Customer Reviews

Angels and Monsters: Male and Female Sopranos in the Story of Opera

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Richard Somerset-Ward, a distinguished figure in the arts and the media on both sides of the Atlantic, has followed his History of Opera with a work no less scholarly but now laced with largely unfamiliar anecdote and scandal (NB two entries in the index under Nudity). The angels and monsters of the title are essentially inseparable facets of the same person - angelic of voice, monstrous of temperament. They could indulge their whims and tantrums because, as Somerset-Ward points out, it was they who sold tickets at the box office, not the composers. Sometimes the public were the victims of capricious decisions not to appear when expected or not to sing what had been advertised (or, indeed, what the composer had written). But generally it was the poor impresario who suffered most.

The lay reader may be surprised to find the male soprano given equal prominence in the book's title with his female counterpart but, as the book makes clear, the castrato was a significant influence on this improbable art form for well over two centuries. "Basically female equipment powered by massively developed male lungs," says Somerset-Ward, made for a formidable sound.

Among the many colourful characters who emerge from these pages, the author has a clear admiration for Mathilde Marchesi whose operatic career as a singer was limited to a single public performance. Her contribution has been as a teacher in her own right, and in the way her pupils, become teachers themselves, have passed on her principles to the present day's singers.

Somerset-Ward argues persuasively that the singers who thrived on angelic sounds alone were on the wane by the beginning of the twentieth Century - Nellie Melba, he suggests, was one of the last. Outrageous behaviour will doubtless linger longer. This is a book that can be enjoyed by all who have been caught up by the Dramma per Musica, but perhaps it should be kept away from rising young sopranos in search of role models.

This book has some very interesting anecdotes about singers, which a casual reader would enjoy. However, the author's core argument is not meaningful or compelling, and his research (as others have noted) is severely lacking. His argument, that singers had to behave themselves after Verdi because of decreased focus on beautiful singing in the opera world, has no relationship to other work being done in this area of musicology. Additionally, a skilled writer could have made the argument in a twenty page article.

This book is a wealth of badly-written misinformation. For starters, the author thinks Clytemnestra is a character in "Salome." He tells us that the important "Macbeth" duet comes after the Sleepwalking Scene. He thinks the big second act showdown duet of the two queens comes in the first act of "Maria Stuarda." He states that the big ballets of French Grand Opera come in the second acts (while in my experience they come in the third or fourth acts). He says opera supertitles were first used in the 1970's; they were first used in 1983. He calls Massenet's mezzo Hérodiade a contralto. On top of that, we have horrible grammar. The author does not understand how to pick the verb after a "neither...nor" construction. He has a problem with "whom." He uses "née" for males. He writes "could have cared less" when he means "could not have cared less." He uses "between" instead of "among" when discussing four singers at the same time. As far as organization, there is so much repetition that it becomes boring. How many times does he have to inform us that a shake is a trill? He loves to repeat explanations of the "Bayreuth bark." It's as if each singer's entry was written independently of the others and then stapled together without rereading previous material to see if something had already been explained. The attempts at humor fall flat. Referring to a choir member in his twenties as "superannuated" works only if you can remember that it might be a boys' choir under discussion. Referring to a long passage as "acres of bars" just doesn't sound right. "Miles of bars" perhaps, but "acres"? As a final insult, the index has been so capriciously compiled that it is virtually unusable; names that seem important on the page do not get indexed. I had such high hopes for this book, but I ended up finishing it only in search of its many mistakes.

Where have all the editors gone? The opening chapters of this chatty book are sufficiently self-absorbed to contain repetitions, one nearly word for word, of stories, along with confusions of Vincenzo (the father) and Galileo (the son) Galilei and misspellings of a frequently mentioned saint's name used as a church name in Venice -- all in a mish-mash that sounds more suited to a well-brandied, late-evening discussion.
Perhaps the latter parts of the book are more interesting; perhaps they are more juicy; perhaps they are written in less of a style that implies transcription from a tape-recorder, without editorial shaping on point.
Maybe Yale University Press published this as a vanity edition. Certainly the subject is wonderfully rich in many ways, but the early sections (granted--dealing with some performers the likes of which none of us has heard in live performance of opera) don't appear to have much grasp of early opera (roughly, Monteverdi through Handel, including Lully, Rameau, Porpora, et alia), the conventions thereof, and the remarkable attempts to bring those works into our time.
A singer might wish for some informed discussion, even if by descriptions from the diarists of the day, of the singing techniques, of the musical possibilities, and of the enormous successes of the great castrati of the time and of their great female singer-colleagues, as well. And what was behind the great rivalries in the London of Handel?
Skip the early stuff and go to the juicy bits with which Somerset-Ward may have more experience and understanding.
Shame, though, on YUP for not doing more to focus the writer and edit and fact-check the content.