This is a selection of videos of the Ten Greatest Sopranos I had the joy to hear in live performance. The order is simply when I first heard them. They are all from my impressionable student days, ...
This is a selection of videos of the Ten Greatest Sopranos I had the joy to hear in live performance. The order is simply when I first heard them. They are all from my impressionable student days, chosen because every one of these great singers gave performances as vivid to me now as when I first heard them. Every one was more than just a voice and they all sang, in their very different ways, so as to move, excite and enchant.
Virginia Zeani sang Lucia and Violetta in the Stoll Theatre in London with a visiting Italian company in 1957. I heard the Lucia on a BBC radio broadcast and was immediately captivated by her beautiful, dark and very dramatic voice. I booked for the last performances of La Traviata and Lucia, but Zeani had already left and other sopranos sang and I had to wait three long years to hear her.
In 1960 Sutherland sang her first Violetta, this time not in a tailor-made production, but in the old stock version which Callas had graced in 1958. Having nearly missed her Lucia, the BBC scheduled a world-wide broadcast of the second night. But Sutherland was ill. I heard her debut and she was uneasy in the role, clearly not in best voice, despite an effortless "Sempre libera", and had yet to come to terms with the complex character. She was obliged to cancel the next performance.
Covent Garden had no understudy and within 24 hours needed a star soprano for the prestigious broadcast. There was just one singer who might be suitable and who was already a famous Violetta, a role for which she was in constant demand. That singer was Virginia Zeani.
But where was she to be found? Zeani was eventually tracked down to Vienna and after a sleepless night flew to London via Paris, arriving at the Royal Opera House at 4pm.
This was her Covent Garden debut, but there was only just enough time for costume fittings and no time at all for any music rehearsal. She walked onto the stage at 7pm and had to ask "Which one is my Alfredo?" The brave tenor who stepped forward was Scotsman William McAlpine, a sweet voiced, very convincing Alfredo.
The performance is almost miraculous with every one in the cast electric with excitement. The whole broadcast can be heard on my channel in 13 consecutive clips.
As to hearing Virginia Zeani live. I was not able to get to the debut but listened glued to the the radio. She was invited back in the summer of 1960 and at last I heard her live and very thrilling it was, truly wonderful.
She was of course very beautiful, both in her voice and in her person. In the party scene she was much calmer than Callas and the guests were irresistibly drawn to her as if to a magnet. In the quiet moment after everyone has left she was upstage looking away, and then slowly turned, gathering her thoughts, in an exquisitely sung "Ah fors e lui". The tone was full and even and beautifully graduated, but also intense, with a plangent quality as if full of tears. One commentator says hers is the "Voce di Donna" the "Voice of Womankind", and I think that is right.
As the opera progressed this intensity became more and more heart rending. The renunciation with Germont Pere, the passionate parting from Alfredo, the humiliation at the party and the lonely death scene are still burned in my memory. In the final scene she read the letter from Germont not declaiming it but almost crying onto the page. In the aria her voice became more and more beautiful with the soft high notes resonating round Covent Garden as if one were inside a great bell. These are the most beautiful sounds I heard from any singer. Ever.
When Alfredo at last returned, the intensity grew even more. She knelt, looking straight out into infinity, and slowly rose, singing from ppp through a miraculously long crescendo, "Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah...Gran Dio morir si giovine" . At the very end, her health seemed briefly to return, she is reborn and then, suddenly, she is gone.
These qualities of beauty and intensity made her close to perfection as Violetta. Coming so soon after the vocally alarmingly fragile Callas performances, Zeani was described, with some relief, as "the most Verdian Violetta heard for many years". For me, I am only grateful that I heard both these magnificent singers and I could not bear to be without either of their performances.
Drawings made just after performances © YMM Fuller
Bravissimo Virginia !