PERSPECTIVE — The tenor drank bleach, and one of the great singing careers of that era ended in an instant.
A Covid lockdown mishap? When some people thought bleach was the answer to the epidemic? No. This was the fate of Karel Burian (1870-1924), the Czech heldentenor who sang most of Wagner’s leading roles in high places, performed under the baton of Gustav Mahler, and played Herod in the world premiere of Richard Strauss’ Salome in 1905. “The greatest and most descriptive Tristan” is how conductor Karl Böhm described him some 50 years after the tenor’s death. But Burian’s primitive-sounding recordings are only glimpses of his world: His 1920 accidental bleach-drinking incident was six years away from the advent of microphone recording. He attempted a comeback in 1922. But his severely burnt larynx never really recovered. He died two years later, no doubt heartbroken.
Renewed interest in the precarious lives of great singers is in the mix more than ever with Maria Callas (1923-1977): The biopic Maria starring Angelina Jolie centers on the years following her mid-1960s voice loss, which continues to be one of the most debated subjects in classical music. Everybody claims to know the real story; few agree on what it is.
Instrumentalists suffer mishaps without the steep and immediate plummet that comes with losing one’s voice, often in front of an audience of thousands. We all know intellectually that great, multi-decade careers are based on tiny folds of skin deep in the throat. But how tiny? I didn’t know until Anthony Roth Costanzo’s one-man Marriage of Figaro this month in New York that, at one point, had a camera in his mouth revealing his vocal mechanism on video screens. But anatomy is just part of it.
Breath control, sinuses, brain power, and emotional maturity also come into play. Plus the music industry — managers, impresarios, recording labels — and an audience that has the highest number per capita of deeply opinionated, self-appointed experts. One more element is most essential but most elusive. Celebrated baritone Tito Gobbi famously proclaimed that Callas lost not her voice but her nerve. What about that? Her voice was never entirely solid. Much of what she achieved was through sheer willpower. The baffling part is that the voice was randomly back some days, others not. In the 135-disc Callas box set La Divina: Maria Callas in All Her Roles, she is heard in studio-recording outtakes struggling — at length, over and over — to deliver a single solid phrase. Was it physical? Psychological? Both?
Lives of singers usually don’t become truly difficult until there’s much to lose, much to maintain, and much to fear. As a 1989 Metropolitan Opera audience waited at length for Puccini’s Il Trittico to resume, the great singing actress Teresa Stratas was in her nun costume for Suor Angelica, pacing around the bowels of the Met, stressed over the notion that she could lose her voice in mid-performance. Her press agent argued, “That’s Jimmy Levine’s problem.” Stratas went on — and delivered a performance to tell your grandchildren about.
Longtime Met music director Levine spoke openly about the burden of a great, God-given voice, namely Jessye Norman’s. Like her screen counterpart in the 1981 movie Diva, Norman (1945-2019) was obsessively anxious about her recordings, holding them back for years and then not allowing their release for extremely minute reasons.
“You sure know how to keep a guy waiting,” I said, upon running into her at a Broadway show.
“My fault! My fault!” she said.
Her musical preparation was rigorous — and her contracts were voluminous, full of provisions that were clearly directed at turning every possible factor in her favor. Reportedly, the stage needed to be spritzed with Evian water. While walking onstage at Carnegie Hall for a recital, she requested instant key changes. She believed that her curtailed recital at Tanglewood was due to the smoke from wildfires many miles away. Really?
Ambush awaits the sturdiest voices. Could the great Elisabeth Schwarzkopf have predicted at a 1966 recording sessions of Strauss lieder that her perpetually chilly pianist, Glenn Gould, would insist on turned-up heat in the studio? She left with sinusitis that didn’t make her Don Giovanni performances at the Met — her final appearance there — any easier.
Bulgarian soprano Ljuba Welitsch (1913-1996) learned Salome directly from Richard Strauss, though the too-heavy repertoire ended her sensational international career, which had begun in 1946, with a 1953 nodes operation. While learning the title role of Strauss’ Elektra in 1991, Wagnerian soprano Roberta Knie (1938–2017) discovered that her retinas were detaching due to the vibrations in her skull. She stopped singing immediately and lived for years, knowing that her voice was trapped inside of her.
And then there was the case of Anna Moffo. One of the most lustrous and alluring sopranos of her time, Moffo (1932–2006) suffered one of the most extreme cases of crossover backlash with her 1974 RCA recording of Massenet’s Thaïs. Having been a successful film and TV star in Europe, she had recently married RCA chairman Robert Sarnoff when she was given deluxe Thaïs packaging, including a sexy commemorative poster of her costumed as an Egyptian courtesan. The close-miked, pop-star engineering accentuated her tone quality — as well as vocal mishaps such as squally high notes and moments where she was just navigating the music as best she could. It was a scandal. Moffo went into much-discussed vocal rehab that was considered partly successful, at best. In the famous words attributed to Christa Ludwig, “The voice is like a raw egg: Once it’s kaput, it’s kaput.”
Or is it?
In 1977, Moffo was about to go onstage to sing Tosca in St. Petersburg, Florida, when (according to reliable industry sources) she lost her nerve, was taken for a drive, and plied with liquor. Once onstage, she was brilliant. Nice show-biz tale, I thought, until I found a live recording of the performance on Opera Depot (OD 11456-2). Brilliant? More than that, it’s a throw-all-caution-to-the-wind Tosca that is musically accurate, dramatically apt, and has the famous Moffo tone. That golden moment didn’t last. She sang for a number of years afterwards, and not with acclaimed results. But into her 70s, she continued to talk about recording. The miracle had happened once. Why not again?
More tragically, Jerry Hadley (1952-2007), the fresh-faced lyric tenor from Peoria, Ill., quit before the miracle would have occurred. Following a divorce, he took two years off from singing at the top U.S. companies and was arrested but not convicted of operating a vehicle while intoxicated, then restarted his career with Madama Butterfly in Australia and had plans to pivot into Mime in Siegfried.
“A wounded bird cannot sing…it goes straight to the throat,” he told the Courier Mail in Australia. “So I took some time off and sat in the quiet for a while. I never really understood how inseparable was the journey of the spirit and the journey of singing and making music.” Two months later, he shot himself. The full story is yet to be told. But clearly he suffered from depression and, somewhere in there, a loss of nerve.
Nerve. If only it could be bottled and sold. Some say it can — in the form of beta-blocker drugs. But while they’re said to be good for an instrumentalist who needs total musical accuracy, they decrease the emotional presence of a singer. No, nothing replaces the authenticity of the unmedicated human voice, heard in the theater without microphone and communing from soul to soul. It is never to be taken for granted.
