OPERA The Italian Opera Company of Chicago

In “The Feminine Touch” we noted that after the American and French Revolutions, the newly empowered woman was finally able to display herself on the public stages of all of Europe and the New World. This phenomenon proved to be so fascinating that the operas tended to focus on female characters throughout the 19th– and early 20th-centuries. We get an idea of how important the principal female singers were to the opera just from the phrase, “prima donna” (first lady), which is commonly applied today in a pejorative sense, to both men and women who tend to have an exaggerated sense of their self-worth. In the opera house of the Romantic era, one could not overestimate the importance of the prima donna except at his own peril. We might well wonder why women wielded such power there when men seemed to rule just about every other aspect of life. Suffice it here to say only that men and women are different, and that the spectacle of a woman unabashedly baring herself spiritually to the public gaze (which is exactly what happens in the act of singing), was captivating to the point of giving the best of these artists anything they wanted. Pioneers in any field established the mold, and made it much easier for those that followed. Hence those today whose hearts are gladdened by the experience of Italian opera owe a debt to the first prima donnas. Following are brief accounts of some of them.

Angelica Catalani (1780-1849 )
Angelica Catalani flourished in that period between Mozart, who invented modern Italian opera, and Rossini, who was the first of the five Italian masters of the 19th century. The daughter of a bass chorister, Catalani made her debut at the Fenice at the age of seventeen. Modeling her singing after the castrati, she soon made a name for herself with her incredible coloratura, and an extraordinary talent for both volume and improvisation. Unfortunately, with the exception of Mozart (she played Susanna in the first London performance of Le nozze di Figaro), she had very little good music to sing so she herself was the reason people flocked to hear her. Catalani’s admirers in every corner of Europe were also willing to shell out unheard of sums for tickets to her concerts. In England, Catalani regularly received £2,500 for a single engagement. (Try to imagine what such a figure would be by today’s valuation!) No woman had ever before been paid so much for her work (at least that could be reported).

The downside to this was that Catalani could not perform for an ordinary opera company. As her manager/husband, former French officer Paul Valabrèque put it, “all that is needed for a successful opera production is my wife and a few puppets.” Worshipped like a goddess, Catalani had the temperament to match. When she was politely asked to move from a section of a Munich cathedral that was reserved for a noble family, she angrily stormed out of the church, cancelled all her Munich performances, left town that evening and never performed in Munich again. (These days it is fashionable to consider such behavior in an artist boorish and unacceptable. Singers today must not make any waves and must submit to the dictates of stage directors, set designers and costume designers, who have really nothing to do with the music. It is probably in university music schools that singers are indoctrinated with the principle of not displaying any temperament at the professional level. Unfortunately this may significantly account for the lack of personality in contemporary voices.) Be that as it may, Catalani also donated huge amounts of money to charities in many of the countries in which she performed.

Isabel Colbran (1785-1845)
The Spanish-born soprano Isabel Colbran is another important figure in the development of modern opera. After her Italian debut at La Scala in 1808, she was hired in 1811 by the period’s most prominent impresario, Domenico Barbaja, to be the leading soprano for the Teatro San Carlo, still the first theater of opera in Italy. Shortly after arriving in Naples, she became Barbaja’s mistress, which could not have hurt her position there. In 1815 Colbran begin to create roles for another of Barbaja’s acquisitions, composer Gioachino Rossini, who revolutionized Italian opera with his innovations in scenic structure, especially in his serious operas. For Rossini, Colbran starred in the premieres of Elisabetta, regina d’Inghilterra (1815), Otello (1816), Armida (1817), Mosè in Egitto (1818), Ricciardo e Zoraide (1818), Ermione (1819), La donna* del* lago (1819), Maometto II (1820), Zelmira (1822) and Semiramide (1823).

After Zelmira was first performed in Naples, it was to be staged in Vienna, where Barbaja was also the director of the Kärntnertor Theatre. On the way there from Naples, at Castenaso, near Bologna, the then 38-year-old Colbran married Rossini, who had just turned 30. Here we are reminded of the relationship between Giuseppe Verdi and Giuseppina Strepponi (creator of the lead female role in Verdi’s first great hit, Nabucco), another prima donna. Unlike the latter union between composer and singer that lasted the rest of their lives, however, Colbran and Rossini were not happy together for long. Perhaps this was because Colbran’s career was ending just as Rossini’s was blossoming (although this was the same situation for Verdi and Strepponi). In any case Colbran left Rossini shortly after moving to Paris, returned to Italy and officially separated from the composer in 1837.

Colbran, who was wildly popular in Naples, was clearly the inspiration for some of Rossini’s most important roles. She was really the first prima donna (actually a mezzo-soprano) for whom music was written by a great Italian composer. All the other Italian opera masters would follow suit in focusing their operas on the prima donna.

Giuditta Pasta (1797-1865)
Born Giuditta Negri, Pasta was the legendary soprano’s married name, her husband being a tenor of indifferent ability. The two of them performed together in the early part of her career, appearing in Paris as a couple of Catalani’s “puppets” in 1816. She supposedly possessed a somewhat flawed voice and yet was the dominant soprano in opera for ten years. Stendhal, the most important critic of the early Bel Canto period, once wrote, “Where can I find words adequate to describe the visions of celestial beauty that spread before us in dazzling glory when Madame Pasta sings, or the strange glimpses into the sublime and fantastic passions that her art affords us?”

It was not only Stendhal that found Pasta’s artistry so impressive. She was rapturously hailed when she sang Desdemona in the Parisian premiere of Rossini’s Otello in 1821. She then went on to create roles for all three of the great Bel Canto composers – for Rossini in Il viaggio a Reims (1825), for Bellini in I Capuleti e i Montecchi (1830), La sonnambula (1831), Norma (1831) and Beatrice di Tenda (1832) and for Donizetti in Anna Bolena (1830) and Ugo, Conte di Parigi (1832). Giuditta Pasta is considered the first leading opera singer to take acting seriously. By using gestures that might be thought of as formulaic and contrived by today’s standards, she nevertheless elevated the dramatic element of opera, in harmony with a trend that only waxed stronger as the century wore on. No composer or director told Pasta to do this, so her efforts were truly creative and no doubt had their effect on composers as well as audiences.

Maria Malibran (1808-1836)
One of the most artistic families of all times was the fabulous Garcia clan, the patriarch of which was Manuel Garcia, the tenor who created the role of Almaviva in Il barbiere di Siviglia (1816) and several other Rossini characters. Three of Garcia’s children were also important figures in opera, but the most famous by far was the soprano (or mezzo-soprano, depending on whom you believe), Maria Malibran. When reading about her one cannot help but think of Maria Callas. Malibran would sing often and could sing every kind of role there was – mezzo or soprano – and do justice to them all. She had a certain magnetism in her stage presence that was universally noted, and she always lived in the fast lane, which added to her notoriety. For example, she would often travel disguised as a man, personally driving the coach horses. In Venice, depressed by the standard black color of the gondolas, Malibran had her own gondola custom painted in bright hues and had her gondoliers garishly uniformed.

Malibran was rigorously schooled by her father and actually appeared in an opera at the age of six. Her London debut was in 1825 as Rosina, opposite her father in his now familiar role of Almaviva. She and her father performed Il barbiere di Siviglia again later on that year in the first American performance of Italian opera. But Maria longed to escape the authority of her father and while in New York, the eighteen-year-old soprano married a wealthy merchant named Eugène Malibran, who promptly went bankrupt right after the marriage. So Maria returned to Europe without her husband and free from her father to launch one of the most legendary careers in the history of opera. She did not create any roles of note but she was ultimately more in demand than any other living soprano. In her early twenties she began an affair with a prominent violinist, Charles de Bériot, whom she finally married shortly before her death (after paying a handsome bribe to her first husband.)

Not only was Malibran a fantastic singer with a huge range but she was also a fine pianist – she often gave vocal recitals where she accompanied herself. On top of everything else she was a beautiful woman, the envy of all other prima donnas. No doubt the manner of her untimely and tragic death has fueled her enduring mystique. While engaged in Brussels, in her free time, Malibran indulged herself in one of her great passions, horseback riding. One morning she fell of her mount and was obviously hurt. But in true Malibran style she shook off her discomfort and insisted on performing that evening. After several performances in Belgium, she went on to Manchester where she continued to sing as scheduled. Before her last performance there she fainted and collapsed. When she revived, Malibran insisted on going through with the concert, which she did. Afterwards, however, she was rushed to a local hospital where she died a few days later, probably from internal bleeding.

(To be continued)