Emma Eames & Pol Plançon

Note by John Steane











"Epoch-making new engagements were those of Emma Eames and Pol Plançon, which enabled admirers of singing of the purest quality to make their choice between Melba and Eames to partner Jean de Reszke... Maurel and Lassalle easily led among the baritones, and Plançon and Edouard de Reszke added immensely to the prestige of the once despised basses."

Thus P.G. Hurst (The Age of Jean de Reszke, Christopher Johnson 1958) on the prospect before opera-goers at London's Covent Garden in 1891. His general heading for the chapters which cover the period inaugurated in that year is 'The Golden Age', which in his account ends at the turn of the century. Plançon was to be heard in each of those summer seasons, Eames in all but three. The years which followed, up to the outbreak of war, are allowed by their chronicler to have the melancholy beauty of an Indian Summer; after that the deluge. Eames and Plançon were again together in 1901, and Plançon remained until 1904, a year which was itself to acquire a special glow in the hearts of record collectors, the year also in which the earliest of the recordings included in this present programme were first listed in the catalogues.

It is hard now to sort out mystique from objective truth. Certainly the 1890s and early 1900s have gained and very largely retained the reputation of a time when great singing was to be heard with exceptional frequency in the opera houses of the world. Unfortunately it will not quite do to say that an examination of early recordings should settle the matter for ever one way or another. For one thing, recording was in its infancy, and the conditions in which the records were made often inhibited singers from doing their best work (Eames herself had a good deal to say about that in later years). For another, it is a graceless and stultifying approach which 'examines'. Of course we listen closely, noting this flaw and that felicity as they occur; we also observe ways in which the art of the singer as presented then differs from what we are accustomed to in our own time. Ultimately it should come to something more than curiosity-value, material for historical assessment, or even admiration for certain skills and achievements. The art of these singers is the art of people, Plançon was eleven years the senior, born on 12th June 1854, at Fumay in the Ardennes. He studied first with Gilbert Duprez, leading French tenor of his time and one of the leading teachers (another of his pupils was Emma Albani). His second teacher, also a former tenor, was Giovanni Sbriglia, whose Paris studio rivalled that of the Marchesis in the production of future operatic stars: the De Reszke brothers, Sybil Sanderson and Lilian Nordica were all pupils there, and roughly contemporaneous with Plançon. As was the usual practice, the young bass went out first into the provinces to gain experience, making his debut at Lyons in 1878. This was as St. Bris in Les Huguenots, an opera that remained closely associated with him throughout his career. His Paris debut followed two years later at the Gaité, graduating to the Opéra in 1883. Here he sang as principal bass for the next ten years, during which he took part in several premieres including those of Massenet's Le Cid, in 1885, and of Saint-Saëns' Ascanio in 1890. In the first he shared honours, as he was to do so many times, with the De Reszkes, and in the second the soprano of the production was the young Emma Eames.

Her route to the Paris Opéra was more circuitous. She was born in Shanghai, August 13th 1865. Her father was a lawyer, her mother an amateur musician, both American, and when Emma was five years old the family returned to the USA. Taught first by her mother, then by Clara Munger in Boston, she was recommended to Mathilde Marchesi in Paris. Like another Marchesi pupil, Nellie Melba, Eames was to have made her debut at the Monnaie in Brussels, but the event was mysteriously cancelled: connections were not far to seek, and Melba became 'the enemy'. As it was, Eames went to the top straight away, and stayed there. As Juliette, to the Roméo of Jean de Reszke, she delighted Parisians with the beauty of her appearance as with that of her voice. Her interpretation of the role was also known to have had the benefit of study with the composer himself.

It is interesting to read, in James Dennis's article on Eames in the Record Collector (Vol. 8, No. 4), that a feature specially noted by Le Figaro in 1889 was 'the expression astonishingly mobile'. This is exactly what was considered to be wanting in her work at Covent Garden. The Musical Times (May, 1891), having listed a number of 'great advantages' (personal attraction and a beautiful voice), wrote of 'an immobile face and a restraint of manner and utterance which suggests true Anglo-Saxon coldness'. Later, concerning her Juliette: 'It is a thousand pities that she seems unable to be eloquent in face and impassioned in manner'. Of her debut in Faust, Shaw (Music in London) gave as detailed a description as we have of her voice and its usage. Then: 'As an actress, Miss Eames is intelligent, ladylike, and somewhat cold and colourless'. This was the prototype of reviews in London and New York all tending towards the notion of a cold artist (the listener will be interested to see how far her records support this), and culminating in the celebrated remark that 'there was skating on the Nile tonight' after Eames had sung her Aida.

Meanwhile, with Plançon all aspects of his art commanded admiration. 'A magnificent performance' was the Musical Times's phrase for his Méphistophélès in 1892. As Jupiter in Gounod's Philémon et Baucis he 'sang superbly and his fine presence was most imposing'. The previous year, his Rocco in Fidelio displayed 'rare excellence of method, fidelity to the text and beauty of voice'. In 1896, 'M. Plançon's splendid voice and dignified bearing' distinguished his Pogner in Die Meistersinger, and they could conceive of no way in which his Ramfis in Aida, or for that matter Mario Ancona's Amonasro, could be improved upon. A rare failure was Boito's Mefistofele (1895) where The Times reported that Plançon was 'scarcely as well suited... as to the more suave demon of Gounod's opera, and he was hardly convincing in the part, though the superb richness of his voice told as well as ever'.

It was in New York, at the Metropolitan, that both of these singers eventually fixed the centre of their career. In their prime, they were among the seven most highly-paid members of the company, which could probably claim (others might dispute it) to represent the summit, financially at least, for the whole singing profession. Eames sang with the company from 1891 till 1909, giving 439 performances in New York and elsewhere; Plançon from 1893 to 1908, with a total of 612. Both appeared in Faust more often than in any other opera, Eames 65 times, Plançon 85. But the repertoire of both was wide. Eames sang as both Donna Anna and Donna Elvira in Don Giovanni, also as the Countess in Le Nozze di Figaro (often with Marcella Sembrich as her Susanna, as in the recording of the Letter Duet included here) and Pamina in Die Zauberflöte; in Verdi she was an admired Amelia and Desdemona, an Alice Ford as well as Aida; in Wagner, her Elsa, Eva and Elisabeth earned praise, as did her Sieglinde: in Puccini she restricted herself to Tosca (38 performances). She also has a niche in the history of the house as its first Iris in Mascagni's opera, Charlotte in Werther and the heroine of Mancinelli's Ero e Leandro which had its premiere in 1899. Plançon similarly took part in many house premieres including those of La Damnation de Faust and (amazingly, as late as 1900 and at the end of the season, with Eames, Sembrich, Campanari in the other leading roles, and with Ternina as First Lady) Die Zauberflöte.

When Plançon retired, at the age of 54, records suggest that he was beginning to lose something in resonance and freedom in the upper register of his voice. Eames, in 1909, and only 44 years of age, clearly should have had more years of singing ahead, and indeed she did sing again in opera at Boston at the end of 1911, proving, according to the historian Quaintance Eaton, 'that she could still provide a lesson to the majority of singers'. Plançon retired to France and taught there. Nothing more seems to have been heard from him in these last years, and he died in Paris shortly before the outbreak of war, in August 1914. Eames (who in 1911 married Emilio de Gogorza, the baritone heard in several duets on this disc) lived to a ripe old age, a grand and formidably censorious person. She occasionally reappeared in the news to support Conchita Supervia in her objections to the management's demands upon her in the proposed repertoire of her season at Covent Garden, or to deplore the decline in standards more or less everywhere, or (in more private circumstances) to pour scorn on the suggestion that she might take the train to Sussex and hear Don Giovanni at Glyndebourne. 'I sang Donna Anna at the Metropolitan when Gustav Mahler conducted. Victor Maurel was the Don, Chaliapin the Leporello, Caruso the Don Ottavio, Lilli Lehmann the Donna Elvira and Geraldine Farrar the Zerlina...The remembrance of the performance will last my lifetime'. History does not record precisely when this remarkable performance took place*, but if the recollection is not completely accurate that may be accountable to Ivor Newton, the accompanist, who relates the story in his autobiography At the Piano (Hamish Hamilton, 1966).

Newton met Emma Eames at the London house of the critic Desmond Shawe-Taylor, whom she visited in 1937. There she was persuaded to listen to some records, of herself and of eminent contemporaries. As mentioned earlier, she had no very high opinion of the gramophone, and recalled the circumstances in which records were made: 'The process enervated me,' she said, 'as I felt that even with the most satisfying results, my voice would be diminished and deformed, and the cross vibrations eliminated completely'. This was her opinion as expressed in a broadcast on American radio in 1939. And yet on her London visit she had been genuinely impressed by what she heard. In particular, her host had brought out some records of Plançon, which drew from her immediate recognition and the exclamation 'But he might be in the room!'. The machine on which those records were played was an EMG horn, grandfather of that used in making these present transfers to compact disc. Let us hope that if the spirits of both of our artists could be summoned to hear their records in this new format they would with equal alacrity and delight acknowledge each other's presence, sounding as they did when in an age of great singers they had taken their places among the greatest.

* The nearest is the cast of January 23 and 27, 1908: Scotti, Eames, Bonci, Gadski, Chaliapin, Sembrich: Mahler conducting and, on February 12, 1909, Farrar singing Zerlina.


© 1994 John Steane

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