OPERA The Italian Opera Company of Chicago

In our last discussion, we noted that most of the operas we know and love were composed in the Romantic period, mainly in the 19th century. We also observed that almost all of these works were musically and dramatically focused on the lead female roles, which were performed by the prima donnas, or “first ladies.” In practice this was a direct contradiction to the concept and performance of opera in its first two centuries, when the art was dominated by the castrati, who flourished for so long in most of Europe, and especially in Italy, because women were prohibited from performing on stage. One of the most earthshaking results of the American and French Revolutions was that the social status of women was elevated as never before in Western Civilization. As this impacted opera, women were no longer banned from the stage, and they made the most of their newfound opportunity. The spectacle of real women performing live in public was such a popular novelty that women soon became the dominant performers in opera, replacing the castrati, who were no longer in demand.

The castrati may have been gone but they were not entirely forgotten. Their claim to fame was their incredible ability to improvise with their voices, much like jazz musicians do today with their instruments. The drama of the operas that featured castrati was often based on ancient myths and featured stereotyped characters, which offered no interest to the audiences of the time. But these remarkable fellows could sing so well that no one cared what the story was about, nor did they really care what the composer had written. It didn’t matter that the heroines were played by men or that the heroes had high, feminine voices. When women begin to portray roles once sung by men, it is understandable that they would sing in a similar style to that of their predecessors. This is the florid style we know as coloratura.

But there was a major difference between the singing of the prima donnas of the 19th century and the castrati of before. At the same time that women begin to appear regularly on stage, the audiences were also demanding more naturalism in the drama of opera (women playing women and men playing men was an important part of this). To keep the drama under control, composers, beginning with Mozart, wrote out all the embellished or ornamented passages that had once been left to the improvisations of the castrati. Even in the early years of the prima donna, audiences fully expected to be dazzled by the virtuosity of the lead sopranos and contraltos. If a composer wanted to succeed in this climate, he had to give the audiences what they wanted and showcase the prima donna. Thus the best prima donnas became utterly indispensable to the opera world and they knew it. Following are a few more brief stories of the first prima donnas.

Giulia Grisi (1811-1869)
With the death of Malibran and the decline of Pasta, Giulia Grisi became the next most famous Bel Canto prima donna. She sang all the great roles of Mozart, Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti. She even sang some important roles of Verdi, thus demonstrating an amazing versatility. As a young woman, in her first La Scala season (1831-32), she created the role of Adalgisa to Pasta’s Norma for Bellini and the role of Adelia in Donizetti’s Ugo, Conte di Parigi. Grisi created two more Donizetti roles, Elena in Marin Faliero (1835) and Norina in Don Pasquale (1843), and was very much associated with this composer’s music. But she was most famous for creating the role of Elvira in Bellini’s I Puritani (1835). The public performance of this opera was so successful that it was performed privately by the original principals for Princess Victoria on the occasion of the future legendary Queen’s birthday. Grisi, along with the other Puritani principals became known as the “Puritani Quartet.” This remarkable group also included some of the finest singers of all time - Giovanni Battista Rubini, tenor, Antonio Tamburini, baritone and Luigi Lablache, bass.

The “Puritani Quartet” gave a number of concerts under this name in most European capitals. When Rubini retired, he was replaced by the tenor known as Mario, who was also Grisi’s lover and constant companion. (Grisi had married but only lived with her husband for a short time and was never able to get a divorce or annulment.) Mario (Giovanni Matteo di Candia) also became Grisi’s business manager and made sure that she was always treated like royalty. The couple traveled and performed all over Europe and toured the United States but could not set foot in Italy because Grisi had escaped an unfair contract there and Mario was wanted by the law as a rebel.

Some of the experiences these two had have amply fueled the reputation of the prima donna as an absolute tyrant. In 1848, Benjamin Lumley, impresario of Her Majesty’s Theatre, in competition with the newly formed Covent Garden company, had booked Pauline Viardot (Maria Malibran’s sister) to give her London debut in La sonnambula. Grisi had joined the new Covent Garden outfit, but Mario was booked to sing for Lumley. At the last minute, Mario notified Lumley that he was “indisposed” and so Viardot had to perform with an understudy, which didn’t help her and made Grisi look better by comparison. In another incident in Madrid in 1859, Grisi, who continued performing longer than she should have, was bombarded with vegetables during a performance. Afterward, Mario challenged the company’s impresario to a duel, which was fought and in which both men were wounded. Giulia Grisi retired from singing in 1866.

Jenny Lind (1820-1887)
Although Jenny Lind, the “Swedish Nightingale,” sang in staged operas for only a small part of her long career, she was one of the most popular prima donnas that ever lived. Born in Stockholm, she was incredibly talented as a young woman, and had performed so many famous roles in her native city, that by the time she was 21, her voice was already starting to fail. One reason for this is that she had never been properly trained and was singing on raw talent alone. Lind sought help from the world’s foremost voice teacher Manuel Garcia (son of the first Almaviva and brother of Maria Malibran and Pauline Viardot), who refused to accept her as a student until she had totally rested her voice for six weeks. She followed the teacher’s orders and then Garcia gradually taught Lind the fundamentals of the Bel Canto technique. After ten months of intense private study, she returned to Sweden and took the country by storm. Soon she was singing throughout Germany, for unheard-of fees.

In 1847, for a huge fee, Lind was brought to London by Lumley to compete with Covent Garden. Her performance caused an hysterical mania, the likes of which have rarely been seen. This season was made even more special because Verdi composed I masnadieri with Jenny Lind as his prima donna. This particular opera was not a success but Lind was a sensation in this and all the other works she performed, including Le nozze di Figaro, La sonnambula and Norma. She was especially popular in England and accepted as an Englishwoman because of her well-known personal comportment, which was totally above reproach. In a way, Jenny Lind personified the Victorian Age with her publicly straitlaced manner and her generosity to countless charities. She even refused ever to perform in France because this nation, as she put it, was “shut out from the common portion of God’s blessing upon men, and deservedly so.” It is perhaps because of the sometimes dubious morality of the theatrical world that Jenny Lind retired from singing in staged operas at the age of 29.

Even though Jenny Lind had a rather brief career in opera (if you can call twelve years, and 677 performances of 30 operas “brief”), she became one of the world’s best known singers, a household name even for those who never even attended an opera. This is partly due to her famous American tour, under the auspices of none other than P. T. Barnum. After a typically Barnum-esque six-month publicity campaign, the Lind tour began with a parade up Broadway in New York, which rivaled the Great War victory parades of the next century for mob scenes. When Lind saw the reception she declared her contract void and held Barnum up for more money (her morality, it seems, did not extend to financial affairs). Of course Barnum gave her what she wanted and for the next eight months Lind barnstormed America, singing 92 concerts. Exhausted from the tour, she finally had enough of show business hoopla and called it quits. She married an American pianist and the two of them returned to England in 1852. They had several children and lived a relatively quiet life, during which time Lind occasionally sang in oratorios. Symbolizing the enormous esteem in which she was held by the British nation, when Jenny Lind died in 1887 she became the first woman to be buried at Westminster.

Adelina Patti (1843-1919)
Essentially, Adelina Patti was a throwback to Angelica Catalani in the sense that she was such a great singer that her services were just too expensive for her to be a regular member of even the richest opera companies. So, like Catalani, the operas Patti performed were mostly special productions that featured her as the star attraction. Patti was reputed to have the most perfect voice in all registers that anyone had ever heard. She could securely sound a high G with a firm tone and her trills were perfection. Not only did she have an incredible voice but she sang dramatically as well. The all-time stickler for vocal dramatic interpretation, Giuseppe Verdi, when he heard Patti at 18 years of age singing his own Gilda, exclaimed that he was, “dumfounded, not only by her marvelous technique, but by her dramatic expression that revealed her as a great actress.” Patti, like other great sopranos, personified the term “prima donna.” When she traveled, she had her own private railway car, a menagerie of dogs, cats, birds and other animals and a large sized personal staff of servants.

Adelina Patti’s origins and early childhood pointed towards stardom. Her Italian-born parents were opera singers and her mother experienced birth pains on the night before Adelina was born during a performance of Norma in Madrid. A couple of years later the family emigrated to New York where Patti’s father managed the Astor Street Opera Company, in which he also sang. Adelina was taken to the theater almost every day from age four to seven, at which time she showed herself to be a a genuine prodigy, appearing as a singer in concert with a nine-year-old pianist and a four-year-old drummer. She went on tour at the age of fourteen and in 1859, at the age of sixteen, made her New York operatic debut as Lucia! Two years later Patti made her Covent Garden debut as Amina. Given the lack of respect Europeans generally had for American singers, it must have been a tremendous shock when Patti blew all the critics and her audiences away with an absolutely brilliant performance. From this point on, Adelina Patti was the world’s dominant prima donna.

Blessed with a slim figure and beautiful face, Patti was such an appealing figure that she felt that she could do anything she wished with her unbelievable talent. But that attitude changed when she encountered Rossini in 1862. At a party, she sang the venerable composer’s “Una voce poco fa,” with Rossini at the piano, improvising runs and ornaments at every point. “Who wrote that aria you just sang,” asked Rossini when it was over. Genuinely shocked, this incident caused Patti to reconsider her approach to music. Seeking Rossini’s advice, Patti dedicated herself to the absolute correctness that she would display from then on.

In the tradition of the great prima donnas, Patti was as money hungry as they come and demonstrated this by scheduling well-publicized “Final Performances” for the last 20 years of her career. In her real farewell New York performance as Violetta (her very favorite role), she took all the many diamonds that had been given to her by wealthy and noble admirers over the course of her career and had them sown into her costume. One can only imagine the effect this must have had on that audience, to see her dazzling in the lights as she sang Verdi like no one else could. Indeed, this was a fitting final display for one of the great prima donnas.