LAST OF THE GREAT CASTRATI
SOURCE: Stendhal (transl. Richard N. Coe): Life of Rossini (Paris: Chez August Boulland et Cie, 1824
Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1970 - Copyright © 1970 by Calder and Boyars Ltd.)
Velluti
I regret that the announcement which I now have to make will be unpalatable even to the most favourably-disposed class of readers which this present biography may hope to secure. I am, moreover, deeply distressed by the duty incumbent upon me to make it, for I am well aware of the risk which I am taking; countless opinions, strange-seeming here in Paris, which I have expressed, but which so far will have been excused as the insignificant vagaries of an irresonsible mind, will suddenly be transmuted into indigestible paradoxes, into odious blasphemies whose last excuse, that of relevance to the matter on hand, will have been swept away under them. Yet the Author, having sworn a most curious oath, which is to speak what he believes to be the truth on all matters whatsolever, even at the risk of offending simultaneously the only readers who are capable of appreciating his work, and the great artist himself whose life he is writing, is in a position of dire necessity to continue even as he has begun.
The sort of man who moves about in Society; who has visited the opera buffa some two hundred times in the course of his life so far; who is beginning to despise the Académie Royale de Musique except for its ballets; and who studiously neglects the Théâtre Français - such a man represents the most enlightened, the most well-disposed reader whose attention I am likely to secure. Now, a dilettante of this class may perchance recall, long ago, when the censorship was less tyrannical than it is in our own time, having seen performance of Beaumarchais' glittering comedy, le Mariage de Figaro. Figaro, he will remember, is excessively vain of his exchaustive knowledge of the English language: which exchaustive knowledge consists of one word - Goddam! Well, to come to the point and risk everything in one throw, I maintain that the average dilettante in Paris has precisely the same kind of "exhaustive knowledge" of one of the most important aspects of singing, which is the art of embellishment or fioriture, as Figaro had of the tongue of Shakespeare. This whole realm of music, so utterly new and foreign to Parisian ears, could only be explored, could only be made familiar through six good months spent in an intensive study of Davide or Velluti. Any explorer who arrives in a new country, after the first, and by no means disagreeable glance about him, is bound sooner or later to receive a violent shock, when he begins to notice the multitude of strange and unfamiliar objects which come crowding about him from every quarter. The best-tempered, the most genial of travellers is hard put to it to suppress some small manifestation of distaste. Such would undoubtedly be the reaction of any average Parisian dilettante face to face for the first time with the extraordinary technique of which Velluti is the master. I would suggest, therefore, to any such dilettante, that he should without further ado set out to make a study of the Romance from Isolina in Velluti's interpretation. [Morlacchi's opera Tebaldo ed Isolina, which contains the famous Romance, will be performed (with Velluti in the cast) in Leghorn in September, 1823.]
Imagine a beautiful woman, whose supreme attribute is the perfection of her figure, sauntering along the Terrasse des Feuillants in bright December sunshine, wrapped in her finest mantle of furs; and now, an instant later, visualize this same graceful being setting foot in some fashionable drawing-room, which is handsomely furnished, filled with flowers, and warmed to a gentle, even temperature by some ingenious and artfully-concealed device; watch her, as she crosses the threshold, throwing off her furs, and standing forth in all the fresh and brilliant tracery of a string-time toilette. The woman who walked on the Terrasse des Feuillants is the Romance from Isolina expatriated from Italy, exiled in the cold North, and there enunciated by some well-trained tenor; how, under such circumstances, such wrappings, are yo uto do more than guess at the secret and hidden graces, at the true elegance of form and movement beneath? Freshness of line, perfection of contour alike are invisible to him who sees but the envelope. But when, on the other hand, you hear the fluted voice of Velluti singing his own favourite Romance, it is as though your eyes were unsealed; and before your wondering gaze, divested at last of her heavy mantle, stands Beauty herself in all her delicate shapeliness and entrancing fascination.
The first three bars which Velluti sings are prayers addressed by a lover to his mistress in her displeasure; and the passage concludes with a sudden fortissimo, when the lover, tormented by the object of his love, implores her forgiveness in the name of memory - the memory of the first fair morning of their new-discovered joy. The two opening bars, in Velluti's interpretation, are filled to the brim with fioriture, expressing to begin with extreme timidity, and later profound despair; he strews every note with descending scales in semitones, with scale trillate; and then at the third bar, resolves them all into a clear, unembellished, strong and sustained fortissimo which, on the occasions when he is at the height of his powers, is a miracle of freedom and confidence. No woman who truly loved could resist such a cri de coeur.
Such a style may, at first, seem effeminate, if not actively disagreeable; but at least the average French opera-lover, if he is honest, must confess that this particular vocal technique is something which he does not understand, a terra incognita of whose existence he had received no inkling from the singers he had heard in Paris. I do not deny that here, in this country, we have vocalists who can execute fioriture, and execute them with precision; but I maintain, firstly, that the sounds produced by singing of this character are not usually pleasurable in themselves, i.e., regardless of their context in the work as a whole; and secondly, that this type of singing, at least as we know it, is anti-musical, since it constantly associates effects which should not be heard in juxtaposition, and which injure each other by their close proximity. Even without exactly understanding the reason, any listener of true and natural artistic sensibility, whose ear has been trained through the medium of a couple of hundred performances at the opera buffa, is bound to feel vaguely dissatisfied with the impression created by the technique of ornamentation as it is normally interpreted in France; he may reluctantly accept it with his mind; but his heart obstinately remains unmoved. But if he were to hear Veluti, particularly on those occasions when this notable singer is at the height of his form, he would experience precisely the opposite impression, accompanied by a sensation of pleasure growing daily more exquisite. The celebrated Sassarini, a castrato attached to the Royal Chapel of His Majesty the King of Saxony, used to create the same sort of impression in his execution of church-music; and Davide comes near to achieving the same deliriously exciting result, or as near as is possible with the technique of a normal tenor. I will not confuse the reader by identifying a number of other fine singers who might have conjured up a distant echo of those angelic sensations which Velluti can inspire in our souls, had Nature but seen fit to accompany the gift of a flexible larynx with the second, but no less essential gift of a refined sensibility. It is by no means uncommon to hear singers in this latter category (who as usually greeted with wild applause by the vulgar run of humanity, which has no fault to find with them) reeling off whole strings of haphazard fioriture, sometimes of extreme technical virtuosity, but all radically incompatible with each other in meaning, in colour, and even in fundamental character. Imagine a Talma, complete with all his wonderful powers of dramatic characterization, in the grip of some horrible nightmare, and declaiming the most famous parts: first, four lines of frenzied passion, extracted from a speech by Orestes (Andromaque), followed by a couple of lines of sublime and dignified moral ratiocination, borrowed from Severus (Polyeucte), followed again without a moment's pause, by a couple more lines of snarling tyranny scarcely repressing its lust for blood, and ultimately to be identified as Nero (Britannicus)...and all the while, the soulless masses, upon whom the significance of all this is utterly wasted, vowing that they have never seen more marvellous acting, and cheering themselves hoarse! Yet, without exaggeration, this sort of performance is precisely the kind to which we have been accustomed from our most celebrated singers - for instance, from M. Martin.
Whereas Velluti gives us a whole, coherent speech, every line of which is conceived in the same character.
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