The Golden Age

Were singers really better in some long-lost Golden Age?

To refresh my memory, I turned to the Romophone "Complete recordings of Battistini (1856-1928), Volume One", intending to sample a few tracks. 70-odd minutes later, my face hurting from repeated and sustained jaw-dropping, I had rediscovered the most technically faultless vocalism on record, and perhaps the greatest baritone voice. Battistini is the oldest indisputedly great singer to make records while still in his prime. He made a sensational debut at 22 and continued to sing, unimpaired, until his death. He was lionized by the public and the proverbial Crowned Heads of Europe (the Tsar welcomed him back to Russia for decades, until there was no more Tsar). He was called "the King of Baritones" and "The Glory of Italy". To listen to him in these recordings made in the first decade of the 20th century, when he was around 50, is to hear the bel canto technique as he perfected it 25 years or so earlier. He did not invent the technique, he inhabited it as it had been practiced for decades before, so listening to him allows us to infer with a high degree of confidence how singers used their voices at least from the middle of the 19th century. For some context, I followed Battistini by listening to the tenor Fernando de Lucia (1860-1925) for another hour. My jaw will probably never be the same. These singers can do anything, anything at all, with their voices. I've "known" these recordings for decades, but it had been a long time since I'd really listened to them.

When I was a (very odd) teenager, the stereo boom was in full flood. Although complete recordings of operas had been made from the first decade of the 20th century on, they were very unwieldy—78's were heavy and easily broken—and they were quite expensive. For all these reasons, they were rare. Things got easier with the invention of the microphone around 1925. Before that, performers sang with their faces in a horn; assistant conductors pushed them forward for lower, quieter passages, and backward when they got higher and louder. Only about 4 minutes could be recorded at a time. Across the room a pianist, or sometimes a handful of instrumentalists, made noises that it was hoped would register on the matrix as well. Since the recording device was operated by a hand crank, speed--and therefore pitch--was variable. Few "78's" actually play at exactly that speed. The microphone changed all that; "acoustic" recordings now gave way to "electrical" ones. When the Germans invented magnetic tape during World War II, things became even easier, but the 78 rpm record could still hold only about 4 minutes per side. A complete "Aida" might run close to 40 heavy, easily broken records.

With the introduction of the LP (long playing) record in the early 50's, it suddenly became much more feasible to record complete operas. Sets poured out in profusion, and they found buyers. With the introduction of stereo a few years later, the major labels raced to replace their still-recent mono sets with new, stereo versions, sometimes with nearly-identical casts. When I went to my first record stores, the browsers were full of big, beautiful boxes with large, easy-to-read, illustrated books inside. If you wanted to save some money (or, like me, buy more recordings with the money you had) the monaural versions were still available, so record shops stocked both. RCA's "Soria Series" sported slip-case boxes with 100+ page, color-illustrated books on good stock, memorably lavish productions. In those incarnations I got to know some of my first complete recordings: The Serafin "Otello" with Vickers, Gobbi and Rysanek; "Die Walkure" under Leinsdorf, with Nilsson, Brouwenstijn, Vickers and London, Karajan's "Carmen" with Price and Corelli. They were gorgeous objects, and I coveted them fiercely. But I was advised not to be dazzled by superficialities. Although these sets were certainly beautifully produced (and even at premium price, cost a fraction of those gritty, fragile old piles of 78's, in real dollars) they lacked something those old artifacts had: really great singers. Today's singers—Birgit Nilsson apart--didn't compare to the Great Old Ones (apologies to H.P. Lovecraft). Price? Well, she's not bad, but really she shouldn't be singing Verdi, her lower voice isn't strong enough, especially for Elvira in "Ernani". Vickers is an interesting tenor, but you should have heard Melchior and Martinelli in this repertoire. I was learning the Golden Rule of opera devotees: "it was a lot better 30 years ago, but not as good as it was 60 years ago".

I was somewhat skeptical, but I listened to ancient recordings from the start, so I had some inkling of what they were talking about. (Looking back to the 60's, I was closer in time to some of those "ancient recordings" than I am today to those fancy Soria Series sets.) One of the fascinating things about opera is that you can hear successive generations of singers perform the same music over a hundred years or more, and then go to the opera tonight and hear that same music performed by a young singer whose career is just beginning. This is what I think I've learned: in terms of individual vocal quality, and certainly in terms of vocal technique (as opposed to musical accuracy) it's been going downhill more or less since recordings were first made. No reasonable person could dispute that singers, as a group, are better musicians today than ever--so are violinists or bassoon players--but vocal technique, the ability to control the voice, has declined. Why should this be so? Is Battistini really that prodigious a singer? Or Plancon, or De Lucia?

The thing that's most gratifying about these singers—-among the very greatest from a technical point of view, but by no means unique in their time---is their ability to make the music entirely their own. Their techniques are so completely dependable that they can do exactly what they want expressively; they have an apparently limitless range of interpretive choices. This sent me to John Steane's wonderful book "The Grand Tradition", where I found a quote that needs sharing (such quotes are abundant in Steane's writing). Speaking of Battistini, de Lucia, and the French basso Paul Plancon (1851-1914), he writes "It was a school that exercised a singer til he had a technique that made him feel lord of creation and then allowed him the freedom to exploit his good or bad taste to the full". That, singers are no longer schooled to do—and if they could be, if techniques like this could miraculously again be taught, they would not be permitted to do. Whether this is the improvement most conductors would claim it to be, is another question.

In the Golden Age, the singer was "lord of creation". In the post World War II period, and really since at least the time of Toscanini (1867-1957), the crown was no longer the singer's, but the conductor's. Toscanini, famous for his volcanic temper, changed forever performance practice in opera. Now the performance would be given "come scritto", "as written." There is no denying that wonderful gains have resulted from Toscanini's iron will and the revolution in performance practice that has followed. And Toscanini would say, probably, that he'd restored the crown to the composer, not usurped it for himself and his musical heirs. But listening to these ancient recordings, I would suggest that more than a little has been lost as well.