More operas need the saving grace of a prima donna to make them worth sitting through than many practitioners of the form (especially conductors, directors, and critics) will willingly admit. Composers did not stretch their imaginations to the boundaries of the genre (as they perceived it) to be meekly enacted by cooperative, pliant mouths. They knew their scores were challenges to artists who would sing them with, at best, the same levels of inspiration, daring, and discipline their creators expended writing them; and they further understood that their compositional genius could not find expression without the genius of their own prima donnas. (Magda Olivero, who came out of retirement at the request of Francesco Cilea to sing his Adriana Lecouvrer, has stated that Cilea told her he felt she sang through the notes he wrote to the very thoughts and feelings he had as he composed the opera.) This is a truth the contemporary opera world has long rebelled against: Ensemble, cooperation, a musical concept accompanying an overall directorial concept, are how we stage (and sit through) opera today. But these ideologies of performance come not from opera but the theater, and in the wake of a postwar takeover of the performing arts by directors and designers wielding not coaching and support but “concepts.”
Sometimes these newer strategies can work but almost all operas — and almost all opera audiences — struggle against them. Occasionally a new performer appears who is so powerfully persuasive, uniquely moving, and fully accomplished in her own way and on her own terms that even the sternest anti-primadonnites either must yield to the force of this single commanding inspiration or be shoved aside by the whirlwind of ecstasy she sends through her audience. It is only when such an artist revitalizes an operatic performance that the form regains its uncanny, almost oracular power. Then all the old stories of prima-donna worship — carriages unhorsed and wheeled in triumph through the streets; monarchs lining up to bask in the diva’s presence; worshippers weathering wind and cold and sleepless nights to get a standing-room ticket — make perfect sense.
Eruptions of prima donna fever are eagerly scouted, season after season. The first time I heard Cecilia Bartoli — over the speaker system at Tower Records days after her very first album was released — the flourish in her final runs and trills of Rosina’s Barbiere aria stopped every browser cold on the Classical floor, sending half of them to the checkout desk to scream, “Who was that?” When Montserrat Caballé sang the first three lines of her Lucrezia Borgia role at Carnegie Hall in 1965 — she was then almost totally unknown in the States, a late replacement for a pregnant Marilyn Horne — audience concentration audibly deepened during her first trip above the staff. (You can hear it on the bootleg tape.)
The eagerness to be in on the kill, to find the newest, most fiery talent that will slay the nouveaux and restore opera to its classic glory (even if for only a few nights of the season) is palpable in lobbies and record stores and concert halls. (The first time I heard Aprile Millo sing, the old standee next to me crossed himself when the audience roared and stamped through her curtain call.) But in the rush to recapture the full turbo-charge of opera, some proclaim glory too fast, report incredible sightings, pin too many dearly-held hopes upon talents that often don’t justify or cannot carry the burden and honor of being opera’s salvation.
All through the New York City Opera’s recent production of Donizetti’s Roberto Devereaux, I could feel an eagerness in the house to be part of an authentic, bel canto prima donna catharsis; and all through the night, it just didn’t happen. It wasn’t the production’s fault, misconceived and staged as it was. (Basically, Elizabethan trappings were postmodernized into a Warholian celebration of Elizabeth I as a superstar. Multiple images of the regnant, looking like precursors of Warhol’s Marilyns, covered the flats and floor. The throne room looked like the entrance to an especially upscale multiplex, while the Virgin Queen’s attendants wore copycat red wigs and white faces, resembling teenyboppers stealing their mothers’ bustiers to sing “Like a Virgin,” before bathroom mirrors. Handsomely designed, impressively lit, the production still came off as silly.) It wasn’t the playing: although it had been nearly a generation since Devereaux was a proud part of the City Opera repertory (as everyone knows, it was one of the greatest roles of Beverly Sills, the company’s last reigning prima donna), this was a skillfully played performance. And it certainly wasn’t the other singing: the chorus sounded fine; Fernando De La Mora sang a somewhat underpowered but still pleasant account of the caddish Essex; Mark Delavan was a dark and enraged Nottingham, and Jane Dutton, a delightful discovery, shone as the unfortunate Sarah. No, the opera foundered because there was no prima donna in the opera house, and the opera just can’t come to life without one. A lot of hope has attached itself to the player of that evening’s title role, Lauren Flanigan, who has distinguished herself in performances with the company of Hugo Weisgall’s Esther, Verdi’s Lady Macbeth, and most recently Susan B. Anthony in Thomson’s The Mother of Us All. Flanigan performances are always high-temperature, for she is not a compliant singer, willing to execute what her coaches, conductors, and regisseurs have decided for her in advance. You know when Flanigan takes the stage that she has worked hard to get there, to make whatever role she is singing meaningful to herself. This determination and ambition have earned her a strong following, especially among New York opera audiences, even as it has (I suspect) kept her well behind more obedient sopranos performing at other opera houses.
But Flanigan, for all her admirable smarts and energy and appetite, has very definite and disconcerting limitations. She does not have an especially beautiful, accomplished, versatile, or powerful instrument. The basic soprano sound she knows how to sing is of limited color and texture (if of more-than-average size). It’s really not agile or powerful or expressive enough for Elisabetta, Abigaille in Nabucco, Lady Macbeth, or Violetta—roles Flanigan nonetheless sings. If I were to describe her sound in a single word, that word would be driven. When Flanigan sings, anatomy is not destiny: she wills herself through her parts, and a good deal of the fascination she inspires comes from watching her negotiate terrain that should be far too tough for her to handle. The compliment her admirers usually offer when praising their favorite is “She’s so dramatic!” But it’s not really the drama of an inspired, achieving artist that Flanigan offers. Other singers (like Sills, in this same role) have gotten away with more than their bodies bargained for, through extraordinary musical skills, attention to words, startling and nuanced pacing. (A tape of a City Opera Devereaux performance in 1970 shows Sills in top form, drawing thrilling inspiration from her words and music.) But Flanigan isn’t really distinguished in these areas, either. Time and again, words fall flat, dramatic gestures are flourished that don’t seem to stem from an original or insightful contemplation of the actual musical and dramatic moment she is in the middle of, and (especially) moments that should be heartrending fall into the house cold. It’s that formidable ability to drive herself through an opera’s leading role that makes Flanigan so watchable (and, to some, admirable). This ability is a talent; but it is not a great talent. And it can become very disappointing, or annoying, or worrisome, to witness. There is something almost hysterical in the way this singer charges through her roles, for in her eagerness to take dramatic risks, Flanigan loses a great deal that any aspiring prima donna simply cannot afford to. Pitch, musical insights, line, coordinated registration, coloring, even the written notes are too-frequently pushed aside when the singer is on the trail of catharsis. She has impressively made a mark in bel canto roles, even though she can fail to demonstrate her ability to persuasively, beautifully, reliably, sing them. You can emerge from a Flanigan performance excited but also dismayed; something has happened onstage, but it’s come into being almost in spite of the role, not because of it.
All these flaws have been more-or-less evident in prior Flanigan performances. She had electrifying moments as Lady Macbeth (whose willfulness to conquer rivals even her singer’s), but she missed much of the creepy beauty and colors of that disturbing part. In newer repertory, with less arduous vocal demands and more dramatic latitude, she is at her best — as Susan B. and (in a real triumph) in the one-act Central Park. She was more affecting in the Thomson opera than in anything else I’ve witnessed. As Susan B., a role you simply cannot charge through but must patiently, almost methodically, demonstrate by way of minutely calibrated articulations of voice and gesture (when singing Stein and Thomson, an almost Brechtian precision and clarity are all) Flanigan was more successful than usual. But as Elisabetta in Donizetti’s Devereaux, her excitation simply could not efface the far-more-considerable imaginative challenges set for her by the composer. All of Flanigan’s energies and thoughts on the role needed to come through, but by way of the music.
They needed to come through the long scales her breath couldn’t compass and also through the radical palette of emotional colors (suddenly-challenged authority, inexplicable human frailty, sexual jealousy) the words require to truly come alive, but which she simply couldn’t realize; through an architectural molding of the great last-act aria. She simply couldn’t manage to do that. Instead of watching the great monarch felled by her own machinations and frustrated desires (to say nothing of her unfortunate choice of boyfriend), we witnessed a singer undone by a role she had everything for but the crucial vocal and musical equipment needed to handle it.
It’s not that all her singing was inadequate. In the second act, with shorter vocal lines to sing and lots of anger and betrayal to tear about, Flanigan’s Elisabetta came to life. It was a pleasure to see her wipe out the unfortunate production design, successfully dominating the stage. And there is something admirable about her, something indomitable. But there is also something frustrating about Flanigan’s efforts, and their too-eager acceptance by some listeners.
There is, there has always been, a taste for overparted but energetic singers. (Was it Chopin who once described an audience’s unwarranted protestations for a prima donna he considered unworthy as “enthusiasm of a bad genre?”) Some listeners prefer it to the well schooled but less feverish voicing of, say, a Renée Fleming. There is some point to the Callas-Tebaldi dichotomy as a textbook example of beautiful sound vs. expressive deployment of sound. I think this is all bunkum; beauty and truth are wedded in all the arts, and the human voice at its best unites them just as surely. At her best, Callas was an uncommonly beautiful (if idiosyncratic) singer. Play her last act Norma from La Scala in 1955. When Callas identifies herself as the priestess whom she has indicted for betraying her vows and people, her incredible extension of that eerie “Son io,” is answered by a shiver of awe from the audience; it’s a staggeringly meaningful and beautiful moment. Chaliapin, with his incomparable range of color, intonation, and insight, was certainly also gifted with a beautiful voice. I once heard a Mirella Freni Bohème that was so perfect a wedding of impersonation and sonic lustre that I was too haunted by the tragedy she conveyed (think of that beautiful sound falling still!) to go to sleep for forty-eight hours. In our own day, Lorraine Hunt finds extraordinary insights in line after line of hauntingly beautiful singing, often in musical territory uncharted for generations. (Her voice just seems to get bigger and broader to handle her roles.) In a series of recitals and concerts in recent New York seasons, the Polish contralto Ewa Podles has moved me to tears or chills of fears with her powerful, rich, expressive tone. And the most moving Manon I have ever heard in the theater was Renée Fleming’s. I think that singers like Flanigan, however well-intentioned and laudable (if on reduced terms) are the unfortunate symptom of a desperation for emotion, any kind of emotion, in opera, even when it is at the expense of the music that the singers are entrusted to realize. There are so few true prima donnas on our stages today, women whose training, natural abilities, and musico-dramatic imaginations can sing through the music to the truest essence of opera, that we go crazy when even an approximation of a prima donna appears. (And please note I do not say so few exist or aren’t lying in wait in the throats and aspirations of our young singers.) In Devereaux, Flanigan was such an approximation. A temptation to side with her, to want her to win, must be checked by an insistence on remembering what a true prima donna is. One must bear in mind how time and space in an opera house can literally come to a standstill when a true prima donna raises her body and soul to the music and the audience lifts their heads to believe in her.
If Flanigan ever tries this role again, it would be nice to discover that she has the ability to sing her way through it and realize the drama of the role instead of wrestling it to the ground. But that will only happen if audiences demand more of her, and their urgings cause Flanigan to regroup and not to be satisfied with what she can already do, but rather to keep improving, extending, and discovering the greater reserves of achievement that are hopefully available to her.
