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Amelita Galli-Curci
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| 'Noone can manufacture a voice,' Galli-Curci would say.
'A canary in an opera house can be heard as clearly as an opera singer because it sings naturally.' This was the essential quality of her art.
She claimed on numerous occasions to have been taught her exquisite singing technique by none other than the birds outside her window, a postulation which the veteran New York critic W.
J.
Henderson was later, rather wryly, to describe 'improbable but not impossible.' Whether or not educated by the twisting chirrup of nightingales, there is no doubt that it was the natural agility and fluid ease of her instrument that became Galli-Curci's hallmark, and for most listeners the effect of this leaping, trilling and pirouetting display was superhuman; 'bird-like,' in fact.
It is no surprise that many contemporary eulogies compare her, in colourful terms, to the various singing fowl of popular literary imagery; no surprise that her recitals were accompanied by piano and flute, thereby to give the impression of some exquisite avian dialogue; and no surprise that her most frequent encore numbers and best-selling records were 'Pretty mocking bird' and 'Lo, here the gentle lark,' complete with convincing imitative effects.
The musical term leggiero, in its most literal sense, means 'lightweight,' or 'of a light calibre,' but also implies a relaxed limpidity of delivery, which, when applied to the voice would identify a central ingredient of Galli-Curci's art. She was the leggiero singer of her generation. The different registers of her voice were welded together to perfection, so that there was little difference of tonal quality between the upper and lower; this, together with the generous warmth of her coloratura, gave an impression of luscious elasticity, an effortless control of formidably schooled resources, which wooed her audiences with its grace and charm. Like the canary which she claimed would be heard clearly at the back of an opera house, she never felt the necessity to push or add artificial weight to her singing. Instead, she characterised her sound with a languorous ease, which is so instantaneously pleasing in effect it runs the risk nowadays of being labelled frivolous. So well did she disguise the technical difficulties of the music she undertook, her singing took on a semblance of cheerful spontaneity - hence even more bird metaphors in the collected critiques - which was ideally suited to the roles that became her speciality. Lucia, Gilda, Dinorah, Lakmé, Amina, are all characters whose chief trait is endearing innocence, innocence which becomes all the more poignant when it is betrayed or exploited. This often leads to ravings and lunacy on the part of the victimised maiden - an excellent opportunity for musical fireworks and vocal pyrotechnics. The Mad Scene - an operatic climax to the virgin-victim's sufferings - was Galli-Curci's speciality. So appealing was her delivery of these roles, together with their inevitable tragic sequences of injured innocence, that even when the voice was in decline she rarely failed to grip the hearts of her audiences. Despite her obvious success in dramatically vacuous roles, Galli-Curci can in no way be accused of being a lightweight musician. Her refinement and vocal continence bear witness to this. She was never a singer to employ dazzling effects for their own sake, and her approach to even the most monochromatic, cardboard cut-out heroines displayed a sympathy with the human drama of the situation, no matter how impeded by the banality of the libretto or the distractions of a melodramatic score. This is immediately apparent if one listens to her recording of Gilda's starry-eyed 'Caro nome' (Rigoletto). If there was a lack of dramatic intensity in her portrayals, it was because her Amelita Galli (Curci was to be added after her first marriage) was born on 18th November 1882, although for most of her life she would claim that the year was 1889, 'for stage purposes.' Her father was Enrico Galli, an ambitious businessman living in Milan, whose wife, Enrichetta Bellisoni, was descended from the aristocratic Spanish di Luna family - immortalised in Verdi's Il Trovatore. From an early age Amelita was strongly encouraged to pursue her interests in music, especially by her paternal grandparents, who lived together in the same house. By the age of fifteen she was a proficient pianist and was regularly called upon to play at private recitals for wealthy Milanese socialites. It was the chance intervention of Pietro Mascagni, one of Italy's most prestigious composers (who had heard the young pianist accompany her own voice at a musical soirée), that induced Galli-Curci to consider a change of ambitions. After her many hours spent in alleged imitation of the birds, the soprano found opportunity to make her début at Trani, deep in the south of Italy. Offers followed from Rome's Costanzi theatre, and companies touring to Egypt and South America. She created a sensation in Spain between 1913 and 1915, but it was not until 1916 that her career took its most dramatic turn, when, stranded on the far side of the Atlantic by the threat of hostile submarines, she joined the ranks of the Chicago Opera Company. Her début in that city, on November 18th, as Gilda in Verdi's Rigoletto, is reputed to have been one of the great operatic events of the century. Her New York début followed in 1918, at the Lexington Avenue Opera House, where she appeared as Dinorah, in the opera of the same name by Meyerbeer, one she was to make particularly famous through her interpretation of the pretty, distracted 'Shadow Song.' The Met finally signed her onto its roster for the 1921-22 season, but the tide of popular taste (away from traditional coloratura repertoire), coupled to the disappointment many began to feel with regard to her timid stage presence, meant that her public following began gradually to diminish. On top of this she was experiencing vocal difficulties: her intonation was no longer secure, and an unsightly tumorous growth on the right side of her neck was beginning to restrict the free passage of air through her larynx. She had the goitre removed in 1935, and after a brief attempt to relaunch herself as a lirico-spinto soprano, eventually retired to California with her second husband, the pianist Homer Samuels. She died of emphysema on 26th November 1963, an event overshadowed in the newspapers by the murder of JF Kennedy in Dallas. It is not as a performer or a magnetic stage personality that Galli-Curci is remembered but as a recorded artist. It was through records that her delightful trills and warbles traversed the globe, and she had fans in their hundreds of thousands who were never to see her in the flesh - perhaps for the best. There can be little doubt that her voice recorded well, and was shown to its best advantage on disc. In the studio she had the privilege to exercise her undoubted striving for perfection, which, in the spontaneity of a live performance, was more difficult to achieve. She would record an aria again and again, until satisfied that she had given of her best. It is impossible not to like such singing, with its pleasing fluency, its bright innocence and intimations of optimism. It lifts the listener from the banality of ordinary life, and eases the stress and toil of the verismo singer's emotional frankness. As such, Galli-Curci's gay, irresistible records were the precursors of what was to become known as the 'easy listening' consumer product, and it was unusual for a household, with even the smallest musical inclination, not to have a Galli-Curci disc. As one historian claims, the first record one bought was a Caruso - because of the sheer glamour and uniqueness of the man - and the second, more often than not, was a Galli-Curci. Galli-Curci was once described as 'an Italian girl with the face of Lucrezia Borgia and the heart of Dante's Beatrice, whose voice was like juggling with golden apples.' Her singing, so often described as delightful, even stunning, has also been condemned as anachronistic, stylistically retrogressive, and lacking the emotional fervour of those who came after. Governed by the strictures of a repertoire that was to earn her overwhelming popularity and vast wealth, Galli-Curci never succeeded in becoming more than an accomplished decorative singer. In historical terms she belonged to the great bel canto tradition, perhaps its last genuine exponent; the other descendant of that same school, Luisa Tetrazzini, was eleven years her senior and belongs to an earlier generation. Galli-Curci was thus the inheritor of a stylistic approach to musical theatre which had its roots in Handel and the eighteenth century castrati; the same which brought to fruition the mesmeric talents of Maria Malibran, Giulia Grisi, Jenny Lind and Adelina Patti, but which by the First World War was cherished merely as a reminder of former artistic values. Post-war Europe, Russia and America belonged to a different era, and the soft shadings of pathos and gaiety, so popular in nineteenth century drama, so perfectly captured in the delicate trills and arpeggios of Galli-Curci's song, were gone. |
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