To Hear You Sing Again Full Movie In Italian 720p Download
Leida Haury
BASTIANICH: Well, it's hard for a mother to hear that a child - no matter, you know, what the illness is. So the fact of assessing that and understanding and understanding that it eventually could be cured, that sort of alleviates you because you're part of the solution. So keeping him in a brace with metal bars in front of it - and it had this this - what is this thing that sticks so that you can stick it? They use it on everything.
Just as I was about to open the door I heard a woman's voice singing inItalian; it sounded like a selection from an opera. It was followed byapplause, and then a moaning, and one shrill cry, as though someone hadbeen hurt. There was no doubt now as to where the sounds that I heard inmy room had come from; they had come from the other side of the door.There was a mystery there for me to solve. But I was not ready to solveit; so I turned the key noiselessly, and with the door locked, tiptoedback to my bed.
Down the long cave-like room I went. There seemed to be no end to it,though many of the columns were surrounded with empty chains. Only thosenear the door had their human flies in the trap. In the oppositedirection the rows of pillars stretched into a far oblivion. I thoughtthat at the end there was the black mouth of a tunnel, but I could notbe sure and dared not go that far to explore the truth. Then, out ofthat tunnel, I heard a voice come, a singing voice. Slipping my shoesoff, I ran back near the door and hid as best I could in a dark recess,back of a far piece of stone. I stood there in the darkness, my torchout, the handle of the revolver in my hand.
They stood there in silence, twenty odd blind men, chained against asmany pillars of stone; and then the woman, standing in the middle ofthem, started to sing. It was a well-trained voice, but metallic, andher high notes had in them the cry of a wild animal. No femininesoftness there. She sang from an Italian opera, and I knew that I hadheard that song before. While she sang, her audience waited silently. Atlast she finished, and they started to applaud. Shrunken hands beatnoisily against shrunken hands.
Then I went through the door. Again I heard the Donna Marchesi sing toan audience that would never hiss her. She left, and I started todistribute the files. From one blind wretch to the next I went,whispering words of cheer and instruction for the next night. They wereto cut through a link in the chain, but in such a way that the Tiger Catwould not suspect that they had gained their liberty. Were they pleasedto have a hope of freedom? I am not sure, but they were delighted atanother prospect.
Back in my hiding-place I waited, and soon I heard the singing voice.Ten minutes later the Donna Marchesi had her lantern hung on the nail.Ah! She was more beautiful that night than I had ever seen her. Dressedin filmy white, her beautiful body, lovely hair, long lithe limbs wouldhave bound any man to her through eternity. She seemed to sense thatbeauty, for, after giving out the first supply of rolls, she varied herprogram. She told her audience how she had dressed that evening fortheir special pleasure. She described her jewels and her costume. Shealmost became grandiose as she told of her beauty, and, driving in thedagger, she twisted it as she reminded them that never would they beable to see her, never touch her or kiss her hand. All they could do wasto hear her sing, applaud and at last die.
Such attention can open minds, and ears, to the innate musicality of so much writing that endures, beyond those canonical encounters when a major composer sets the words of an equally mighty poet (from Schumann's Heine to Britten's Blake). Good prose as well as verse can often sound eminently singable. But, although opera libretti quarry novels, plays and short stories as raw material, it's hard to find distinguished examples of composers who have mined non-fiction. This summer, I was lucky enough to hear the premiere of one such rarity when the Italian conductor-composer Francesco Cilluffo directed the first performance of his song cycle for soprano, cello and strings, "The Land to Life Again". Cilluffo has set passages from the war diaries of the writer Iris Origo. Aptly enough, the premiere took place in a castle courtyard just up the road from her family house and garden at La Foce in south-eastern Tuscany.
Not yet thirty at the time, Rosa Ponselle (1897-1981) was at the zenithof her career when she made her radio debut on New Year's Day 1927. Theoccasion was the inaugural broadcast of The Victor Talking MachineHour, sponsored by the recording-industry giant for which Ponselle hadbeen making phonograph records since December 1923. Despite the successof the program, Ponselle was not heard again on the air until New Year'sDay 1928, when Victor reintroduced her to a growing nationwide radioaudience. During the months separating the two broadcasts, Ponselle hadsung La vestale, La Gioconda, La forza del destino,L'Africana, Cavalleria rusticana, Il trovatore,L'amore dei tre re, and Aida with the Metropolitan Opera,had appeared in thirty-seven concerts in nearly as many cities fromCanada to Cuba during the off season, and had capped the year bysinging the title role in the Metropolitan's revival of Norma,in which she had "won the transcendent victory of her career," in thewords of one critic.1For the New Year's 1928 Victor Talking Machine Hour program, CarlDreher, a columnist for Radio Broadcast magazine, was an invitedguest and contributed this description of Ponselle during the broadcast:She stands about three feet from the microphone and not much farther fromthe conductor, who is one of the regular maestri from the Metropolitan.[End Page 100]The orchestra of about thirty-five is behind her, and a mixed chorus ofabout the same number is back and to one side, full thirty feet from thetransmitters. . . . Miss Ponselle weaves back and forth as she sings,varying her distance from the microphone according to the loudness ofthe passages. During piano portions she advances to a point where hermouth is about eighteen inches from the transmitters, while when shewants to hit a note hard she may get as far away as four feet. . . . Herassistant supplies the loud speaker ear for her. When he considers thatshe is getting too close he moves his hands apart with the familiar "Sobig!" gesture of the fisherman; when she is too far from the pick-up headvances the parallel palms of his hands to within a few inches of eachother, and when she is hitting it right the coach signals with a shortvertical gesture, palms down, like an umpire saying "Safe!" to a runnerwho has just slid into a base.2"It is very comical," Dreher added, ". . . to see her glancing constantly,with the hundred-thousand candlepower eyes which are part of her operaticequipment, . . . to see whether she is treating the microphone properly."3Between January 1928, when Dreher wrote his description, and October 1934,when the first of the programs heard in Rosa Ponselle on the Airwere broadcast, the diva had become a bona fide radio star. At firstreluctant to devote much time to the new medium, Ponselle began to changeher mind in the 1932-33 season, when her income from radio surpassed herMetropolitan earnings. Especially to a shrewd business mind like hers,the arithmetic was too lopsided to ignore: compared to the rigors ofa three-hour opera performance, which netted her $1,000 from the Metin the depths of the Depression, a one-hour radio broadcast earned hernearly $3,000 on average.4And unlike concerts, which required substantial train travel andoverhead expenses, her radio appearances involved little more thana cursory rehearsal a day or two before the program was to air and ashort commute from her Manhattan penthouse to a midtown radio studioon the evening of the broadcast. As Ponselle's career-long secretary,Edith Prilik, once commented, "Singing a couple of arias--and in any key that she felt like--and doing two or three ballads on top ofthat, didn't even seem like work to her."5Fortunately for posterity, a sizable portion of Ponselle's radioappearances on such popular programs as the Atwater Kent RadioHour, General Motors Symphony, Ford Sunday Evening Hour,Chesterfield Hour, Heinz Hall of Fame, RCA Magic Key,and General Electric's Twilight Hour and Sunday Circlewere preserved on "airchecks," or private recordings commissioned bythe artist or the program's sponsor to critique sound levels and otherproduction values. In later years, many of these airchecks were releasedon private LPs that were sold on a subscription basis. But these privateLPs were both a blessing and a curse. Most of them were produced byEdward J. Smith, an opera buff and former correspondent for theHollywood Reporter, whose mastery of tape-recording techniques[End Page 101]and zeal for tracking down airchecks were offset by a disregard forconsistent sound quality, accurate documentation, or even authenticity.6Still, the numerous radio performances Smith was able to preserve anddistribute through his "EJS" private label enabled thousands of operaenthusiasts to hear live performances by Ponselle and other singersof her generation when they were still in their prime.Nearly fifty years later, fortunately, audio conservator Ward Marstonhad at his command digital equipment and techniques that make Smith'scursorily edited analog dubbings seem almost primitive. Marston alsohad the advantage of working from the original aluminum and acetateairchecks, obtained through the Rosa Ponselle Foundation (to which "aportion of the sales will go to the Rosa Ponselle Scholarship Fund,"according to the liner notes), with additional source material providedby Lawrence F. Holdridge, William Shaman, Robert Fazio, Peter Lack, andespecially Bill Park, a personal friend and the authorized discographerof the diva, and Marston's coproducer for this exquisite two-volume collection.Between January 1927 and April 1937, when she chose to end hernineteen-season affiliation with the Metropolitan, Rosa Ponselleperformed in seventy-five radio broadcasts.7Of these, five complete opera broadcasts (a 1935 Traviata, andfour performances of Carmen in 1936 and 1937) and one partialperformance (poorly recorded segments from a 1935 broadcast of DonGiovanni) are known to have survived. The rest of the singer'sradio performances took place on widely popular musical programs, whereher choice of material was limited to turn-of-the-century ballads,light-opera selections, sacred songs, and an occasional aria fromthe repertory she was then singing at the Met--mainly selections"not intended for a 'high-brow' audience," as Marston writes in theliner notes.True enough, as far as it goes. By her own preference, however, and withalmost no exception, the songs Ponselle performed on radio were staplesof her concert repertoire. "I think that the artist ought to speakto the public, as they say, 'heart to heart,'" she told a MusicalAmerica interviewer in 1922. While acknowledging that "arias fromher best-known roles form an important part of her recital program,"she told her interviewer that she also liked "the simple song."8But to Libbie Miller, who began managing Ponselle's concert schedule in1922 and eventually became her exclusive manager, these "simple songs"kept the singer from achieving the artistic stature that many of hercontemporaries enjoyed:She would sing classical songs and lieder only because she had to, but what she really liked were songs like "Annie Laurie," "BeautifulDreamer," and old-style popular songs that were not suitable for anythingresembling a recital. She also favored Neapolitan songs, which werevery popular and which she did very well--but, again, Paolo Tosti isnot Schubert. Later on, she also tended to pick what I would call[End Page 102]"novelty pieces"--songs like "The Night Wind" or "The Big Brown Bear,"which are pure hokum. But in her mind they were entertaining, and whenshe made up her mind about a song, you could forget about trying to gether to change it.9Predictably, these "old-style popular songs" proliferate in bothvolumes of Rosa Ponselle on the Air: "I Love You Truly," "TheLast Rose of Summer," "Danny Boy," "Annie Laurie," "Carry Me back to OldVirginny," "Home, Sweet Home," "Comin' thro' the Rye," "On Moonlight Bay,""Humoresque," "The Rosary," and "My Old Kentucky Home" are heard, oftenmore than once, among the fifty-six songs these discs comprise. So tooare "The Night Wind," "The Big Brown Bear," "What's in the Air Today?,""The Sleigh," "The Cuckoo Clock," and others that Ponselle sang inconcert despite her manager's dismissal of them as "pure hokum." Whichis not to say that they are too trifling to be appreciated on theirown terms--especially when sung by an artist who not only understoodbut also could convey their sentiments "heart to heart," and who couldmold their phrases with a voice and technique that most critics judged(as Olin Downes once wrote) "probably the greatest soprano voice ofher generation."10Not all of the songs in these two volumes are drawing-room ballads andnovelty numbers. Ponselle routinely included Spanish, French, and Germanselections in her broadcasts, just as she did in her concerts. Her foraysinto Spanish, as evidenced by airchecks of Valverde's "Clavelitos,"Buzzi-Peccia's "El Morenito," and such standards as "Estrellita,""La Golondrina," and "La Violetera" (which was then enjoying newfoundpopularity after Charles Chaplin featured it in his 1931 film CityLights), are vocally beautiful but decidely unidiomatic. Even more soare Ponselle's performances in German--Schubert's "Der Erlkönig,"Brahms's "Wiegenlied," and Reger's "Mariä Wiegenlied" amongthem. All are sung phonetically and tend to betray the diva's insecurityin a musical culture that was literally and figuratively foreign toher. They are offset, however, by the sacred songs that Ponsellechose for her broadcasts--especially her performances of "Ave Maria"by Schubert, Sandoval, Kahn, and the Weatherly adaptation of Mascagni'sCavalleria intermezzo.Ponselle's star shines brightest, not unexpectedly, in the Neapolitansongs she learned in the Italian communities of Meriden, Waterbury, andNew Haven, Connecticut, where she matured from a nickelodeon pianist toa café singer. It was in New Haven that her raw talent compelleda well-to-do Italian restaurateur, James G. Ceriani, to take her to theMetropolitan Opera and assure her that one day she would sing there. Afew of the popular Italian songs that Ponselle sang as a teenager, inNew Haven's San Carlino movie theater and Ceriani's popular CaféMellone near the Yale campus, were still delighting radio audiencesnationwide two decades later--especially Tosti's "L'ultima canzone" and"Addio," De Curtis's "Carmè," and Falvo's "Dicitencello vuje,"all of which survived in aircheck form and can be heard in RosaPonselle on the Air.[End Page 103]Among the eighty-three broadcast excerpts contained in these twovolumes, less than a fourth are opera arias. With the exceptionof "Bel raggio" from Semiramide, "Batti, batti" from DonGiovanni, "Printemps qui commence" from Samson et Dalila, and"Divinités du Styx" from Alceste, none of which Ponselleever sang in the opera house, the remainder of the arias heard in Onthe Air are from roles she was performing at the time. Listeningto her sing "Voi lo sapete" from Cavalleria, "Addio del passato"from Traviata, and "Ritorna vincitor!" from Aida clarifiesas could little else Ponselle's preference for listening to her airchecksinstead of her commercial recordings. "I'm not that fond of many of myrecordings. The tempos were either too fast or too slow because of thatdamned clock on the wall," she said, referring to the limited runningtime of 78 r.P.M. records. "But on radio, I sang mosteverything just like I sang it at the Metropolitan or like I would singit in one of my concerts."11"Even [on] the best [records] I made," she went on to say, "I stilldon't hear the full sound of my voice. That's why I like to listento the [airchecks] they made from my radio broadcasts like TheChesterfield Hour, which I did with André Kostelanetz, andespecially my Traviata and Carmen [Metropolitan Opera]broadcasts. When I listen to those, I can hear more of my voice thanI can on my records."12So can we, thanks to the quality of sound Marston has been able toextract from time-worn metal disks recorded nearly seventy years ago,with no thought given to their permanence. To hear Ponselle freed fromthe spatial confines of a recording studio and the limitations imposedby "that damned clock" is to hear her opulent tones endow "Ritornavincitor!" with a richness and a nuance that her otherwise excellentVictor electrical recording approximates but never quite equals. The sameholds for her radio performances of Cavalleria's "Voi lo sapete,"in which the sheer power of her voice is a reminder why she was labeled"Caruso in petticoats" shortly after her Metropolitan debut.Other radio performances--in particular, "Addio del passato" fromTraviata (from a 1934 Chesterfield Hour broadcast) and"La Vergine degli angeli" from Forza (captured on an aircheck fromThen and Now, a series aired in 1936 by Sears, Roebuck and Companyon the occasion of its golden anniversary)--correct defects Ponselleheard in some of her commercial recordings and on-air performancesto which she often called attention in interviews. "I just didn't putenough of myself into it that day," she said of her "Addio del passato"in a June 1935 Met broadcast of Traviata.13But under Kostelanetz's baton in Manhattan's Hudson Theater, whereThe Chesterfield Hour weekly programs were broadcast, Ponsellefelt she gave a better performance of the aria. The same with "LaVergine degli angeli," which she had recorded for Victor in 1928 withEzio Pinza and the Metropolitan Opera Chorus. "That record is bad--mypart of it, I mean, not Pinza's," she said emphatically. "Somebody inthe [Victor] studio turned up the volume on my microphone, which mademe sound like I was singing Gioconda, which is hardly the wayI would sing a prayer. In the [opera] house I sang it in mezza voce,which is how it's marked."14On the Sears Then and Now program, notwithstanding the lack ofa basso and the wayward[End Page 104]singing of an anemic chorus, Ponselle indeed delivers the scene withprayerlike subtlety.Two other arias from the diva's repertory would never be heard at all wereit not for airchecks on which they were captured and preserved. Ponselle'sperformance of "O divina Afrodite" from Romano Romani's Fedra, fromher 1936 appearances on The Chesterfield Hour and RCA's MagicKey program, displays her dynamic range in an aria expressly writtenfor her voice. Arguably more important is a Chesterfield Houraircheck of "Tu che invoco" from La vestale, in which Ponselle waslauded at home and abroad for her mastery of "Spontini's long, gravelysculptured melodies" and the "stilted pathos that is their quaint andspecial mark."15Her success as Giulia in the Metropolitan's revival of 1925-26presaged her crowning achievement as Norma two seasons later, whenthe formidable critic W. J. Henderson pronounced her "without doubtthe foremost dramatic soprano of the Italian opera."16As heard in an April 1936 aircheck included in volume 2 of On theAir, Ponselle was still able to replicate that same mastery in"Tu che invoco" a decade after her initial triumph at the Met.Overall, the two volumes of Rosa Ponselle on the Air fill avoid in the singer's recorded legacy. Between January 1929 and November1939, Ponselle made no commercial recordings at all, choosing instead totake advantage of the exposure and income she could derive from networkradio performances. Consequently, the airchecks that she or her sponsorsarranged to have recorded not only bridge that ten-year gap, but alsocapture the legendary Ponselle voice as operagoers and concertgoersheard it in the latter years of her Metropolitan career. And as withother Depression-era radio programs, the airchecks heard in On theAir have a historical and cultural significance that goes beyondtheir musical worth. Marston, by choosing to include the voices ofthe announcers who delivered the spoken introductions to Ponselle'sradio appearances, has managed (as he writes in the liner notes)"to convey the atmosphere of the original broadcasts." To those whohave experienced the plumminess of tube-amplified music pulsing from amagnet-driven speaker in a Zenith or Crosley superheterodyne console,the formal yet inviting voices of Milton Cross and his contemporarieswill be nostalgic reminders of a time when every musical genre from jazzto grand opera were heard routinely on network radio.If the remarkable restorations contained in the two Marston volumesare not entirely matched by textual accuracy (in volume 1 Ponselle ismisidentified as "Rosa Raisa" in one photographic caption, and in volume2 the tenor James Melton is referred to as a "conductor"), these areminor errors of no more significance than eraser marks along the marginsof a well-written page. Individually or in tandem, the two volumes ofRosa Ponselle on the Air are a must for those who appreciate themajesty of a true dramatic-soprano voice. "I would express it this way,"Metropolitan coloratura Nina Morgana said when describing the uniquevoice of her colleague and friend: "From the A-natural in her upperrange to about an F an octave below it, the tones that Rosa Ponselle[End Page 105]sang may have been the most beautiful that ever came from a woman'sthroat."17
James A. DrakeJames A. Drake, campus executive officer, University ofCentral Florida, Brevard Campus; authorNotes1.From a review of Norma by Richard Stokes, New York EveningWorld, 17 November 1927.2.Carl Dreher, "Rosa Ponselle before the Microphone," Radio Broadcast(April 1928),
p. 429.3.Ibid.4.Author's interview of Libbie Miller, August 1978.5.Author's interview of Edith Prilik Sania, July 1977.6.For a rounded portrait of the often-controversial Smith, see Enrico CarusoJr. and Andrew Farkas, Enrico Caruso: My Father and My Family(Portland, Ore.: Amadeus Press, 1990), pp. 477-88.7.Bill Park, "Discography--Radio Broadcasts," in James A. Drake, RosaPonselle: A Centenary Biography (Portland, Ore.: Amadeus Press,1997), pp. 470-85.8.R. M. Knerr, "Rosa Ponselle Makes a Record--and a Few Remarks," MusicalAmerica, 15 July 1922, p. 5.9.Author's interview of Libbie Miller, August 1978.10.New York Times, 17 November
1927.11.Author's interview of Rosa Ponselle, March 1978.12.Author's interview of Rosa Ponselle, December 1978.13.Ibid.14.Author's interviews of Rosa Ponselle, June 1975 and December 1978.15.New York Tribune, 13 November
1925.16.New York Sun, 17 November 1927.17.Author's interview of Nina Morgana Zirato, November 1975.// -->Previous ArticleOpera Viva: Canadian Opera Company: The First Fifty Years (review)