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Home , Adriana Lecouvreur, Alberto Erede, Andrea Luchesi, Anita Cerquetti, Aureliano Pertile, Claudia Muzio

HOMAGE TO TWO GLORIES OF ITALIAN MUSIC:

ARTURO TOSCANINI AND

Emilio Spedicato University of Bergamo December 2007 [email protected]

Dedicated to:

Giuseppe Valdengo, chosen by Toscanini, who returned to the Maestro October 2007

This paper produced for the magazine Liberal, here given with marginal changes. My thanks to Countess Emanuela Castelbarco, granddaughter of Toscanini, for checking the part about her grandfather and for suggestions, and to Signora della Lirica, Magda Olivero Busch, for checking the part relevant to her.

1

RECALLING TOSCANINI, ITALIAN GLORY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

As I have previously stated in my article on Andrea Luchesi and Mozart (the new book by Taboga on Mozart death is due soon, containing material discovered in the last ten years) I am no musicologist, just a person interested in classical music and, in more recent years, in and folk music. I have had the chance of meeting personally great people in music, such as the pianist Badura-Skoda, and opera stars such as Taddei, Valdengo, Di Stefano (or should I say his wife Monika, since Pippo has not yet recovered from a violent attack by robbers in Kenya; they hit him on the head when he tried to protect the medal Toscanini had given him; though no more in a coma, he is still paralyzed), Bergonzi, Prandelli, Anita Cerquetti and especially Magda Olivero. A I have read numerous books about these figures, eight about Toscanini alone, and I was also able to communicate with Harvey Sachs, widely considered the main biographer of Toscanini, telling him why Toscanini broke with Alberto Erede and informing him that, contrary to what he stated in his book on Toscanini’s letters, there exists one letter by one of his lovers, Rosina Storchio. This letter is found in Storchio’s brief biography, available at Museo Storchio in Dello, near Brescia, the second largest museum in on lyrics possessing the first collection of in the world, but virtually unknown! Such new information has appeared in the book Toscanini, dolce tiranno by Renzo Allegri, possibly the best on the market, based upon the memorials that Toscanini’s daughters Wanda and Wally wrote and published several years ago in a magazine with a wide circulation. From now on I will refer to Toscanini just as T.

2 I have a kind of family connection with T. In our home he was appreciated more than any other Italian of the century, possibly because my grandfather had been the first foreign language interpreter in at the beginning of 20th century (I heard he spoke 25 languages), and so he certainly must have met T at . And quite recently I heard from my aunt, over ninety years old, and from another relative almost as old, that , the preferred by T for his extraordinary expressivity, used to visit our home, playing the piano and singing. I suspect that some scores that survived the destruction of the family house by a British bomb (“Mi par d’ udire ancora.....” “ E lucevan le stell”e) belonged to Pertile. And I remember the sadness that overtook our family when,-- I was 12 years old at the time-- the news came by radio that T had passed away.

Since I am not qualified to discuss the musical aspects of T work, which for some years has been subject to probably unjustified revision, I will only consider, (again by way of anecdotes) the principal aspects of his life. For a fuller presentation there are about a half dozen books on the market. I would also recommend a visit to the house where he was born in Parma and the conservatory there, which has a room dedicated to him.

T was born on March 25th 1867 in Parma’s workers borough beyond the river; his father was anticlerical and a garibaldino, his mother a practicing catholic. Soon his musical qualities were discovered, such as being able to reproduce on the piano, on first hearing, melodies that he had not studied. He got a grant to the local conservatory, where there was strict discipline, little food, no heating, and compulsory mass attendance every morning, but where the teachers were very good. Once, due to some rule violation, he had to spend 24 hours in a small dark room, keeping only his cello. He was not allowed to

3 use the bathroom, hence he used the cello as a container. The following day the teacher asked: “What happened to your cello, it is sweating! ”

Soon his schoolmates started calling him “ the genius”, having noted his extraordinary memory and his passion for learning every type of music and to play every instrument. A teacher asked why he was so called, and wanted to test him. First he asked him to play a score on first sight, then to replay it by memory; then he asked him to look at a score of Wagner and interpret it at the cello. Confronted with the amazing performance of T, he said: “It is true, T, you are a genius.” The extraordinary memory of T is a landmark record in human history. His memory was of the visual type: he could remember even dirty spots or abrasions in the page. He memorized about 1500 and symphonic works. Once an orchestra member asked him to be let out since a wire was broken in his instrument, so that a certain note could not be produced. T asked which note it was, then told him such a note did not appear in the part he had to play! Another time, when he was close to 90, pianist Delli Ponti, who used to visit him to play some baroque music (not much previously practiced by T), told him: “I will play an almost unknown piece of Frescobaldi....” Then T replied, remembering having seen that piece when he was a conservatory student: ”There are two versions in print, both with a mistake on the fourth beat.” We should recall that other people, such as De Sabata among musicians and Von Neumann among scientists, also had an enormous memory. We can recall as well the case, often quoted by Oliver Sacks, of a Russian who remembered everything in every day of his life... not to say of the Kirghizian bards, called Manaschi, who remember large part of the six million verses of their national epic, the Epic of Manas.

At conservatory T specialized in the cello, but we know little of his quality as a performer. We know that in the following years he played the piano a great 4 deal, to accompany singers; in his last years he spent full days on the piano, playing full operas while singing them with a voice very expressive and completely in tune. (This can be heard in a famous recording of a Traviata rehearsal where Violetta was , still alive in New York and close to one hundred, if not over according to the grandchild of Toscanini Emanuela Castelbarco ...).

At 19, T embarked for a tour of South America as a cellist. Already he had memorized some twenty operas. During the voyage he took pleasure (in addition to seducing some of the female singers; in love he could not be resisted, and women, as his grandchild Emanuela Castelbarco told me, easily fell into his arms) in directing several operas, where his colleagues played and sang. In Brasil the very bad performance of the conductor got lot of boos in a concert at which the emperor was present. There was a real risk that the tour would end without the players and singers having the money to pay for a return ticket. Then a girl in the chorus, also from Parma, asked T in their dialect to act as conductor. After some hesitation T accepted, entering the scene without rehearsal and frac and directing, as he said later, as though in a trance and with shut eyes. It was a triumph: the audience went wild with clapping, and the emperor gave him a golden little box. The triumph continued in the following days of the tour, the newspapers enthusiastic and foretelling a great future. We should mention that after that first performance, T slept very deeply. On waking up he reviewed his and realized that he had made two mistakes! The only one in his long years of conducting?

Back to Italy T intended to continue his career as a cellist (for some years he also composed, but destroyed his compositions when he realized he could not create works better than Wagner’s). Meantime the fame of his success in 5 America had spread. So he was soon called to direct several orchestras, and in a few years he was already at La Scala. Here he was director and manager for many years, leading to such deep changes in the notion of opera and concert performance that the old ways completely disappeared worldwide. This is not the place, nor do I have the competence, to discuss the changes he made, fighting against the public, the orchestra and the singers, who had been accustomed, till his time, to modifying the composer’s notes according to their convenience. We will simply say that T had complete respect for the original text and composer’s will, and that he wanted the audience to pay real attention to the music (hence no more card playing or having food during the performance). He required from the orchestra a high quality performance in terms of tempi and expressivity. He became well known for his brusque reactions, sometimes almost violent, but only on work time; outside he was known for his generosity in helping orchestra members who were in financial need. He was acquainted with many composers, from Verdi (he visited him in Genova to settle an interpretative question with Tamagno... and Verdi confirmed that T’s memory was right), to Puccini, great friend with whom he had many discussions, especially on politics, since Puccini was close to fascism, to Catalani, Boito, Mascagni…. During the first World War T often went near the front line and conducted for the soldiers even in conditions of real danger (he refused to be paid, which was the case as well when he went to , Wagner’s temple for him, and to Palestine, to support the first Hebrews communities).

T was interested in politics, albeit not at the level of an activist. He was sympathetic to Mussolini when he was a socialist, then he became a strong critic without fear of showing his opposition. Since he never permitted fascist hymns to be performed before the opening of operas or concerts, once in Bologna his refusal to play “Giovinezza” led young fascists close to Farinacci 6 to attack him. Someone slapped him, and he was threatened with death. Mussolini rejected responsibility, claiming he had to lead not an orchestra of 100 men, but the whole of Italy. After this event T left Italy for the US, where he was enormously successful and NBC put a new orchestra under his baton. His house in Riverdale became a focal center for musical life and a refuge for opponents of Mussolini. When he arrived in America, he was already above the normal pension age, so he reduced his more demanding heavy activity with operas, concentrating on … Under his baton played pianists like Serkin, Rubinstein, Horszowski, Horowitz (who became his son in law in 1933 when he married his daughter Wanda), and violinists such as Heifetz and Busch. T did not always have perfect agreement with such stars: see the following comment of O’ Connel on the Beethoven violin he conducted with Heifetz: “It was amusing to look at these two men so equal as perfectionists but also so different in age, character and musical ideas. They appeared to outsiders as showing to each other the greatest respect, but really they were diffident as two cats who don’t know each other, each one strongly willing to attain perfection in any way and time...”

When the war ended he returned to Italy for the concert which was to reopen La Scala. After the audition for the , T chose Tebaldi, who began her career with the nickname voce d’ angelo, since T so called her, because she was to sing an angelic role. But T had wished to have as soprano on that occasion Magda Olivero, who had retired in 1941. He asked La Scala people to contact her, which they didn’t do, since someone was against her. Therefore Olivero, who a few years later returned to activity on the call of Cilea, and to whom Serafin said, while preparing her for , “You are always number one” , never sang under T. However she met him in Sirmione, where T during two hours gave her his personal evaluation of singers and musicians. These very frank judgments Olivero has kept for herself, and 7 probably will never divulge. The opening of La Scala, overflowing with people (among them the young Luciano Chailly) was a triumph for T, who was received with 37 minutes of clapping.

Among the last operas directed by T in America: , Traviata, and (which was considered by T the best Italian operas; among Puccini operas the best for him was ). Among the singers soprano Licia Albanese, still alive, and baritone Valdengo (who passed away at 93 on October 2007). Under his baton also sang the young star Di Stefano, whose wonderful voice was greatly appreciated by T. He gave him a golden medal with his portrait, to save which from assailants in Kenya the great tenor was subject to acts of violence that led him to his present state of paralysis (he died shortly after these lines were written).

T lived a few years after the death of his wife for 54 years, Carla. The marriage was not an easy one, due to the several affairs of T, who was very much attracted by women, a situation Carla was somehow able to deal with. Among his lovers we remember the very beautiful (see her portrait at La Scala Museum) and great soprano Rosina Storchio. From him she had a boy, who died in his teens, affected by severe brain disorders. When she left singing, she became a lay sister in Milano helping handicapped children. Before dying she wrote T a letter of great serenity, thanking him for his help in her musical career and telling him she would wait for him in heaven.

T did not like priests, and stopped going to church after the many times he had to in conservatory. He was a believer, but reticent in speaking of religious questions. He used to keep in the little pocket of his jacket a crucifix, that was put between his hands in the bier. He died almost 90 years old, a few days after his beloved disciple Cantelli had perished in an air crash. He had a 8 stroke and died after about ten days.

He was in contact with only one priest, whom he greatly respected, named Don Gnocchi. His daughters called Don Gnocchi to ask him to come to New York to confess their father. He answered: “There is no need, he has done much good in his life...”

Don Gnocchi ’s (whose assistant was Barbareschi, my religion professor in high school and who was denominated by Israel “man of righteousness among nations” for having saved many Jews by taking them to Switzerland through the mountains-- and he ended too in a concentration camp …) Don Gnocchi, with T., one of the few glories of Italy in the 20th century, but strangely not yet proclaimed a saint.

On March 25th 1910--the same day T was born but 43 years later-- in Saluzzo another glory of Italian music was born, Maria Maddalena, or Magda, Olivero, still living and active, a voice for 3 if not 4 generations. The next section is about her

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HAPPY 98TH BIRTHDAY, SIGNORA DELLA LIRICA !

In the Encyclopedia Le Muse (De Agostini, 1967), three Italian of the twentieth century are presented as follows:

ROSINA STORCHIO (Verona 1876, Milano 1945), started her career in Milano with in 1892. She was soon called to the great theatres, and had an intense international career, including Italy. Endowed with a voice of the light-lyric type, with delicate tone and very pure silvery colour, she developed a vast repertoire, with best results in the intimate roles close to her temperament (Mimì, Butterfly….). She was a passionate interpreter and a great actress.

MUZIO CLAUDIA (Pavia 1892, Roma 1936) reached La Scala early in her career, and soon was a great success at the best world theatres. She was remarkable for her vast repertoire, which included works of the lyric, high- lyric and dramatic type. Her voice, not very notable for volume, but of the greatest fascination, could be set between that of a dramatic soprano and a high-lyric. She was able to express any accent, from the most intensely dramatic to the saddest and most sombre. She was a very fine actress as well.

MAGDA OLIVERO (Saluzzo 1910) was considered, from the outset of her career, one of the best lyric sopranos. She was mainly active in the verista repertoire. Style of phrasing, soft and persuasive tone, coupled with the art of a great actress, make her the greatest singer-actress in of our times. Her voice, once very extended, is pure enamel, and can produce splendid

10 filature and golden half-voices, whose fascination is enhanced by a vibration all the more remarkable in the pianissimi.

On March 25, 1867, , glory of twentieth century Italian music, was born in Parma. On 25 March 1910 (thus, 43 years later), Maria Maddalena, known as Magda, Olivero was born in Saluzzo. To her we dedicate these pages, on the occasion of her approaching 98th birthday.

We started with the short biographies of two great sopranos of the generation before that of the Olivero, i. e. Storchio and Muzio, whom she never met personally. We did so for the following connections, albeit weak:

Rosina Storchio, who was a lover of Toscanini for several years, and had a son from him (gravely ill, the boy died as a teenager), devoted herself to the care of handicapped children in the Cottolengo of Milano once she stopped singing; her home was in 68 corso Magenta, not far from where Olivero lives now. A fact of which I told Olivero ….

Claudia Muzio had almost no competitor. She used to reach the theatre on a carriage trained by white horses and covered by white roses, as Olivero told me. She was called divina by Eugenio Montale, the great poet who received the Nobel Prize and happened also to be a superb musical critic. In his book Stelle della lirica, Stinchelli, possibly the most famous Italian music critic, considers about 300 women singers. He calls divina only Magda Olivero. We also recall that director stated, before Olivero began her career, that “among singers there are three miracles, Caruso, and Ponselle; among the others there are some who are quite good”. Perhaps Serafin would have added later Chaliapin and Olivero. When Serafin was preparing Olivero to sing in Adriana 11 Lecouvreur on her return to theatres, he said, “You are always Number One”. When Olivero, being over fifty, started her tour in the USA with enormous success, the great Ponselle had retired and was not present at her performances, but she listened to her on the radio and phoned her to congratulate her on her singing.

The impulse to write this paper is, first and foremost, to memorialize a singer who has been a glory of Italian lyric, insufficiently appreciated by the media, which was more interested in the Callas case and in the supposed war between her and Tebaldi. But my impulse also comes from a personal memory. I was a boy ten years old studying piano, and intrigued by the presence at home of operatic music scores which had been saved from the bombing that destroyed our house in Milano. So once I asked my mother who were the greatest singers; she answered: “, Tito Schipa and ; sopranos, and Magda Olivero.” Only in the last few years have I developed a serious interest in opera. Schipa and Gigli passed away a long time ago, Tebaldi quite recently (I was only able to talk briefly with her on the phone; she was already ill with cancer). But I had the luck to meet Olivero thanks to Prof. Crespi, professor of law, pianist, musicologist and collector of ancient sacred paintings (he donated his collection, worth a hundred million euros, to the Milan Diocesan Museum). It was November 2003, and from that day on I have had the opportunity of deepening my acquaintance with a person who has not only reached the summits of lyric but is also magnificent in her humanity.

Since I am no musicologist, I will leave aside the specific aspects of Olivero’s singing, dealing only with biographical items. I will call her Magda, as she allows those who meet her to call her; but I recall how ,

12 the great mezzo just about three months younger, called her, on a phone call with me, the Signora della lirica (Lady of Lyric).

Magda was born in Saluzzo in a family of a good social and cultural level, which practiced a traditional form of Catholicism, to which she has remained faithful. Notice that for many, or most, other singers the origins have been either in the working class (Caruso...) or in the peasant world (Nilsson...), where singing while working was a common habit. Consider also that Goethe, in his book Italian Journey, claims that everywhere in Italy people used to sing. A habit that has virtually disappeared, even for mothers taking care of infants...

Magda very early started musical studies (though she was also fascinated by a career as theatre actress, being an admirer of Sarah Ferrati). Her parents would have preferred for her to become a pianist, but she preferred singing. At two auditions in at EIAR, the Italian Radio Agency, she was judged negatively, as lacking all qualities for a singer! At the second audition, however, Maestro Gerussi, heir of the great singing technique of Cotogni, judged that she had qualities that had been ruined by her teachers. So he took her as his student, submitting her to a very intense and demanding training that ended up developing exceptional technical skills. She was able to reach high E (Callas reached high D, but had problems in maintaining it, so that the claque at La Scala intervened with suitable clapping.... as a member of the claque has told me). Notice that African women singers, among the Berbers and the Pygmies, can reach even higher notes! She could go through two and more vocalizings with a single breath (which left Lauri Volpi astounded, himself proud of being able to perform a full one with a single breath). It was normal for her to reach the end of an opera with no fatigue of the vocal organ, only with the mental and psychological stress due to her full identification 13 with the person whose role she was acting and singing. Once after singing four operas in one week, did the throat specialist who was consulted by La Scala singers ask her permission to look at her vocal chords. He was amazed that they showed no sign of tiredness, as if she had not even sung! Here we may notice that a similar performance characterized also , who was able once to sing as Isolde five times in a week, in what is possibly the most engaging role for a soprano, and not only in Wagner.... Thanks to her exceptional technique, Magda was able to sing for a span of fifty years, and she would have certainly retired later but for the loss of her husband. After retirement she still recorded much of Adriana Lecouvreur in 1993 accompanied at the piano by Carmelina Gandolfo, and part of Bohème in 1999, age 89!

Even in later years she continued to sing hymns to the Virgin in the church of Solda, in the Tirol Alps, every August 15th. In 2007 she was still giving lessons to a graduate from the conservatory, singing personally at full voice the most difficult passages. A voice, therefore, for four generations, not three, as the title of her biography by Quattrocchi would have it (Una Voce per Tre Generazioni).

Magda’s first public appearance was in 1932, followed by several performances in the Carro di Tespi ( Thespian Car) organized by , the secretary of the fascist government. Quite soon she appeared in the great theatres. Initially she sang operas of composers of the first half of the nineteenth century, but soon moved to verismo operas, with enormous success, especially in Adriana Lecouvreur of Cilea. Here is an anecdote: at the end of an Adriana performance, while she was in her dressing room, she noticed a woman silently crying. The lady approached her, embraced her and said: “Till now Adriana has been me; now she is you.” The lady was 14 Giuseppina Cobelli, one of the great sopranos of the Twenties, who soon disappeared from the operatic world, due to incurable deafness.

In year 1941 she married and left opera, thinking such a work incompatible with a normal familiar life, and possibly also due to the problems caused by war. In 1946 Toscanini, who was due to reopen La Scala, rebuilt after the war bombing, wanted to have her as the soprano; he had never met her but greatly appreciated her via radio transmissions. However no one cared to let her know the maestro’s wish (more precisely, someone did not want her to return to the scene). So La Scala reopened with the newly discovered soprano Renata Tebaldi, who impressed Toscanini with the two famous arias of the third act of Otello. Magda restarted her operatic career in 1951. At that time she knew she could never be a mother. Moreover the composer Cilea had very much insisted that she again sing Adriana, in her manner that perfectly represented his view of the heroine. Magda prepared her role with maestro Tullio Serafin, who told her: “You are always Number One”. Her career, restarted after ten years--probably a fact unique in opera history-- continued for thirty years. She sang in many places in Italy and abroad, appearing in about eighty operas of the hundred or so she had studied. She was enormous successful in the , especially in Dallas and New York. There, at the Metropolitan, her was given forty minutes of clapping, a local record. The audience was mesmerized by her acting and singing, as well as by her physical beauty and comportment,, which had led many to call her the “Alida Valli of lyric”. We wonder what would have happened if she had performed in Adriana Lecouvreur, which was cancelled for reasons that we avoid giving.

Magda sang with such colleagues as Pertile, Gigli, Schipa, Prandelli, Tagliavini, Corelli, Di Stefano, Pavarotti, Domingo, Bastianini, Protti, 15 Simionato, Stignani…. Unfortunately there are not many recordings of her performances on the market, and almost all are live, few are in the studio. This disregard by commercial companies may be partly explained by the fact that Magda never acted like a diva in order to become famous. She worked for music and was happy to sing in small towns and modest theatres (recall that the great pianist every year crossed from Moscow by car, playing piano along the way even in villages). There is however some hope that recordings of concerts broadcast by radio, EIAR, may some day be remastered from the archives.

The year 2007 was dedicated to the memory of Toscanini fifty years after his death, and to that of Callas, thirty years from hers. Callas was a very great soprano (albeit active for only a dozen years-- she had a long pause during her affair with Onassis, and when she returned to the stage her voice had lost its previous quality). She can be considered the most famous soprano of the twentieth century, due in large extent to her romances and to an imagined, but in fact not actual, artistic war with Tebaldi. The media almost always define her as the greatest soprano of the twentieth century. Now to decide who was the greatest is a task that cannot be settled by purely objective analysis, since it is influenced by personal taste. Here we wish to report some judgments on Olivero from qualified literature, that indicate her as an alternative to Callas for the title of number one.

From the book of Stinchelli, Stelle della lirica:

- Consider , , Magda Olivero, Gino Bechi, whose voices cannot be defined as “beautiful” but are endowed with interpretative qualities and, in the case of divina Magda, also absolutely exceptional technique. 16 - Art has no age, see Magda Olivero…unforgettable her intense interpretations ….where in a frame of growing emotions she exhibited cutting and burning words followed by ecstatic or melancholic passages with incomparable expressional intensity, thanks to perfect control of emission and absolute mastery of breathing.

From Opera Fanatic, the magazine of Stefan Zucker, a musical critic who produced a documentary with interviews of several stars of lyric: “Given a choice between Callas and Olivero, I’d actually pick Olivero. She has greater warmth and depth and is more moving.”

Not long ago I met a collaborator of the great tenor Ettore Parmeggiani, who sang Wagner for over twenty years at La Scala and after the second world war became the chief of the claque there. This my friend, Luigi Cestari, was also a member of the claque and was able to listen to hundred of performances. He told me that “Magda Olivero was the only singer whose voice could send a shiver down one’s back.”

Dear Magda, many years have passed since you were a two year old child with a big hat, who used to sing Torna a Surriento, standing on a window frame in Saluzzo. We want you with us for many more years, active and in good health, even when your years will be more than the many years, 101, lived by , who was a in the Thirties, when you sang with her as Liu.

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The photo below was taken Spring 2007 when Magda Olivero visited Spedicato at his home.

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Toscanini’s pictures provided by his grandchild Emanuela Castelbarco.

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