From: conrad@brahms.udel.edu (Jon Conrad)
Subject: J.B. Steane's "The Grand Tradition"
Organization: University of Delaware
Date: Mon, 17 Aug 1992 15:19:11 GMT

I have recently been rereading (for about the fifth time) J. B.
Steane's "The Grand Tradition: Seventy Years of Singing on
Record" (NY: Scribner, 1974).  Though nearly 20 years have
passed since Steane wrote this book, Steane's judgements still
impress of the reaction of someone who has listened closely and
well, and has an exceptional descriptive gift when it comes to
singing.  He always sharpens my perceptions, even when I
disagree with him.  I thought I would quote some brief samples
of his writing about various singers we have been discussing
here lately, as examples of a well-balanced, historically
informed listener's views.

"While about Sembrich, her methods, her excellences and faults,
there is always something that raises questions, with [LUISA]
TETRAZZINI everything is clear as daylight.  Perfectly clear, if
we listen to her at her best, in 'Ah non giunge' for example,
are the reasons why we should value her recordings.  Like
Sembrich and Melba she is an invigorating singer, bold, full of
spirit and energy....She had the bright tone of a bach trumpet. 
There was also something of a dramatic soprano's fullness in her
voice from about the upper F to B flat; it seems an odd
comparison, but if I cast around asking whom these upper notes
remind me of, the only answer that comes is Birgit Nilsson....
Her records are strangely variable.  Sometimes it seems that
there was hardly any voice at all in the middle and lower
registers, and yet in other records...it sounds sturdy and quite
adequate....Sometimes it seems that there was hardly any voice
at all in the middle and lower registers, and yet in other
records (as in a very uncharming 'Voi che sapete') it sounds
sturdy and quite adequate.  Sometimes one feels she has not the
slightest interest in interpretation, yet her Traviata records
are genuinely dramatic...We know, through her, how certain kinds
of music can sound, and it is the better part of her voice that
we hear singing these when we listen inside our own heads.  She
is also a tonic.  For after listening to the more enervating
beauties of the German coloraturas and the drooping loveliness
of some of our own contemporaries, we feel how refreshing a
little simple, forthright liveliness would be, and then it is
time to look out a good Tetrazzini."

[in a chapter titled Decline:]  "That LILY PONS should be chosen
for some adverse comment may be more readily acceptable in
England than in America, where she has had as much success as
any singer in recent times.  English music critics have always
been rather critical of her, sometimes, one suspects, because
she was popular and pretty and went in to films -- formidable
drawbacks....There are excerpts from a performance of Lucia di
Lammermoor at the Metropolitan, with the audience responding
rapturously...Lily Pons' high notes are not doubt a principal
cause; they seem invariably to be well taken and well
sustained...Some of the fiorature are good too: the upward
scales are distinct, and there is some accurate arpeggio work,
powerful and rather brilliant.  The trills are poor: loose and
sketchy, or hardly there at all.  Interpretation can hardly be 
said to be in evidence either....As far as one can judge tone,
it is sweet, but while there is evident beauty in the high
notes, the voice sounds shallow and even tremulous on the stave. 
Very occasionally, the intonation is suspect....the general
impression is not at all contradicted by the commercial records. 
Some of these are quite beautiful, and they show what a
delightful singer she could be.  The is the 'Caro nome' of 1931,
sung with a tenderness and absorption with which she seems
rarely to be credited....She also recorded some songs by Handel,
Pergolesi and other seventheeth- and eighteenth-century
composers, but whatever she might have felt about them we shall
never know, for it remains uncommunicated.  The runs are
aspirated, almost as a point of honor, and there is no mincing
it that they sound very bad, as does the frequent scooping
approach to high notes....With this delimiting of the
'coloratura's' province went a change in the technique required. 
Because a firm cantilena was not the focus of attention, there
was less incentive to cultivate it.  Yet this is the basis of
singing in the European tradition, and a deficiency here goes
with the sort of short-cut to flexibility of which the aspirate
is the clearest example.  This in turn is likely to affect the
tone itself, encouraging breathines and withdrawing from the
singer the power to draw a poised, economical line of sound."

"[ZINKA] MILANOV does certain things to perfection; it then
registers as a genuine disappointment that one can enjoy one
phrase and not the next, or one part of an aria and not what
follows...[examples from Aida]...the pattern is clear by this
time: where there are high notes to be floated, soft passages to
be sung with a creamy tone, phrases where the solo voice can
hold a long line uninterrupted by declamatory or other
pressures, then all is more than well.  At other times the lack
of bite is felt, possibly by the singer herself, whose tone then
becomes unsteady under pressure.  Thus, the Aida starts badly
and ends beautifully....Perhaps best of all, in Il Trovatore,
she comes into her kingdom in Act IV....It is thus that she
remains a kind of archetype: where one wants soft singing, its
surface suggesting velvet, its texture cream, and the whole
things set somehow magically afloat in the night-sky, well, of
course one can try Ponselle, Lemnitz, Caballe, but in this
particular matter it is hardly possible to do better than with
Milanov."

"What Christoff has done for Russian song, VICTORIA DE LOS
ANGELES has done for Spanish.  Nothing sunless here, either in
the songs themselves or in the voice and personality of the
singer.  The smile and charm which have made her live recitals
such happy occasions are present and infectious on records....
Her Marguerite is particularly fine in the Prison Scene -- we
really do care what happens to this one....Melisande is happy in
the medium-to-low tessitura of the part, while Antonia, delicate
and tender, has to strive for the high notes.  These have often
caused anxiety to her listeners, sometimes quite needlessly....
de los Angeles has presented in her Butterfly an example of 
latter-day greatness in the standard operatic repertoire: beauty
of voice matched by beauty of spirit, a full heart to feel, and
taste and intelligence to direct."

I'm tempted to go on, but I'd better stop myself.  I just wish
I'd bought the book, either when it was first published on upon
its mid-80s reprinting.  Ah, life's lost opportunities....

Jon Alan Conrad
Newsgroups: rec.music.classical