply nothing ordinary about it, not in the way it began, nor in the way it continued, and certainly not in the way it ended.
Born in the industrial town of Meriden, Connecticut, to a family of poor Italian immigrants, Rosa was employed at the age of 15 to accompany silent films on the piano in the Star Theatre, New Haven, and to sing while the reels were being changed. Within a couple of years she had graduated to a purely vocal stint in New Haven's Café Malone, a familiar spot to many a Yale man, where she sang tasteful ballads from a balcony. She then joined her elder sister, Carmela, to form a successful vaudeville duo with the billing "Those Tailored Girls", because they could not afford evening dresses and sang in their street clothes, and in the early Spring of 1918 Carmela decided that they should both apply to a fashionable teacher named William Thorner for singing lessons. Rosa had just turned 21, and this was the first vocal tuition she ever received; but following a visit to Thorner's studio by Enrico Caruso she was summoned to the Metropolitan Opera to audition for the all-powerful Manager, Giulio Gatti-Casazza, who promptly engaged her to sing the role of Leonora in the Met's first ever production of La Forza del Destino, with Caruso as her partner. Now Leonora is not by a very long chalk a beginner's role, and when Ponselle was led onto the stage on that fateful evening of November 15th 1918 by her mother and her loyal coach Romano Romani (prominently featured as conductor on this disc), she was so terrified that, as she herself later wrote, her head was filled with the thought "I am going to die - oh my poor mother!" Three hours later, though, the public was hailing the arrival of the most gifted soprano in living memory, and the Ponselle Legend was firmly launched. Understandably the Columbia Record Company lost no time in signing up the new phenomenon (thereby depriving the world of ever hearing Ponselle and Caruso together on disc, as he was contracted to a rival company), and one only has to hear Ponselle's first entry in the Forza scene 'La vergine degli angeli', recorded within three weeks of her debut, to see what the fuss was about. The vocal timbre is of a spine-tingling sumptuousness, (critics throughout her career bent over backwards to avoid the phrase "a flow of molten gold", but did not always succeed), the steadiness of line is total, and in the delivery there is precisely the other-worldly, seraphic quality which this particular music requires, and which declares the presence of a genuine musical personality, not merely a flawless singing machine. It is an extraordinary thought that the other item from this same session, Tosti's 'Goodbye', had so recently been part of Ponselle's repertoire in the Bronx Star Theatre and the Café Malone - one can only hope that the vaudeville public and the lads from Yale had appreciated the full glory of those matchless high A flats. The instances of other artists' tributes to Ponselle are innumerable. The great Italian conductor Tullio Serafin used to say that in all his long career he only worked with three "giants", Caruso, Ruffo and Ponselle. The celebrated prima donna Geraldine Farrar wrote "When discussing singers there are two you must set aside, Rosa Ponselle and Enrico Caruso, then you may begin", and when Lotte Lehmann turned to Farrar with the words "How does one get a voice like Ponselle's?" she received the reply "By special arrangement with God". Callas saluted Ponselle as "the greatest singer of us all", and Pavarotti has referred to her as "the Queen of Queens in all of singing". For 19 seasons she lent lustre to the Met, with Norma, Aida, the Trovatore Leonora and Sélika in L'Africaine amongst her outstanding successes, but even in her heyday her career retained elements of the extraordinary. As several tracks on this disc so amply testify, she would surely have been the Puccini singer of one's dreams. In 1924, shortly before Puccini's death, she visited him at his home in Viareggio. She sang him the 'Vissi d'arte', and when she had finished Puccini sat with his head in his hands saying softly "If only I had heard her earlier!" - yet the Met never gave Ponselle a single Puccini role to sing. Her entire repertoire only consisted of 22 roles, including several of distinctly secondary musical value, something which one cannot help looking back on as a remarkable waste. Another unusual feature of Ponselle's career is that with the exception of three seasons at Covent Garden and a few performances of Spontini's La Vestale in Florence she never appeared with any other company than the Metropolitan Opera. For one who possessed in such abundance every quality which a prima donna requires she was remarkably lacking in self-confidence, and before coming to Covent Garden she needed to be reassured that the London public was a polite and friendly one, not prone to hostility or the whims of the claque. Before her debut there as Norma she met the erstwhile queen of the house, Dame Nellie Melba, who told her "My dear, don't expect Covent Garden to be like your Metropolitan, and above all don't expect applause after 'Casta diva'. A London audience wouldn't clap the Angel Gabriel himself until the curtain came down". On this occasion, however, Ponselle evidently outsang the Angel Gabriel, because as the aria ended the house burst into uproar. As the archivist of the Met, Francis Robinson, has recorded, the next time Ponselle and Melba met "Dame Nellie was not so solicitous". One particularly attractive feature of Ponselle's early recordings is the unusual blend of youthfulness and maturity - the former in the tone quality and the emotional directness, and the latter in the musicianship and the security of vocal technique. She was, so to speak, a singer with an old head on young shoulders, so that her Manon, her Butterfly or her Elsa combine to a rare degree the appeal of youth without any of the vocal vulnerability which youth is often heir to; while for her technical versatility one only needs to turn to the track from Victor Herbert's Mademoiselle Modiste. This number, similar in content to Adele's second aria in Die Fledermaus, finds her switching effortlessly from twittering coloratura to sensuous seductiveness, with a velvety fullness of tone in the lower register which would be the envy of any normal mezzo. It was also a number which marked a modest milestone in Ponselle's artistic development, because it was by singing it to a producer named Mr. Hughes after supper one evening that she first secured her promotion from café singer to vaudeville star! Despite the distinction of her career at the Met, the curtain came down on Ponselle's career as suddenly as it had gone up. After Gatti-Casazza's retirement in 1935 he was succeeded by Edward Johnson, who unwisely refused Ponselle's request to be allowed to sing Cilea's Adriana Lecouvreur. This professional slight, combined with the facts that she had never lost her nervous dread of going on stage and that she had in any case recently married a wealthy man, persuaded her that the game was no longer worth the candle. After a performance of Carmen with the Metropolitan company in Cleveland on April 17th 1937, Rosa Ponselle, at the age of 40, told her dresser that she would never be going on stage again, and she kept her word. Private recordings made as late as 1954 make it clear that, had she wished to, she could still have been filling opera houses and concert halls anywhere in the world - but the instrument described by the British critic Walter Legge as "the most glorious voice that ever came from any woman's throat in the Italian repertoire" was never heard in public again. |
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