Newsgroup: it.arti.musica.classica
Titolo: Henry James and THE AMERICAN SOPRANO

A refreshing and illuminating article about the U.S. of A. and its
sopranos, or how it treats those who choose not to subject their
(European) art to the nation's cliches and the generally infantile
character of a land with an eternal inferiority complex vis a vis
Europe.
The article was authored by one Rodrigo Maffei Libonati, native and
resident of Brasil.
http://www.geocities.com/rmlibonati/weekarch.html#4
 
HENRY JAMES AND THE AMERICAN SOPRANO - Dec 14th, 2001
I could say I am still under the spell of Henry James. At present, I
am reading his "The Portrait of a Lady", a nicest book. I won&#8217;t
comment on it because I haven&#8217;t finished yet. However, this
Jamesian Leitmotiv - Americans in Europe - led me to take some
conclusions.
In "The Portrait of a Lady", there is a most interesting character
called Henrietta Stackpole, an American patriotic journalist. On
visiting St.Peter&#8217;s in Rome, she declares that
"Michelangelo&#8217;s dome suffered by comparison with that of the
Capitol at Washington". Miss Stackpole has this a priori - American
things are the best. Of course, she has reasons for that. With this in
mind, I was thinking of Deborah Voigt&#8217;s performance as Ariadne,
which is, as you could read in my Strauss discography, incredibly
boring. Naturally, Miss Stackpole would take me for a snob and I can
imagine her description of Voigt&#8217;s voice: "it has the honesty of
American spirit, the amplitude of America&#8217;s land and the
ingenuity of American people". Since Deborah Voigt&#8217;s and Renée
Fleming&#8217;s (if we restrict our examples to the number two)
woefully inadequate performances have been taken as models by many
reviewers (whose nationality I prefer not to reveal), I&#8217;ll try
to propose a group of ideas about this new myth of the musical world -
"THE AMERICAN SOPRANO".
Roland Barthes explains that a myth is a second degree of
signification. We would have an object and a symbol for this object -
a word for example. When we have a myth, we join two objects and they
make a new and original level of signification. For example, red
roses. In the first level of signification, we refer to the kind of
flowers produced of the genus 'Rosa' in the colour red. However, if it
is a guy who sends a girl red roses that would mean he is in love with
her. So we have a second level of signification - red roses + a guy
sending them to a girl = he&#8217;s in love with her. The second level
has a complete new group of ideas turning around it.
The same thing happens to "American Soprano". Of course, in the first
level of analysis, an American soprano refers to a lyric female singer
whose voice has the highest tessitura among human voices who was born
in the United Stated (or, for that matter, of an American mother or
father...). However, why are we never tempted to refer to Arleen Augér
or Barbara Bonney, for example, primarily as "American sopranos"?
Because, for "American Soprano" we mean something very different from
it.
The myth of the American soprano probably started in the Bing years in
the Met, precisely in the Helen Traubel case. To start with, the voice
must be in the Henrietta Stackpole standard - wide as the continent
and solid as the American way of life. This is the premise of this
myth, but it aims something more ambitious than that. The American
soprano is the affirmative that "our [I mean, theirs] way is the best
way". The idea was that, when Ms. Traubel went to night clubs to sing
standards of the American song, she was "pulling her hair down" and
doing the real thing. In ultimate level, the American soprano is the
main character of what one calls "cross-over". Generally, she says
that - until the age of 18 - she has never heard of opera or Lieder,
that she liked blues and Ella Fitzgerald was her idol. She also says
she&#8217;s a normal person and music is only her job - that she has
more in herself than just that.
These elements are fundamental to be a 100% American Soprano. When
Jessye Norman affirmed that she was definitely NOT the soprano next
door and that her youth&#8217;s ideal was Leontyne Price - she lost
her claims to this position. Probably that is why she just debuted in
the temple of the American Soprano - the Metropolitan Opera House -
when she was already famous in the rest of the world. "Why does she
fake a British accent when everybody knows she was born in Georgia?",
is the comment generally applied to her when referred to by some of
her fellow citizens. Another case of desertion is Cheryl Studer. Being
born to a Swiss family, she left her home Michigan when she was 14 to
study in Germany with Hans Hotter et al. She made her name in Bayreuth
and became a national property in Munich. Of course, America was ready
to receive her back. So, an invitation to the Met was produced and
there she was singing Michaela. Magazines were claiming that she was
the new greatest thing - a kind of German repertoire Maria Callas who
had the invincible quality of singing zillions of roles in all kind of
repertoire. Things were great until she made the crime of crimes - she
paid the contract fee in order to leave the Met&#8217;s production of
La Traviata. In her defense, she said that the role of Violetta was
extremely demanding and musically not rewarding. Basically, she
preferred to save her voice to Sieglinde, the Kaiserin and Elsa. When
I was in the Met for the Ring some 5 years ago, on mentioning her
name, I got as an answer "She thought she could cancel the
sponsors&#8217; evenings all the time, until we finally kicked her out
- her voice is not the same anymore". Of course, this was the
beginning of Studer&#8217;s declining popularity and less and less
recordings with her were produced. Although it has become a widespread
rumour that her voice is over, Studer sang here in Rio this year and
proved to be in top form and still one of the best artists to have
appeared in the operatic stages in the second half of XXth century.
The Viennese, for example, never doubted that. A saddest case involved
Kathleen Battle, probably the most charming of light lyric sopranos to
appear in her generation. After a childhood when she and her sisters
were forbidden to use the local club swimming pool and any other kind
of public entertainment, Battle had all the time of the world to
dedicate to her studies. She graduated as a music teacher and, with
the support of the world&#8217;s leading conductors, she became famous
in the whole world. She entered the select club of the Salzburg
Festival artists (the best paid in the world) and was affectionately
called by Herbert von Karajan as "Kathleen". Of course, being a
personal friend of James Levine, Battle was a diva at the Met.
However, the girl who was not allowed to the swimming pool never
"died" inside the worldwide famous Ms.Battle. So, she commited capital
crime no.2 for American Sopranos - she didn&#8217;t seem to be
grateful to the whole world and decided to play the cards her way now
that she was famous. A campaign similar to "We are the World" was made
in American operatic stages to do away with her. She was accused of
bad temper, whimsical manners and lack of comradeship (i.e., the
dictionary definition to what a "diva" is). Nevertheless, the girl
from Ohio should have noticed that, as much as the swimming pool, the
"diva" club was not allowed to her. SHE had to behave. Apparently, in
the strict Salzburg Festival, where Agnes Baltsa was dismissed because
she decided to go to Generalprobe without her shoes, nobody complained
about Battle. Unfortunately, Battle had made the Met too much her
home. She is an American soprano, but hasn&#8217;t been an AMERICAN
SOPRANO - so the world went on without a place for her. Her fans all
over the world have to content with old recordings and to uninspiring
Heidi Grant Murphy et al. If we were speaking Edith Wharton&#8217;s
House of Myrth, it would be trading Lily Bart for Grace Stepney.
So what is behind the myth of American soprano? We go back to
Henrietta Stackpole and her declaration that Michelangelo&#8217;s
Duomo can&#8217;t stand the comparison with the Washington&#8217;s
capitol. Opera is of course an European form of art and, as much as we
want to say it "belongs" to the world, it remains 100% European. As a
matter of fact, we could affirm that of classical musical in a general
way. Even when it is composed by non-European musicians. And, as we
know, Western Culture doesn&#8217;t hail from New York, NY (although
you can find it in quantities and prices unavailable in the rest of
the world), but from places one calls today dirty and unsafe for trip,
such as Greece and Turkey. Native North- and South- American indians
didn&#8217;t produce opera. And without entering the discussion of
superior and inferior cultures, the fact is that classical music is
for us in this side of the ocean foreign art. Wagner was not a nice
guy in a Norman Rockwell painting, Handel&#8217;s prime donne were
unbearable shrews and the Walküren, as much as Amneris&#8217; servants
or the girls in the cigarette factory where Carmen works don&#8217;t
speak English (or for that matter not even Spanish) as native
language.
So, when Jessye Norman says she is not the soprano next door, she is
affirming that, if you are born in Atlanta, Honolulu, Lima, Buenos
Aires or Rio de Janeiro, you don&#8217;t have the time to be nice to
your neighbours and make speeches and cut ribbons in the opening of
supermarkets. One has hundreds of years of culture to absorb. So, one
has not only to understand, but to MASTER foreign languages, one has
to read a lot, listen a lot and to be humble enough to absorb
everything that surrounds the creation of those masterpieces the
audiences all around the world are interested about. The "Henrietta
Stackpole" attitude only leads to a complete impermeability.
Nevetheless, one wants to make of classical music something it is not
and has Yo-Yo Ma and Bobby McFerrin re-inventing Bach. If we remember
that Keith Jarrett has a career as a jazz pianist and composer and,
when he decided to play Bach, he actually studied the harpsichord and
played BACH - one has the hint of what a sensible attitude is.
It is not strange that Brazil doesn&#8217;t suffer the same problem.
Here, classical music is FOREIGN music as much as Japanese koto music
is. No-one whistles La Donna è Mobile in the shower or knows that
there is only ONE Valkyrie and ONE Nibelung in the title of
Wagner&#8217;s operas. However, that doesn&#8217;t mean that nobody
cares for music. The Theatro Municipal in Rio de Janeiro had record
sale of tickets this year. What doesn&#8217;t happen here is the
search for a "next door" attitude. Classical music is seen as a
product for an elite and when someone, whichever class he or she
belongs to, decides that being a tenor or a soprano is the career he
or she wants to follow, he or she feels that he or she has an intimate
connection with a foreign culture and won&#8217;t miss time dedicating
to performing samba, jazz etc. If one wants to sing jazz, one sings
jazz. If one wants to be a soprano, one goes to a long series of
studies in order to acquire all the necessary information to perform
in operatic stages. For instance, Brazilian soprano Eliane Coelho. As
soon as she decided that singing opera was her life, she moved to
Germany, where she followed her studies and has been living in Vienna
all her life. She is a Kammersängerin and a favourite with the
musicians of the Vienna State Opera. When I was in Vienna three or
four years ago, there was a big picture of her in the right façade of
the threatre, next to the ones of Plácido Domingo and José Carreras.
She appears in Brazil once or twice a year and sings Strauss, Verdi
and Puccini. She doesn&#8217;t appear in charity events, sings bossa
nova or gives interviews saying she only listen to João Gilberto at
her house. Nobody expects her to do that. Brazilian audiences are
thankful for her appearances here and for doing what she does best -
being an operatic diva. When she cancelled her Berg/R.Strauss/Wolf
recital, we were very sad, because it is so rare for us to attend such
an occasion. Nobody exptected her to take a chair and a guitar and
sing "The Girl from Ipanema", so that we could say "Ah, she&#8217;s a
true Brazilian soprano". She will be forever in Rio&#8217;s music
lovers&#8217; hearts for the wonderful performance of Strauss&#8217;
Four Last Songs in the Sala Cecília Meirelles. I was in the third row
that evening and couldn&#8217;t help thinking how lovely it was that a
girl from Rio had gone to Germany and dived so deep in German culture
in order to produce such legitimate piece of Straussian singing. And
yet there was the Brazilian in her - she doesn&#8217;t have to stress
that, because she IS so.
In conclusion, the myth of the American Soprano just does a bad
service to American sopranos. The world&#8217;s stages have been
graced by the most thoroughly talented singers who were born in the
USA and we can add to the distinguished examples of Augér, Bonney,
Norman, Battle and many others the beautiful performances offered
today by Deborah Polaski, Susan Anthony, Laura Aikin and (why not a
mezzo?) Susan Graham. Those are artists who seriously, little by
little, have been acquiring or already acquired the necessary
knowledge - musical, stylistic, linguistic - to master their
repertoires and deserve all the praises for that. It just makes me
worry when you have a media product such as Ms.Fleming doing things
her way when she clearly hasn&#8217;t learned to do the right way
first. It would be a pleasure to see her nice voice singing from
Donizetti to Strauss when she has mastered all the necessary
information to do so. Renata Scotto took roughly twice the time to do
it and she didn&#8217;t spend her youth days crooning in
students&#8217; night clubs.
$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

at last!!!!!!!
gaaaaaaaaaby has searched the journalistic world over and found a match
of paranoid cretinism, backed by ahistoric research and half-truths
equal to his own. and these are the conclusions upon which he bases his
facts. as usual, we are prompted to urge:
leave us. you smell.
dft