MARGARET PRICE (1941-2011)Margaret Price and Plácido Domingo sing the Act I love duet from Verdi's Otello in Paris, 1976, with Nello Santi conducting.by KenI'm jumping the gun here. I've been assembling an aural tribute to Dame Margaret Price, the Welsh soprano who died Friday at her home, but I ran -- or ran myself -- into a stupid situation, entirely of my own doing,
I've already spent most of an afternoon making a "suite" of audio clips from my LP copy of the 1971 recording of Mozart's
Così fan tutte conducted by Otto Klemperer (you wouldn't believe what they're charging for the CD edition! at least
I don't) in which Price sang the fearsomely difficult role of Fiordiligi better, as a whole, than anybody else I've heard sing it. Anyone who's heard her Fiordilgi can have no further excuse for thinking that Mozart is making fun of his leading ladies in this opera. No excuse, that is, except not having working ears or a working brain. I interviewed her once, still early in her career, and she left no doubt that she took Fiordiligi seriously. I'm still of the opinion that her Act II aria, "
Per pietà" is quite possibly the most beautiful music Mozart ever wrote, which automatically puts it on the list for the most beautiful music
anybody ever wrote.
Before we get to my immediate problem, let me throw out a more general one concerning the reponse to Dame Margaret's passing. In
the Daily Telegraph obit, Barry Millington calls her "one of the most beloved singers of her generation," and while it's true that she was better known personally to British than to American audiences -- but really not so much to them either, having made Munich her home base for most of her career -- I really don't think "beloved" is the right word. Oh, I've loved a good deal of her singing, but to describe the singer as "beloved" seems to me to get off very much on the wrong foot in describing what was special about her.
Milligan himself seems to understand this. He tells how she made her stage debut with the Welsh National Opera in 1962 in the unlikely role of Cherubino in
The Marriage of Figaro (a normally mezzo-soprano trouser role) and "followed up her success" there by auditioning for Covent Garden.
Georg Solti, then music director of the Royal Opera, made it clear that he did not want her there, his verdict being that she "lacks charm", and she prepared to return to lieder. A second audition, undertaken with some reluctance, elicited no greater enthusiasm from Solti, but she was nevertheless given a contract to cover Teresa Berganza, again as Cherubino. The contract stated that she was never to sing in the house but for Berganza's indisposition. However, when that moment came, she stepped in to great acclaim.
Now I'm guessing that Sir Georg himself revised his opinion, because later on he both performed and recorded a fair amount with Price. (We're going to hear some of their recording of Verdi's
Ballo in maschera.) But she didn't suddenly become more "charming." Rather, I think, the world caught up with her own vocal and artistic virtues, which were if anything on the cool side, but in her particular way quite, um, imperious.
But we'll get to that. I've been assembling assorted other stuff -- more Mozart, but by no means just Mozart -- and while I still haven't quite figured out how to present it, that's not my present problem. As I sorted mentally (an alsod physically) through the recorded documentation of Price's career, I got this idea of trying to present her in a number of her operatic roles in both solo and non-solo excerpts, and Verdi's
Otello, which became an important role for her, certainly lends itself to that kind of treatment: How much better could we do that the great love duet that climaxes Act I and the great solo scene that begins Act IV? For this purpose I suppose I could have used the Decca studio recording of
Otello conducted by Solti in which Price sings Desdemona opposite the Otello of Carlo Cossutta, but I only have that on LP, which would have meant more LP dubbing (and I'm not at all optimistic about those London Records surfaces), and I don't recall the performance that fondly, and besides do we really want to hear Carlo Cossutta as Otello?
I had an excellent solution at hand, or rather not at hand, which was the problem. I've got a recording of a 1976 Paris
Otello with Price and Plácido Domingo, presumably from the same run of performances, if not the very same performance, as the video clip above. That would have worked great, since we're going to have Price in Verdi's
Ballo with Luciano Pavarotti, admittedly not at his best (unfortunately, because this was once one of his great roles), but Pavarotti nonetheless, so the
Otello with Domingo seemed neatly symmetrical. The only problem is, I don't know where the damned thing is. I had it off the shelf some time back to consider when I needed a bit of
Otello for a Sunday Classics post --
this one, I think, though if it
is this one, I wound up not using that recording. Whatever use I had in mind for it, it never found its way back onto the shelf, or rather to any of the shelves where it might have gone.
Oh, it'll turn up, and I still had time, but there was no guarantee that it would turn up in time for this purpose. Looking online I found another Price-Domingo
Otello, I think also from 1976, from Covent Garden, with the eccentric but usually interesting in
some way Carlos Kleiber. I actually ventured down the other day to my second-hand CD emporium prepared to shell out the necessary $$$$ (within reason, of course) if they had this recording, and also to see if there was any other Price material that would fit in here. Naturally they
didn't have the Domingo-Price-Kleiber
Otello. They
did have the Paris performance I already have, somewhere, and the price wasn't outrageous, but for a recording I already have, somewhere? I didn't think so.
They had another Price-Domingo
Otello, though -- from the Met, 1986, at the time of Price's belated Met debut. Sherrill Milnes as Jago, and Maestro Jimmy Levine conducting, neither of which quickened my pulse. You have to understand that I was here when Maestro Jimmy first did the opera at the Met, a performance with some real excitement which seemed to need only some reflecting and deepening, but instead of that got what I came to understand as the maestro's death grip, whereby any life that happens to exist in one of his performances early on in his public encounters with the piece in question will gradually -- or sometimes not so gradually -- be sytematically but ruthlessly expunged so that nothing remains but pure, unadulterated death, a painfully put-through-the-motions corpse, all sham and artifice without a hint of actual movement or sustainable life.
Still, I thought, for my purposes -- Price as Desdemona, Domingo as Otello -- it should be adequate. Still, it was 20 bucks, and I don't part with that kind of dough that easily. Oh, I would have spent it for the other performance, which probably would have been a dubious investment itself. But 20 bucks for another Maestro Jimmy
Otello? (I wondered briefly if I hadn't recorded that broadcast, and if I might not finally try to set up the audio hookup by which I could digitize my audiocassette holdings. But given my storage situation, the cassettes aren't easy to get at, and I realized it was doubtful that by 1985 I would have troubled to record yet another Met
Otello.) In the end I left the store without the
Otello, figuring
I could always go back! And in the meantime, maybe the missing Paris performance would turn up!
Today I went back, because there were some other things I wanted that I couldn't trust would still be there if I waited another day. And I figured what the heck, I'll spring for the 20 bucks for the
Otello. I'll find some way to finesse its shortcomings, but it'll be
usable. Maybe it'll even be OK! Isn't everyone always complaining how hypercritical I am? Maybe I was just acting out my accumulated hard-earned hostility toward Maestro Jimmy's death-promoting music-making. In any case, even Maestro Jimmy couldn't ruin the Act I duet or Desdemona's Act IV scene! (Could he?)
So I bought the damned thing, parted with the 20 bucks. Plus the other stuff that had drawn me back to the store so quickly. I brought the load back to the office, and after much procrastination, conscious or otherwise, slapped the
Otello on. And ohmygod, ohmygod, ohmygod.
Hypercritical??? On the contrary, I've been much to kind to that useless blob of artistic death Maestro Jimmy. Oh, the performance isn't screechingly hideous, which in a way is worse, because if it were manifestly incompetent -- you know, singers who couldn't hit the notes, the orchestra garbling its part -- at least it would be obvious to one and all that there was mayhem being committed by the performers. This way it always sounds as it it's the composer's fault, or maybe we're just kind of tired of the poor old piece.
I suppose it's possible that if you'd never heard
Otello, you might get an occasional sense from this performance that there's something kind of neat about it. If I were grading it, it wouldn't be an F, maybe not even a D, but probably a C -- the C of dismal mediocrity. Maybe a C-minus. But make no mistake about the size of the hit Verdi takes in this chopping-down-to-size process. The only people I can imagine coming away from a performance like this satisfied at the kind who believe it's the function of art to be dull -- the duller it is, the more artistic. At this degree of stultification, the artistic level must go through the roof!
A while ago, while I was writing, I half-listened to the above clip, and while Nello Santi is generally thought of as a genial hack, and I've certainly been often unkind to him in past judgments, by comparison with the people occupying opera-house podia these days, I've come to count myself almost a Nello Santi fan. And in the case of
Otello, by actual measurement (allowing for round-off error) this rendering is 698 times better than the stone-cold corpse of a performance Maestro Jimmy presided over that dour Saturday afternoon in 1985. Santi shows a competent musician's basic understanding of how a musical phrase works and provides altogether satisfactory support for the singers.
To make matters worse, by undoubted coincidence -- can you guess that I'm subtly suggesting it's maybe not such a coincidence? -- the singers all sound woeful. Okay, by 1985 it was a long time since I'd hope to derive much pleasure from Sherrill Milnes's singing, which as a matter of fact I'd never gotten from his Jago. But Plácido is normally an OK Otello. Not often a very
interesting one (for all the career success he's had with the role, for which I give him full credit, how many of those performances have left any kind of artistic imprint in the imagination?), but normally dependably OK, or OK-ish. This performance really isn't OK; it sounds like he's sleepwalking through it. And at least in Acts I and II, as far as I've gotten, Price's voice has a pronounced wobble that, in combination with the stultifying dullness of the proceedings, make her almost unbearable.
(So far I haven't found anybody in the cast worth a second, or even a first, hearing. For example, surely William Lewis, a tenor who sang many principal roles quite competently, would have brought something to the important secondary role of Cassio? No, he sounds just awful.
So my dilemma is: Having spent the 20 bucks, can I afford
not to use this performance? On the other hand, what kind of remembrance of a much-admired singer would be provided by this evidence of why the belated advent of her Met career was less than a triumph? No,
of course I couldn't do that. Maybe at some point I can use this
Otello to try to show the difference between it and other performances that have some kind of life going on in them. (Of course it may be that postmodern audiences prefer the kind of performance that comes pre-killed to ensure that there won't be any engagement of the imagination or any other human faculty.)
Meanwhile, it looks like that $20 is just down the drain. And for me of all people to be sinking money into that ragtag bunch? I just hate when that happens.
REMEMBERING MARGARET PRICE
Part 1: From Handel's Messiah to Wagner's Tristan, emerging in Mozart
Part 2: The Countess in Mozart's Marriage of Figaro (plus "Or sai chi l'onore" from Don Giovanni)
Part 3: Fiordiligi in Mozart's Così fan tutte
Still to come: A career in song, plus non-Mozart roles (Weber, Verdi, et al.)
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