So rare are opera roles for the true contralto that she often re-invents herself into Amneris (high B flats in the judgment scene), Azucena, Eboli (lots of coloratura in the Veil Song; this voice needs to move) or Ortrud. So who’s a contralto and who isn’t?
The lines between mezzo and contralto began to blur about 100 years ago. Mid-nineteenth century opera composers needed voices to cut through the orchestra, leading to a lack of repertoire for the true contralto. The earlier bel canto roles of Rossini and Bellini, replete with lower-voiced female roles, were not often performed. Verdi and Wagner were prominent, with larger and thicker orchestrations. The middle to lower registers did not easily “sound” or cut through heavier orchestrations. Cellists know this problem.
Contraltos, voices colored by sunset rather than diamonds, gravitated to the high-glam roles like Amneris. People were singing at least a quarter tone lower than they do today, and singing to smaller orchestras in smaller spaces. Too, the sensuality of the contralto voice and the sexuality of the characters it depicted were minimized. Instead, the great castrati were opera’s first sex symbols. The lower-voiced female got the old crone roles in early Italian opera. Aritea is a comic old lady in Cesti’s Orontea (1649). She spends most of the opera tottering after a dashing young man (played by a woman—a soprano—supposedly adding to the hilarity). Monteverdi used contraltos for elderly nurses, and for one superb tragic role, Ottavia in L’incoronazione di Poppea. Handel gave the contralto voice a superb role in Cornelia (Giulio Cesare in Egitto). He later revised his Rinaldo so the seductress Armida could do her seducing in the lower range. For every Dalila there was an earth mother Erda. Whether gypsy, whore or mother, the contralto seldom got the guy. She became the Voice of Mother.
What’s not to love in this voluptuous voice? Was the contralto repertoire really the leavings of the castrati? Castrated male singers who developed soprano voices in male musculature became the rock stars of the 17th and 18th centuries. (Read Anne Rice’s novel Cry to Heaven for a vivid, beautifully researched look into this lost world.) It was nothing for the castrati to throw off the most dazzling vocal feats, not so much in the service of music than at the service of audiences and themselves. They were the darlings of Europe, welcome at any royal court and revered by composers from Monteverdi to Mozart.
When the era of the castrato passed, helped towards its demise by the Enlightenment, the French Revolution and the new industrial age, audiences had been left spoiled by these large, flexible voices that crashed through the orchestra. The cult of the diva took over. The cult of the tenor came around 1830, when Louis Duprez became the first to sing the high C from the chest, abolishing the mewing falsetto that for years had stood for exciting male singing. It’s the top dog who gets noticed or at least the top line over the orchestra, the chorus and the other soloists. The great sopranos took over.
But wait! Close examination of the original scores prepared for Giuditta Pasta, Maria Malibran, and Henriette Sontag tell us that these ladies must have had voices of real power, and—at least in Norma—a more than comfortable lower range. Norma dips below the staff almost as often as she soars above it. Maria Malibran was a bona fide mezzo, who excelled in the great Rossini roles: Arsace (and Semiramide!), Tancredi, Desdemona and Angelina. And remember again, she was singing these roles to orchestras tuning lower than we are used to hearing today. Norma’s vocal color is darker than that of Amina in La Sonnambula and Elvira in I Puritani, although with Malibran and Pasta considered mezzos with large upper extensions, it’s entirely possible Bellini had lower-pitched voices in mind for these roles. Perhaps we may regard the bel canto era as a transition time from the castrati to the great contralto writing used by Wagner for Erda. Vocal color, more than range, separates the mezzos from the contraltos.
“I strongly agree that voices are defined by color rather than range,” says contralto Ellen Rabiner. A graduate of Indiana University, Rabiner is heard on a new recording of Bach’s Mass in B minor, with Martin Pearlman conducting the Boston Baroque. “The range difference between a lyric mezzo, a dramatic mezzo, and a contralto is negligible. It is the sound we make that defines us.” Rabiner’s own sound is a rich, dark velvet voice, perfectly capable of Bach’s long vocal lines. She brought her own dramatic intensity to Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky, as heard with the Columbus Symphony in 1997. But even Rabiner, who bills herself as a contralto and who has the unmistakable dark tone to her voice, says, “I’m sometimes listed as a mezzo. The Met, for example, lists contraltos under the mezzo heading, which is perfectly accurate but less specific than the term contralto. I think of the contralto as the lowest subdivision of the mezzo category. So many people think we are limited to Erda and Messiah! But for a cut-off point between mezzo and contralto, I think it depends on the singer. For me, it’s Amneris. I don’t pursue the hosen roles. Unlike the Verdi mezzo/contralto roles (Amneris, Azucena, Ulrica) that lie in the middle of the voice, make extensive use of the lower register, and call for an occasional high note, pants roles like Cherubino, Siebel, and Stephano lie in a higher tessitura and don’t show my voice to best advantage. My repertoire does include Erda, Gaea (Richard Strauss’s Daphne), Cieca, and other old lady contraltos. It also includes Carmen, Dalila, Azucena, Amneris, Ulrica, Isabella, Tancredi and Arsace. Lots of Russian—Olga, Pauline, and Kontchakova, which I sang at the New York City Opera. I’d love to do Klytamnestra but that generally comes later in the career.”
The low, commanding tones needed for Wagner’s Erda in both Das Rheingold and Siegfried can be best heard on a recording made 70 years ago by Ernestine Schumann-Heink (1861-1936). The mother of a large family, she had sons fighting on both sides in World War I. Schumann-Heink was not only a contralto with an impressive range (low D to B just under high C), she was the first Klytamnestra, in 1909. Schumann-Heink went on to practically become America’s mother. Her rich, steady voice was on the radio with Stille Nacht every Christmas Eve until her death in 1936. Her electrical recordings, made when the lady was well into her sixties, show a great voice unimpaired. If she was short on sex appeal, this was a voice America took to its heart. Everyone knew Schumann-Heink, through the radio and later when she burst forth in several early talkies. And yet a real dazzler appends her image as a saintly earth mother type: Her 1909 recording of the Brindisi from Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia. Play this alongside any of Schumann-Heink’s recordings of Brahms or Wagner, not to mention her tearful “Danny Boy,” and you have an aural portrait of a great artist.
So too, the warm, perhaps non-threatening voice comforting the people in the art of Louise Homer (1871-1947). This voice for me is the contralto. Almost baritonal, Homer, in her recordings, runs the risk of being stereotyped as the old-lady-foghorn type voice. You need to really listen closely to Homer’s recordings. Once past the near impossibility of capturing what must have been a huge sound, there’s plenty to admire in Homer’s voice, technique, and sincerity. At first hearing it’s easy to make fun of Homer’s recording of “O Thou that Tellest Good Tidings to Zion.” She struggles to keep her voice from breaking the primitive recording equipment. She fights a losing battle to quicken the tempo. The runs are not easy for her. But I’ve never heard, “lift up/thy voice/with strength/lift it up/be not afraid” sung with such authority. Like Schumann-Heink, Homer was the mother of a large family. She spent a lot of time singing Dalila and Amneris (interestingly, never Carmen), roles that were thought to be most unlike “her own dear self.” Homer’s opera career was capped with Orfeo, sung at the Met with Toscanini. Her portrait hangs to this day in the Met’s Founder’s Hall, and it looks like her voice sounds: warm, serene, and rich. Photographs show a pretty woman whose looks can be at odds with the huge, dramatic voice that brought her fame. Her recordings were best-sellers, but making them seems to have been a trial. “This is Friday the thirteenth,” Homer once wrote to her husband, composer Sydney Homer, “So I ought to have good luck with the records I just made. But you never know how the records will turn out. I was in great voice in the fall and only one was good. I stood too near. My voice is so clear and facile this year. So today I stood much farther away and I hope they shall be good.” If you want to understand the contralto voice, begin with the nearly 100-year-old recordings of Louise Homer (some are finally on CD, Pearl Gemm CD 9950). The ancient acoustics can be hard to take, but patience! The voice is there!
From Schumann-Heink and Homer, the contralto tradition extends to Marian Anderson (1897-1993). Anderson is the subject of a new biography by Alan Keiler, Marian Anderson: A Singer’s Journey (Scribner, 2000). Her 40-year recording career is finally getting its due with four new CD releases on RCA/BMG. Each of her three recordings of Brahms’s Alto Rhapsody is worth seeking out. The RCA Victor Vocal Series release, Marian Anderson, includes the 1949 version with Pierre Monteux conducting the San Francisco Symphony. Over on Pearl (Pearl GEMM CD 9405) one can hear Anderson with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy, recorded in 1939. Included here are a group of Sibelius songs that give credence to the story of the composer greeting Anderson in his home in 1940 with the words, “My roof is too low for you.” Anderson’s reputation was iconized by the 1940s, and people were admiring her courage in the face of racial prejudice more than her art. She sang on, bringing nothing to the argument except her magnificent voice, hailed by Toscanini as “a voice heard once in a hundred years.” Her debut at the Metropolitan (as Ulrica in Un ballo in maschera) was also her debut in opera. This was in 1955, by which time her great years were behind her. But one hearing of Anderson’s searing recording of Sibelius’s “The Tryst” (Flickan kom fran sin alskings mote) gives lie to her reputation for placidity.
If Anderson’s post-career reputation has favored courage over voice, the reputation of Kathleen Ferrier (1912-1953), too, was distorted by her early death from cancer. Her friend Peter Pears described Ferrier’s “Rabelaisian wit,” and at the time of her death she had been pursuing her career for only ten years. Ferrier’s sumptuous voice conquered post-World War II Europe (and the states). For her, Benjamin Britten wrote his opera, The Rape of Lucretia. Her only other role was Gluck’s Orfeo. Bruno Walter coached her in the great Mahler cycles, and together they recorded the Kindertotenlieder, and a year before Ferrier’s death, Das Lied von der Erde. But it was not for Mahler, Gluck, or Britten that Ferrier became a household name, at least in Britain. It was for her way with English song, from “O Can Ye Sew Cushions” to the sublime “Ca’ the Yowes” and “Blow the Wind Southerly,” that Ferrier earned her place in heaven.
From Schumann-Heink to Homer to Anderson to Ferrier, we progress to Lili Chookasian to Maureen Forrester to Nathalie Stutzmann and Ellen Rabiner. Stuztmann is a young Frenchwoman with an exclusive recording contract for RCA. Mozart arias, Bach cantatas, oratorios by Schumann and Liszt and a wonderful recording of melodies by Ernest Chausson (RCA/BMG 09026-68342-2, with pianist Inger Sodergren) are part of the story. Stutzmann and Rabiner are more revealing to us in that they are contraltos recorded with state of the art technology, thus easier to hear than the greats of generations ago. There’s no hollow tone, none of that “hootiness” afflicting women who abuse the chest register (and there are some low- voiced singers, Fedora Barbieri among them, who insist there is no such thing as the “chest register”). Ellen Rabiner we have already met, but her story is most interesting because this is a career still growing. This season she’s at the Met, with Busoni’s Doktor Faust among her assignments. She’s about to add Carmen to her repertoire. What’s a young contralto to do? “I don’t know,” declares Rabiner. “I can tell you that after getting my bachelor’s, master’s, and performance certificate from Indiana University, I went to law school and practiced law for a few years. It was something to fall back on while I grew into my voice. But that’s not a recommendation I’d make to a singer. It’s just my way of agreeing that it’s very confusing for a young contralto to know what to do. “One thing a young singer can do is look for role models. “I have to say I’ve always listened to Christa Ludwig as my ideal,” continues Rabiner. “She’s not a contralto of course, but I always thought that if I could aim for that kind of singing I’d be in good shape. In the Verdi roles, I like Fedora Barbieri. A current contralto role model would have to be Ewa Podle≠. It’s wonderful to hear a recital of dark, powerful, Slavic songs followed by encores of ‘Cruda sorte’ and the ‘Habanera.’ She proves that you don’t have to be a lyric mezzo to sing that repertoire. People shouldn’t assume that large, dark voices can’t move.” Podle≠’s career in the U.S. appears to be moving quite well, and so does Ellen Rabiner’s, giving new hope for artists able to sing low.
