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Grim's Intriguing Discussion of Why Liszt Preferred Lenau's Faust To BOOKS 185 Grim's intriguing discussion of why Liszt preferred Lenau's Faust to Goethe's suddenly ends—without a word about Liszt's "Mephisto Waltz," a brilliant pianistic setting of a scene from Lenau. Even more startling, outside of a footnote Grim does not mention Berlioz's Damnation of Faust or Liszt's "Faust" Symphony. The latter may be a minor work, but the Berlioz is not, and Berlioz was a composer whose thoughts ran very much on literature. It is rare to wish a book twice as long as the author wrote it, but this is such a case. George Martin Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/oq/article/7/1/185/1460104 by guest on 30 September 2021 Maria Malibran Diva of the Romantic Age April FitzLyon London: Souvenir Press, 1987 (U.S. distributor: Indiana University Press) 330 pages, $29.95 When the fifth edition ofGrove'sDictionary of Music and Musicians (1961) was compiled, the editors chose as the entry on Maria Malibran the same article that had represented her in the Dictionary since it was first put out in the 1880s. The story of this diva evidently needed no revision; she seemed to have become a legendary figure about whom research was futile. Fortunately, in 1979 Howard Bushnell changed this picture, for his biography of Malibran brought together much new and inaccessible information about his subject.1 Now April Fitz- Lyon's book goes further. As well as recounting Malibran's life in rich detail, it highlights the larger historical significance of her career and reputation. Any conscientious biographer of Malibran is forced to peruse virtually boundless source materials. Though her life was brutally short (1808-36), her extraordinary fame and dizzying activity created a paper trail of huge dimen- sions. Besides much contemporary printed matter in the form of newspaper reviews and the like, there exist the correspondence, diaries, and memoirs published posthumously or still extant in manuscript. Letters to, from, and about Malibran deserve particular attention, in part because their off-the-cuff character evokes a sense of the ephemeral and thus especially suits a great singer's transitory accomplishments. Evaluating the truthfulness of docu- ments and even their authenticity, separating self-serving statements from dis- interested ones, deciding what to put aside, what to paraphrase, and what to quote in the book itself are major tasks for the biographer—tasks that FitzLyon has carried out with exemplary skill. FitzLyon is expert also in executing another biographical duty, namely, the portrayal of her leading dramatis personae. At the heart of the book of course I 8 6 BOOKS stands the possibly manic-depressive Malibran, and around her an almost operatic threesome—the domineering and perhaps sexually abusive father, Manuel Garcia; the elderly and quickly irrelevant first husband, Eugene Mal- ibran; and the lover, companion, and finally second husband, Charles de Beriot. (In addition we are given an ingenue in the person of Pauline Viardot- Garcfa, La Malibran's younger sister.) Devotion, hatred, and indifference mingled in odd and shifting proportions in the relations among these indi- viduals, but FitzLyon manages to remain fair-minded throughout. She nei- ther disparages nor idealizes her characters. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/oq/article/7/1/185/1460104 by guest on 30 September 2021 Any study of Malibran could justifiably rest content with subject matter that comprises the people and events in her life. This artist was gifted with so unmatched a combination of musical, intellectual, and dramatic talents and projected so magnetic a personality both onstage and off that a close-focus biography, even a psychobiography, would be quite fitting. At the same time, on a wider plane her pan-European and transadantic career, her recognition as the transcendent opera star of her day, her reputed immorality, and her contro- versial death are as good as a novel in themselves. FitzLyon's book covers both the human being and the incidents in a balanced and highly readable fashion. Beyond all this are certain themes that the author finds embedded in Mal- ibran's life story. One recurring topic concerns the diva's difficulty in attaining entree into exclusive social circles, which nevertheless gready appreciated her art; FitzLyon sees in this situation a vestige of the near-outlaw status to which theater folk had been relegated over the centuries. Then, too, gossip and censure dogged the singer's private affairs; here FitzLyon explores the hypo- critical moralizing that aimed to restrict women's activity in this era. Finally, FitzLyon conceives Malibran to be the creator of an archetypal image for early nineteenth-century romanticism. Among her friends and acquaintances and among her fans were numbered many leaders in the French Romantic literary movement—for example, Alphonse de Lamartine, Alfred de Musset, and George Sand—as well as Bellini, the composer whose name is forever linked with hers. But it is not by association alone that Malibran was a romantic. Her spontaneity and moodiness, her capricious daring, her calculated artistry, and her manipulative theatricality came together with her lifestyle to make of her the romantic woman par excellence—or so FitzLyon persuasively argues. (The "shrinking violet" brand of romanticism dear to English and German poets and to German composers such as Robert Schumann is not at all what FitzLyon means by the term.) The theme that most deeply permeates FitzLyon's book is her notion that Malibran perfecdy fits the model of a cult figure. Such a cult figure is not merely an accomplished person whose achievements are much admired but one who is for a time almost universally idolized and who dies young, leaving a group of sometimes hysterical devotees. Marilyn Monroe, Rudolph Valentino, James Dean, John Lennon, Martin Luther King, and John F. Kennedy are BOOKS 187 some of the demigods whom FitzLyon places in this category. The personages who are venerated usually have an air of vulnerability and separateness about them. In Malibran's case aloneness was enhanced by cosmopolitanism. For all the excitement she ignited among the intellectuals of Paris, she seems to have belonged to no one nation or culture. The idea of Malibran as a cult figure should serve FitzLyon's readers well. They will readily see the singer's behavior as that of an artist-celebrity ever reacting to the ineluctable expectations and judgments of her public. Under- stood thus, Malibran's life becomes a high-wire act in which applause is an integral part of the performance. Today many musicologists are busy writing Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/oq/article/7/1/185/1460104 by guest on 30 September 2021 "reception history," which deals with the interaction between the meaning of a musical composition and the response of its audiences. FitzLyon's work is in somewhat the same vein; she deals with the power of an adulatory following to control and define the person it adores. Yet FitzLyon's Malibran does not supersede Bushnell's. If one has questions about, say, the singer's performing engagements or the quality and capabilities of her voice, the earlier book would give the fuller answers. Contrariwise, Bushnell's study in no way renders FitzLyon's effort needless. Anything but, as Maria Malibran: Diva of the Romantic Age shows how an author's fresh ap- proach can achieve distinguished results in treating once again an inexhausti- bly fascinating life. Christopher Hatch NOTE 1. Howard Bushncll, Maria Malibran: A Biography of the Singer (University Park and London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1979). We Need A Hero! Heldentenors from Wagner's Time to the Present: A Critical History Carla Maria Verdino-Siillwold West New York, New Jersey: Weiala Press, 1989 466 pages, $34-95 (paper) Verdino-Siillwold calls herself a "critical historian," a designation that clearly implies a certain method in her approach to a study of heldentenors: a critic experiences contemporary work, contemplates it, and forms an opinion of its merit; a historian researches past events, recounts them, and deduces facts. Anyone anticipating the successful application of such procedures here will be disappointed. Despite pretensions of intellectual probity, We Need a Hero! is merely an outlet for the author's adoration of tenor Peter Hofrnann. With it she.
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