Word: calvã
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Their voices float eerily across more than eight decades, ghostly echoes of a fabled operatic golden age: Nellie Melba, Emma Calv??, Jean de Reszke, Lillian Nordica and others, recorded live at the Metropolitan Opera by an enterprising music lover armed with an Edison cylinder machine. The sound is strictly low-fi, the scratchy surface noise is sometimes overwhelming, and the tantalizing fragments often break off abruptly with a singer in mid-phrase. But listening to them is thrilling, like hearing Lincoln recite the Gettysburg Address...
Here is the effortless technique of Melba, formidable in the mad scene from a 1901 Lucia di Lammermoor. Here is the Italian tenor Emilio de Marchi, the first Cavaradossi, ringing the rafters with a triumphant Vittoria! in a 1903 Tosca. Here too is the white-hot French soprano Emma Calv??, a peerless Carmen; the Polish soprano Marcella Sembrich, who negotiates the Queen of the Night's treacherous coloratura con molto brio in a 1902 Magic Flute; and the soaring American soprano Nordica (née Norton), who must have been one of the most glorious Brünnhildes in history. And here...
Singers able to breathe life into the role have been few and far between. First there was Minnie Hawk, a very ladylike Carmen compared to her successors. Then came Calv??, whose realistic interpretation won her the name of being the first singing actress. Farrar made her Carmen a hoyden as incalculable as the wind, kept it popular in Manhattan to the end of her regime. Mary Garden has done similar service in Chicago. Last week for the first time, the Metropolitan presented the Carmen of Maria Jeritza...
...Washington. There followed study in New York, with Farrar the Student a frequent standee at the "Met," learning the ways of Melba, Calv??, Lilli Lehmann, Jean de Reszké, learning to her greater advantage what pleased the purse-poor folk around her who scarcely missed a performance. She studied a year in Washington, was taken one afternoon to call on Mrs. McKinley. News came: DEWEY VICTORIOUS AT MANILA?and Farrar, still the Student, sat down at the piano, played and sang the "Star Spangled Banner...
...remarks about diversions, I do not think Calve devoted her every minute to study, although she worked hard. Mme. Calv??'s remark about publicity ? well, she did not scorn publicity herself, and she knew...