Something Thoughtful

 Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

LIMITS OF PERFECTION

 

            We didn’t exactly have a quarrel, my wife and I. We had a difference of opinion.

 

            Judging solely from recordings and such relevant videos as are found on Youtube, she had decided that Maria Callas was the finest operatic soprano ever to record the great arias. Neither of us had ever heard Callas sing live, of course, as she was well past her prime before either of us was fully an adult – and besides, we didn’t ever have the money to fly over to the Met.

 

            Judging solely from recordings and such relevant videos as are found on Youtube, I had decided that Renee Fleming was the finest operatic soprano ever to record the great arias. We hadn’t heard her sing live, either.

            I said that Maria Callas’s voice always sounded as if she had something stuck in her throat, affecting her vocal cords.

            My wife said that Renee Fleming always sounded too, too perfect and in control, missing the necessary emotionalism that the great arias require.

            She also said that I was probably influenced by the media in which I saw and heard Renee Fleming.

            She might have had a point there.

            Maria Callas lived and sang before the age of the internet and of regular filmed transcriptions of operas from the Met. One saw her performing only in old black-and-white broadcasts captured from television (and now available on Youtube). Renee Fleming lives in the age of full-colour Met transcriptions. We have twice seen and heard her in full-screen cinema presentations of Met transcriptions, as well as seeing her often in older transcriptions available on Youtube. My wife suggested that I was responding to Fleming because of her physical beauty and because of the more advanced medium in which we could appreciate her.

            I had to confess that I was a little smitten with her beauty and I may have been biased when I was judging her singing. But I clung to my verdict. After seeing her at the movies as Desdemona in the Met transcription of Verdi’s Otello, I had rushed home and watched her on Youtube singing some of the same arias in a production staged a decade earlier – and comparing this with the recent transcription, I concluded that her voice had not degenerated in the least. She must be the best.

            Anyway, to settle the matter over a bottle of wine, we sat down one evening and compared the two sopranoes aria for aria.

            On Youtube, we watched and listened to Maria Callas singing O mio babbino caro from Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi.  Then we watched Renee Fleming sing it. No contest there, because O mio babbino caro is really a sweet sentimental song, not one to wrench the emotions… and I still thought Callas’s voice sounded somewhat constrained.

            We followed this with first Callas then Fleming singing the Ave Maria and the Willow Song with its Salce, Salce, Salce and all the recitative that follows in the last act of Verdi’s Otello, when Desdemona is about to be murdered.  I admit that my judgement shuddered a little. This is one of the most wrenching scenes in opera, and both women sang perfectly and with the appropriate emotional display – the fear of Desdemona for she knows not what, played against Verdi’s lowering music. But I did realise that Callas’s lower tones, the darker element of her voice, really did suggest a more tragic situation than Fleming’s well-managed cascade of sound.

            What really battered me, however, came when we compared Callas and Fleming singing one of the great show pieces, and the aria that probably popularised the word “diva” as a designation for operatic sopranos. I refer to the Casta Diva from Bellini’s Norma, where the pagan priestess addresses reverently the chaste goddess of the moon. As it happened, both Callas and Fleming were filmed, forty or so years apart, performing this as a concert piece rather than as part of a production of the opera.

            Maria Callas put her soul into it. Even if she was dressed to the nines with a silk wrap over her evening gown, and with jewels glittering around her neck, she played the part of Norma, drawing her wrap protectively about herself as her first note approached, really beseeching the goddess, being both humble and reverent but begging the goddess to answer her prayer. She inhabited the role, and for the first time I fully appreciated how those darker tones of her voice, those very notes that I had taken to be a defect, were what conjured up emotion.

            And Renee Fleming, also dressed in an elegant evening gown? Note for note she was perfect. You thought how beautiful her voice was, how well she managed every sound, how fully rehearsed she was. But she was manifestly playing the part rather than being the part, smiling wistfully at her audience rather than giving her full attention to the goddess. Of course both sopranos were giving a performance and consciously doing so, but Callas’s voice and performance won.

            So, eventually, I had to agree with my wife’s original judgement… much as I still love Renee Fleming.

            Maria Callas died at the age of 53, many years ago. Renee Fleming is now in her 61^st year and has moved away from opera to giving concert performances only.

            What is the point of this sermon?

            Especially in music, technical perfection is not always what touches the heart and mind. Important though it is, it is only part of the impact that music has. Still, complete wuzz that I am, I did begin to tear up watching Renee Fleming in La Traviata, so I am not saying that this diva lacks completely the ability to fire the emotions.