Roberto Alagna
Steff
It is a very lovely and heartfelt tribute of Alagna to his childhood idol.
About three years ago I had already translated parts of the pages which are about Mario (thank you to Pam Latham from “The British Mario Lanza Society,” for digging out this translation for me in her archives, as I had lost it!), but for some or another reason, I had left out a few paragraphs at that time.
Here is the entire translation of the Lanza relevant pages:
“Having gone to bed I would relive the day in my thoughts. All quietly I would sing the music that I had heard, maybe even a new song that my father had learned at the building site, and I would make plans for the future. All energy and all passion for the drama eventually had found a vent, no matter if I wanted to become an acrobat, an actor or a singer. Deep inside myself I gave preference to the latter one. But how to achieve this?
One evening my mother carefully prepared her recorder to tape something on TV. When I asked her what it was exactly, she only replied mischievously: “Wait and see, I am sure you will like it.” My sister Mariella was already sleeping. Shortly before the film started, my father sat down on the couch next to my mother, and for the last time she checked if the recorder was ready. As always, I sat down in a chair. All of a sudden there was a terrific voice. “That is Mario Lanza,” my mother explained. “He’s portraying Caruso.” In those days both names didn’t mean anything to me, but the things I saw and heard, gave me greatest joy.
“The Great Caruso,” an American movie from 1951, tells in a very romanticizing manner the life of the legendary tenor, who debuted in Naples at the end of the 19th century. Caruso loves Musetta, but is not accepted by the young girl’s family, as he is a singer. Some years later, after having achieved great success at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, he thinks about marrying Dorothy, the daughter of one of the patrons of the opera house, and again is rejected by the father of the woman he has chosen, as he, according to her father, is a peasant, singing too loud and being excessively sentimental. Although Caruso eventually marries Dorothy, it becomes obvious that all his life he is a slave of his talent, and that his destiny is not an easy one: Due to a commitment he had not even been able to be at his mother’s deathbed.
To Mario Lanza, a beautiful Italian with charismatic looks, each of these episodes offered to sing a new aria, to show all facets of his brilliant voice and to express fortune and misfortune.
During the complete film I was stony and I was not able to look away from this superman, whose voice made my heart delight. I recognized some of the arias which my uncles too, sang quite often. Yet, it was the first time that I heard them with orchestral accompaniment. Only now I realized the great difference between a beautiful amateur voice and the achievement of a tenor such as Mario Lanza, who sang without any strain.
How often had I experienced that my uncle, out of breath, had to stop in the middle of an aria!
All of a sudden my father joined in Lanza’s “La donna è mobile.” I listened deeply moved, completely overwhelmed by his powerful voice. Never before had I heard him sing this way, and he held out until the end! When the film was finished, there was a complete silence for a moment; we were just speechless. My father seemed to be a little embarrassed as he had let himself go so much, and my mother had tears in her eyes. She pressed the key, and once again Mario’s voice was ringing through the room. She sat down again and told me about Lanza. She told me that he was a tenor of Neapolitan origin, who made career in Hollywood. My father added that he later had regretted his decision. Indeed, his decision was not helpful for his future career, as Mario Lanza had become overweight, and he died in 1959 at the age of 38 in an Italian clinic, where he was to lose weight for a new film.
Apart from Mario Lanza’s voice I also was impressed by Caruso’s life story: This man, who probably had the most beautiful voice in the world, was never happy beyond the stage. It was as if his career had a negative impact on his private life, a dilemma which often can be found among artists. In later years, I myself would realize how difficult it is to reconcile different things.
Eventually, I was completely fascinated when my mother told me that my great grandmother had met Antonietta Caruso in New York! So there was a connection between me and the great artist, even if it was so far away. In secret, I was very proud of that, and this pride would accompany me during my entire childhood. I had to prove myself worthy of this wonderful “relation.”
Far into the night I couldn't get the music of this film out of my mind. I was afraid to forget it when falling asleep, but then I remembered my mother having recorded it. Happily, I had not to go to school the next day and my mother went for a visit to her sisters. My father was out for a while when I, being alone with Mariella, took the tape recorder to my room and turned it on. The orchestra started playing and Mario Lanza's voice rang out. With closed eyes I listened and immersed in it completely. Then I rewound the cassette and got completely carried away. I heard the sound of a voice, my voice that I had already heard so often in my thoughts. I felt as if the voice would really escape me. Standing with both feet firmly on the ground, a posture of Lanza which had caught my attention in the film, I sang from the bottom of my heart and experienced a feeling of extreme relief. How long had I been waiting for this moment! I rewound the cassette several times and sang along with it several times. Time seemed to freeze; I was completely enslaved by the ecstasy of getting aware of the complete range of my voice, of following the singer to his highest height and to his most extreme depth, of singing louder and louder. I fall into an exhausted state and dropped down onto my bed. My head was spinning. Then I heard someone opening the door. I had forgotten that Mariella had stayed at home and could hear me. "I didn't know that you can sing," she said and sat down on my bed. I put my finger on her mouth. "Psst, I beg you, please keep this to yourself, nobody is supposed to know it, it has to remain our secret." Although still being a little girl she knew which significance the music had in our family and she instinctively understood the importance of this secret. For a long time Marinella –apart from Alberto- was the only one to know about this. As we were inseparable I was not able to keep it as a secret to him for a long time.
During these times I always was eagerly waiting to be on my own at home. My father would work almost every Saturday morning and my mother would go shopping with her sisters. As soon as I heard them going out, I retreated to my room, turned on the tape recorder and abandoned myself again to the ecstasy of singing. Each time I noticed another detail or special nuance of Mario Lanza's style and I tried to imitate it. I rewound, starting another attempt, I started again and again, until I felt that I would have gotten the maximum out of my voice. I had instinctively understood that the mere joy was not enough, and that singing had to be learned. Mario was my teacher from the hereafter so to speak, and several times I swore to myself to achieve perfection someday. These were incredible moments of happiness, and I was not even ten of age."
The time in which a future singer is discovering his own voice is always very exciting and confusing. One starts weighing the options of the voice and one realizes that there’s still quite a long way to go!”
Derek McGovern
Steff
Armando
Thank you, Steff, that’s a lovely account of the young Alagna first experiencing the voice and charisma of Lanza.
Alagna started off on what promised to be an outstanding career, singing Alfredo at La Scala when he was only 28 and then proceeding to sing on most of the major operatic stages.
He had a beautiful voice, musicality and stage presence, but in subsequent years he somehow lost his way. A pity!
Steff
Here’s a youtube video from the “Roberto Alagna Channel” - an interview with Roberto Alagna which took place just recently, on 26 February 2016 on Radio - 774 ABC Melbourne:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AIS_8fpTlM
“Tenor Roberto Alagna is interviewed by Red Symons on the Australian radio 774 ABC Melbourne as part of his program "Breakfast with Red Symons" on the occasion of his upcoming Australian tour. Roberto is also speaking about Mario Lanza, Luciano Pavarotti, and his singing carreer | Roberto Alagna will be performing in #Sydney, #Melbourne and #Brisbane from 21st July.”
Steff
P.S. Let’s forgive Alagna that he mistakenly stated that Mario made his first film at the age of 19. JJ
Steff Walzinger
Derek McGovern
Steff Walzinger
Victoria Bigelow
Steff Walzinger
Victoria Bigelow
Steff Walzinger
Hello to all!
On Friday, 8th of November, Sony Classical is releasing Roberto Alagna’s new album, „Caruso 1873,“ a tribute to Enrico Caruso. I am looking forward to this with much anticipation.
The past days Roberto Alagna posted the liner notes of the booklet, which accompanies the CD, on his Facebook site, and I think it gives an interesting reading. The cover of the CD is most stunning, and I hope to find more photos in the booklet. Alagna, as you know, has been a Lanza fan from his childhood days.
The following liner notes are taken from his FB-site, where you can also read them in French. It appears that Alagna wrote the liner notes himself, which gives the whole project a very special and personal touch.
I have attached a photo of the cover and the track list.
https://www.facebook.com/RobertoAlagna.Tenor/
❝ For as long as I can remember, I’ve felt an almost visceral love and admiration for Enrico Caruso. Ever since my career began I’ve wanted to pay tribute to this exceptional singer, so this album is a dream come true.
Caruso is part of my life, part of my roots even. My great-grandparents knew him in New York. I feel as if I’d known him – there’s that same sense of closeness one might feel for an eminent ancestor. I was about ten when I first became aware of him, although for that first encounter he was inhabiting the face and physique of another tenor, Mario Lanza, who played him in Richard Thorpe’s film The Great Caruso. I transferred all the affection I’d had for my ancestors to him – he was exactly how I pictured my great-grandfather, whose life story I’d been told many times.
As a teenager I drank in Caruso’s recordings. He was the singer I studied the most, thanks to my teacher Rafael Ruiz, who was a great collector of old records and a huge fan of Caruso. We’d spend entire Sundays listening to him, dissecting every phrase, every sonority, every idea, every vocal inflection, every way he had of landing on a note. ❞
CARUSO THE TRAILBLAZER
❝ An iconic tenor, Caruso was also the first modern tenor. There was one way of singing before he came along, another after he’d gone. He influenced such phenomenal singers as Beniamino Gigli and many others who followed him. Everyone who had the luck to see him on stage said that it was impossible to compare his singing to anyone else’s – because of his cello-like tone, because he put his heart and soul into his performances, because of the sob you could hear in his voice, the suffering he could convey – he was unique, with a voice that was both human and divine. He mixed up the rules of the bel canto tradition from which he came with those of the emerging style of verismo. The verista composers were his contemporaries and he appeared in the premières of such magnificent operas as Fedora, Adriana Lecouvreur, L’Arlesiana and La fanciulla del West, among others.
More fascinating yet is the fact that we still have recordings in which Caruso is accompanied by the composers themselves. We know that Puccini was adamant he should play Rodolfo, willingly agreeing to transpose “Che gelida manina” into a different key despite Toscanini’s reluctance.
Over time, Caruso has become a legendary figure. Films have been made about his life – and death – and his love letters have inspired novels. His generosity, his talent as a caricaturist, his good nature and Neapolitan character have all left their stamp on the collective imagination, turning him into a hero who gave every last ounce of his strength. And this was indeed true – even if he didn’t actually die on stage, he did keep singing until the end. Having returned to Naples, he died of lung disease, but also of sadness at not being on stage any more, not being able to sing. Music was his life, it was stronger than him. He was born to sing.
Caruso was the trailblazer when it came to recording. He was the first to record in such quantity – and a huge amount of what he recorded was destroyed! He used to record several takes and listen back to them straightaway, the effect of which was to wipe out the take on the fresh wax. Only when he felt absolutely happy to set down a final version could the recording begin. Created between 1902 and 1920, his recorded output is particularly rich. No one else recorded so much until Gigli, his direct heir, and then modern singers such as Del Monaco, Di Stefano and onwards to Pavarotti et al. Caruso was also the first to have hit records – “Vesti la giubba” from Pagliacci, for example, or Mattinata, a popular song of the day that we’d now classify as a crossover track. Caruso’s 1904 recording of Mattinata, with piano accompaniment provided by its composer Leoncavallo (who dedicated the song to him), turned it into a global hit. Through his recordings Caruso was able to arouse the interest of a listenership increasingly enamoured of his voice.
BEAUTY OF SOUND RATHER THAN VOCAL ACROBATICS
❝ Caruso’s singing is very interesting: heir to the bel canto school, he never pushed his voice beyond its limits. He always looked for ease of projection and beauty of sound. If a particular phrase or passage was too high for him, he had no qualms about transposing it, even mid-duet. At that time, restricted by the maximum duration of wax cylinder recordings, expert editors were needed. It was their job to ensure that any overlength works or excerpts were cut down without any loss of impact or nuance. We can hear that in Rossini’s Domine Deus, in Pietà, Signore and in the Il Guarany duet. All of these are considerably more than seven minutes long, but have been reduced to four and a half minutes at most. Wax, bakelite and the earliest records were all limited when it came to duration (five minutes maximum per side for 12-inch 78s). This explains the choice of very fast tempos for such long arias as “Vois ma misère, hélas!” from Samson et Dalila. It’s remarkable to see how they managed back then to shorten a piece and not disfigure it but retain the best of it, its essence. And there was never any hesitation about lowering the key to make a piece more comfortable to sing. Facility and beauty of sound came before power and vocal acrobatics. ❞
THE CARUSO “STYLE”
❝ I respected the Caruso “style” while making this recording, just as one would respect a composer’s style. He was a true creator. I adopted, as scrupulously and accurately as possible, his style of singing, of emitting sound, his individual manner of phrasing – an exercise in subtlety, as if a present-day conductor wanted to copy to the letter the gestures and tempos of a Toscanini. Caruso was an exceptional singer. Nature had given him his instrument, of course, but he shaped it himself and in doing so created something utterly unique.
There would have been no sense in my imitating him, a mistake I’d made in the past. My audience would have been disappointed if my voice had become unrecognisable as mine. My aim was to celebrate Caruso but hang on to my own vocal identity. I followed his key signatures, I even did my best to reproduce his breathing patterns, as much as possible, to open up certain sounds where he did, to close others where he did. It was a strange feeling: I was so immersed in the sound of Caruso that I started hearing his voice instead of mine inside my head during the sessions.
As I was performing the various arias, I had to remember with complete precision what he’d done with them. I made notes in my scores because it was hard to keep everything in mind while we were recording. There was such a lot of information to take into account. Sometimes Yvan and I had to stop and listen to Caruso between takes and then make some improvements. We didn’t want to add anything that he hadn’t included we tried to equal his tempos and to hold the high notes for the same amount of time and no longer.
Of course the results aren’t 100% accurate. Time is money when you’re recording, and at a given moment you simply have to stop – even though there were times on this project when we noticed later that a particular detail had escaped us, such as a breath he’d taken between words to help him hit a high note. To be totally accurate, we’d also have had to adopt the pitch of the day, which was lower than today’s standard pitch, and that would have been hard to achieve with an orchestra of modern instruments. Nevertheless, we did everything possible to reproduce his style. ❞
INSIDE CARUSO’S MIND
❝ This was the joy and the charm of this project. Yvan faced exactly the same challenge. Together we had to find a way into Caruso’s world – I had to get inside the man, into his mind. Yvan had to get into mine, and conduct at the same time. He also wrote the arrangements and so had to immerse himself in this universe and retranscribe the orchestrations, because none of the arrangements used in Caruso’s recordings survive. They too were affected by the technical limitations of the day.
I’ve had a go at making acoustic recordings, as in Caruso’s day, at the turn of the 20th century – on wax, without electricity. The sound waves emitted by instruments or the human voice were channelled through a horn to make a cutting stylus vibrate and etch a groove into a wax cylinder. The sound of string instruments was captured less effectively using this technique than that of other instruments, which is why they were often replaced by an array of brass instruments, including the tuba! Thanks to Yvan, we did everything possible to recreate the original orchestrations, so as to be able to reproduce all the atmosphere and charm of these early recordings. ❞
MISTAKES THAT AREN’T MISTAKES?
❝ There are occasional mistakes in Caruso’s recordings. Or at least, there are things that we’d see as mistakes today. What he sings isn’t exactly what’s written in the score. These differences in fact add considerable interpretative and dramatic power to his performances and we decided to include all of these “mistakes”. Although Caruso was performing works by his contemporaries, we can see that he regularly took liberties with both words and music. In Les Pêcheurs de perles or Manon, for example, he invents ornaments, breaths and phrasings, while in the I Lombardi trio he joins in at one point with the soprano line. All this does is prove that music is, first and foremost, a living, breathing thing. Now we no longer permit ourselves such departures from the score, or at least only when it comes to variants from tradition that have themselves become the norm. In following Caruso’s example, we tasted a kind of freedom that we perhaps lack today. ❞
AN INNER JOURNEY
❝ Retracing Caruso’s recording career, from 1902 to 1920, also took me on an inner journey. In quick succession I had to imagine myself as everything from the barely 30-year-old Caruso to the fully mature Caruso, although even then he was only 47. But we all sing differently at 25, 35, 55…
Like any journey, it was an enriching experience. It was a chance to travel in search of a certain freshness, brightness, spontaneity and maturity, a certain passion and also a sense of suffering that you can hear towards the end of Caruso’s life, when he was starting to have breathing difficulties. As time went by, something happened, his voice changed, matured; his whole life can be heard in its sound.
If I’d followed chronological order, I’d have had to begin with the less elaborate recordings, because in the early days Caruso recorded in a hotel room with a simple piano accompaniment. I wanted to do the opposite: to begin with the latest recordings, namely Rossini’s Petite Messe solennelle, the last one he made, and finish with the earliest. ❞
YESTERDAY’S CARUSO, TODAY’S CARUSO
❝ For this journey back in time, we’ve chosen, after long consideration, to open the album with something unexpected: Lucio Dalla’s Caruso. This is really a pop song, in terms of its arrangement, structure, development and colour, so we had to think about how we could add it to our tracklist without changing the whole character of the album, without it clashing with the overall tone of an album which, even if we hadn’t artificially “aged” it, was meant to sound as it would have done in Caruso’s day. I thought about it long and hard. Dalla was inspired to write his tribute by a visit to the room in which Caruso died at the Vesuvio Hotel. But what’s less well known is that he also drew on Dicitencello Vuie, a song Caruso never sang as it was written ten years after his death, and from whose lyrics Dalla made a number of direct borrowings for his own song (“Te voglio bene assaje”, “Una catena”, etc.) – the same words and almost the same tune. I decided to combine the two and create a piece that’s more operatic in feel. The tonalities are completely modified, and there are even several key changes during the course of the song, giving it a classical air while leaving it with its own identity intact. What Yvan and I tried to create was a version that could have been sung by Caruso himself. We understand each other well and were definitely on the same wavelength here, so were able to create something from that starting point. I’m delighted that we turned the idea into reality and that we’ve produced a completely original version of the song. ❞
BLENDED PORTRAITS
❝ It was hard to select the repertoire for the rest of the album, because we had a list of around 300 pieces to choose from, giving us endless possibilities. We could only pick a small number, but I was keen to show off as many facets as possible of Caruso’s style and personal taste, and present an album that reflected him and some of his key personality traits. His repertoire was very eclectic, both in terms of composers (Tchaikovsky, Gomes, Rubinstein, etc.) and genres. It ranged from solo arias with either piano or orchestral accompaniment, to operatic duos or trios, as well as including Neapolitan songs, the popular songs he loved, art songs, sacred music, and so on – I wanted the album to reflect all of these. I chose my own favourites, of course, so the programme reflects me too, as if our two portraits had been subtly blended together. I’ve often paid tribute to Caruso in my own recording career by featuring music that he sang on my albums – Lensky’s aria (in French), La Reine de Saba and the duet “A la luz de la luna”, for example. But I wanted to go much further with this recording.
We haven’t just included Caruso’s greatest hits. That would have been a bit dull, especially as I’ve already recorded quite a few of them, and I’d rather explore new territory than duplicate existing recordings.
For example, we’ve included an extract from Les Pêcheurs de perles, which I’d recorded previously in French, but here sing in Italian, with piano accompaniment, and in the same key as Caruso. I think that for each number, his choices, his preferences, the choice of one language over another, all say something about him. He chose to record Tchaikovsky’s Don Juan’s Serenade in French; I did the same with Because. This song is mainly famous because of Mario Lanza, who had a hit with it in its English version. Caruso sang it in both languages. Given that the composer was French, I decided to sing the rarely heard original French version. The aria from Manon is in the Italian translation which Caruso recorded twice, in 1902 and 1904 (he never recorded it in French). I’ve chosen the 1904 version and have placed it at the end of the album, after the amazing duet from AdrianaLecouvreur, “No, più nobile”. Incidentally, Cilea was happy to rework his duet into a solo, and he himself accompanied Caruso on the piano for that recording.
Another of the curiosities I chose for the album is “Vecchia zimarra”, the bass aria sung by Colline in La bohème. Legend has it that Caruso sang this on stage, standing in for a colleague who’d lost his voice, and that no one noticed the subterfuge. I found it an interesting piece to record too. It’s not particularly low – the real difficulty lies in finding the right vocal colour, something Caruso did in style. The aria has to sound soft, gentle, intimate, tinged with sorrow and nostalgia. The challenge for a tenor is to darken his sound without artificially enlarging it, and to project his voice smoothly and gracefully.
This selection begins with a modern song recorded using today’s state-of-the-art technology. To give listeners an idea of the way recording techniques have changed in the last hundred years, I decided to add a bonus track – a classic Neapolitan song which reflects Caruso’s roots and which we recorded as he would have done in his day, giving it a “vintage” sound. ❞
CARUSO 1873
❝ While this album was hard to make, it was an enormous pleasure to step into the shoes of the tenor I’ve admired all my life – I feel the experience has created a bond between the two of us. Enrico Caruso was born in 1873. Almost a century later, in 1963, it was my turn to come into the world. His voice has been with me ever since.
The singers of the past have left us their legacy. I hope this recording will help younger generations to discover or rediscover Caruso’s unique artistry. That way his flame will burn for ever. ❞
