# Alessandra Marc, At Half Her Former Size



## Seattleoperafan (Mar 24, 2013)

She still sounds wonderful, but has easily lost 100 pounds. It is strange that she is wearing no makeup for this concert. She has never had any fashion sense. I am guessing she is mid to lat 50's. She doesn't seem to have much of an opera career anymore. I have always loved her shimmering voice.


----------



## Bonetan (Dec 22, 2016)

Its telling that most of these fat cow sopranos are American. The food situation in the US is messed up smh. Then they have to resort to drastic measures to lose weight at the detriment of their voice. I don't know if any of this applies to this lady, but her being American got me thinking...


----------



## SixFootScowl (Oct 17, 2011)

Seattleoperafan said:


> *She still sounds wonderful*, but has easily lost 100 pounds. It is strange that she is wearing no makeup for this concert. She has never had any fashion sense. I am guessing she is mid to lat 50's. She doesn't seem to have much of an opera career anymore. I have always loved her shimmering voice.


Perhaps weight loss only affects the vocal cords when taken to the extreme like with Callas.


----------



## The Conte (May 31, 2015)

Fritz Kobus said:


> Perhaps weight loss only affects the vocal cords when taken to the extreme like with Callas.


There are various theories about what happened to Callas. I don't think it has ever been proven that weight loss has a detrimental effect on the voice (although when taken to an extreme, as in cases of anorexia, it obviously is detrimental to a person's heath overall).

N.


----------



## BalalaikaBoy (Sep 25, 2014)

The Conte said:


> There are various theories about what happened to Callas. I don't think it has ever been proven that weight loss has a detrimental effect on the voice (although when taken to an extreme, as in cases of anorexia, it obviously is detrimental to a person's heath overall).
> 
> N.


in Callas's case, a large amount was due to the technique she used. essentially, she ingested tape worms which eat EVERYTHING inside the body. not just fat, but muscle, organ tissue, essential vitamins. it's no surprise their were some more serious health repercussions.


----------



## BalalaikaBoy (Sep 25, 2014)

now a huge fan. comes off with much of the bellow-y quality I dislike in most dramatic sopranos. the dramatic singers I like tend come from more traditional techniques where the voice still moves lyrically even amidst bigger rep (ex: Flagstad).



The Conte said:


> There are various theories about what happened to Callas. I don't think it has ever been proven that weight loss has a detrimental effect on the voice (although when taken to an extreme, as in cases of anorexia, it obviously is detrimental to a person's heath overall).
> 
> N.


in Callas's case, a large amount was due to the technique she used. essentially, she ingested tape worms which eat EVERYTHING inside the body. not just fat, but muscle, organ tissue, essential vitamins. it's no surprise their were some more serious health repercussions.


----------



## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Seattleoperafan said:


> She still sounds wonderful, but has easily lost 100 pounds. It is strange that she is wearing no makeup for this concert. She has never had any fashion sense. I am guessing she is mid to lat 50's. She doesn't seem to have much of an opera career anymore. I have always loved her shimmering voice.


Marc was born in 1957, making her 60 in this clip. Her voice was always pure and even, with a narrow, quick vibrato - a wonderful antidote to the teeth-rattling vibratos we're so often subjected to (hello Angela). She did have a habit of attacking notes from below - just an odd quirk, I'd say, since she was perfectly capable of hitting them dead on. In her prime she was really something:






Obviously she was fully equal to the demands of Verdi's dramatic roles, as well as those of Strauss and Wagner. Why wasn't she recorded in more operas? Her Elektra is well-regarded, Turandot held no terrors for her, and had Isolde been in her repertoire (or even if not) it would have been nice to hear her in that.


----------



## SixFootScowl (Oct 17, 2011)

BalalaikaBoy said:


> in Callas's case, a large amount was due to the technique she used. essentially, she ingested tape worms which eat EVERYTHING inside the body. not just fat, but muscle, organ tissue, essential vitamins. it's no surprise their were some more serious health repercussions.


----------



## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Fritz Kobus said:


>


Not yet grossed out? All right then...

https://www.snopes.com/horrors/vanities/tapeworm.asp


----------



## Seattleoperafan (Mar 24, 2013)

Woodduck said:


> Marc was born in 1957, making her 60 in this clip. Her voice was always pure and even, with a narrow, quick vibrato - a wonderful antidote to the teeth-rattling vibratos we're so often subjected to (hello Angela). She did have a habit of attacking notes from below - just an odd quirk, I'd say, since she was perfectly capable of hitting them dead on. In her prime she was really something:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Well said!!! I saw her in the Verdi Requiem and it was an experience I will never forget. Gorgeous with thrilling, enormous top notes. I shouldn't say this but, when she got up from her chair to sing you couldn't tell. She looked the same. I forgave her when she opened her mouth.


----------



## davidglasgow (Aug 19, 2017)

Woodduck said:


> Marc was born in 1957, making her 60 in this clip. Her voice was always pure and even, with a narrow, quick vibrato - a wonderful antidote to the teeth-rattling vibratos we're so often subjected to (hello Angela). She did have a habit of attacking notes from below - just an odd quirk, I'd say, since she was perfectly capable of hitting them dead on. In her prime she was really something:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Love your description 

I'm amazed that she was so little appreciated by the recording companies - there is a live recording of Don Carlo with Giuseppe Giacomini and Alessandra Marc from Bordeaux in 1992 which offers an electric, rich-voiced couple but in ropey sound and with a pretty blurry picture. It is frustrating this was not well-recorded for posterity.

If you consider who else was performing this rep at the time, Pavarotti had his obvious virtues but Dessi was comparatively lightweight and Sylvester/Millo, Margison/Gorchakova, Alagna/ Mattila arguably do not eclipse Giacomini/Marc either in the strength and beauty of their voices or necessarily in their interpretative insights.

Not for the first time, the perceived dearth of Verdian voices can seem like a self-fulfilling prophecy while recording executives make wrong-headed decisions. The catalogue is made much poorer by the shortage of studio recordings by Flaviano Labo, Magda Olivero, Bruno Prevedi, Pablo Elvira, Maria Chiara, Giuseppe Giacomini and the topic of this thread, Alessandra Marc, among others. Of course, it can appear there is a drought if you choose to ignore all these and only record (and re-record) the same few artists usually with diminishing returns


----------



## Itullian (Aug 27, 2011)

I saw her in Turandot about 12 years ago.
She had a nice voice that really carried.


----------



## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Bonetan said:


> Its telling that most of these fat cow sopranos are American. The food situation in the US is messed up smh. Then they have to resort to drastic measures to lose weight at the detriment of their voice. I don't know if any of this applies to this lady, but her being American got me thinking...


Americans are fat, in absurd numbers; nowadays a thin person stands out in a crowd (if you can see them behind the rest). Veterans Alessandra Marc, Jessye Norman, and Deborah Voigt, current stars Angela Meade, Jamie Barton, Tamara Wilson and Christine Goerke, up-and-comers Meredith Arwady, Leah Crocetto, Elizabeth DeShong, Latonia Moore, Amber Wagner... Hold the french fries, please!

We're told that the rest of the world, now exposed to carb-laden fast food, is getting fatter too, at the very time we're told that opera singers are increasingly expected to "look the part." A bit of a collision course, isn't it?


----------



## Seattleoperafan (Mar 24, 2013)

davidglasgow said:


> Love your description
> 
> I'm amazed that she was so little appreciated by the recording companies - there is a live recording of Don Carlo with Giuseppe Giacomini and Alessandra Marc from Bordeaux in 1992 which offers an electric, rich-voiced couple but in ropey sound and with a pretty blurry picture. It is frustrating this was not well-recorded for posterity.
> 
> ...


I agree about sad quality of the Don Carlo. She said she wasn't really a dramatic soprano, but her voice carried very well. She was great for Verdi. Her extreme size hurt her career. I think Jane Eaglen got by with it because there are so few Wagner sopranos out there who are any good. Verdi is almost as bad in that regard but I think if you are fat you stand out more.


----------



## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Seattleoperafan said:


> *Her extreme size hurt her career.* I think Jane Eaglen got by with it because there are so few Wagner sopranos out there who are any good. Verdi is almost as bad in that regard but I think if you are fat you stand out more.


Maybe size was a drawback thirty years ago, but obesity doesn't seem to be hindering today's singers' careers. Does this mean that they're so fabulous that no one cares, that we're desperate for halfway competent singers and have to take what we can get, or that we expect everyone to be huge now, so there's no point in bringing it up? Are we terrified of being accused of "fat-shaming," or misogyny, or some other capital crime, should we take a young singer aside and suggest that she (or he, but less commonly, it seems) needs to do something about her weight while she's still young, that opera is theater, that audiences deserve to be offered something that looks dramatically convincing, and that no one wants to be thinking "my God she's huge, and so young, she looks uncomfortable moving onstage, how can she even breathe to sing, is it a thyroid condition, she's going to be diabetic in a few years, what does she eat, doesn't she exercise, " etc. etc.

When Artur Bodanzki auditioned Kirsten Flagstad for the Met in 1934, when she was already a mature woman of 39 with a huge voice capable of singing Brunnhilde magnificently, he admonished her not to put on weight, since her nice figure was one reason she was being hired. That might be considered offensive now, but there's no indication that she took it that way, and she did maintain a sensible weight throughout her stage career, putting on pounds only late in life. In those days "the opera wasn't over until the slender, sturdy, or somewhat plump lady sang"; extreme obesity was rare among singers (and elsewhere), yet the reputation of opera singers for being fat precedes our current epidemic. It's all relative - and Bodanzky probably never imagined a stage full of butterballs such as we now witness and appear to be accepting as normal.

Well, it isn't normal, and it isn't attractive or healthy. It's been proven by innumerable great operatic artists that fine singing has nothing to do with the "extra support" provided by a hundred excess pounds of lard. All these overstuffed young singers with their oversized vibratos... Some opera lovers, I know, don't care what a singer looks like if she sounds good. But how good _do_ they sound? In the '50s and '60s, Callas, Tebaldi, Steber, Price, Sills, Sutherland, Nilsson, Schwarzkopf, Grummer, Ludwig, Verrett, Bumbry, Lorengar, Caballe, Cossotto, Simionato, Arkhipova, Vishnevskaya, Obraztsova, Baker, Horne, et al. sounded extraordinary: you could tell blindfolded who you were listening to, their timbres were unmistakable, they rarely had vibratos that sounded like pneumatic trills, and (except for Caballe and Horne) they were not conspicuously overweight. Clearly we're doing something - or maybe a lot of things - wrong.

Sorry. Old curmudgeon's rant over.


----------



## Seattleoperafan (Mar 24, 2013)

Woodduck said:


> Extreme size doesn't seem to be hindering today's singers' careers. Does this mean that they're so fabulous that no one cares, that we're desperate for first-rate singers and have to take what we can get, or that we expect everyone to be huge now, so there's no point in bringing it up? Is this the new normal?
> 
> When Artur Bodanzki auditioned Kirsten Flagstad for the Met in 1934, when she was 39, he admonished her not to put on weight, since her nice figure was one reason she was being hired. We might consider that mildly offensive, but there's no indication that she took it that way, and she did indeed maintain a reasonable weight throughout her stage career. In those days the opera wasn't over until the slender-to-pleasantly plump lady sang; real obesity was rare among singers (and elsewhere), yet by the standard of the time opera singers could gain the reputation of being fat. It's all relative! Bodanzky never imagined what we now appear to be accepting as normal.


My sister the opera singer thinks one of the winning things she had going for her when she was hired in Germany was the fact that she had pretty legs and looked nice onstage. Even Nilsson for most of her career looked very nice onstage and I'm sure it helped her career. Her short neck made her look heavier than she was in photographs. No one wants an obeses Salome.


----------



## Bellinilover (Jul 24, 2013)

I once read one critic's opinion that Alessandra Marc had the most beautiful soprano voice he had ever heard (this was circa 2000). I'd be tempted to agree; I love her voice. Her recorded Elektra with Sinopoli is my favorite.

Regarding "fat Americans" -- I don't disagree that too many Americans today are overweight (at certain times in my life, I've been in that category myself). However, you also see many Americans who are _too thin_. Looking at photos and video of people from the 1970's/1980's (I was born in 1978), what strikes me is that, back then, there were a great many people who were neither "fat" nor "skinny" and who were _in shape_. Today, I think it's far more common to see people who are very overweight and out of shape, or to see people who are too skinny and look unhealthy and even anorexic. It's like the "healthy medium" has disappeared.

But I do want to point out that Americans aren't the only ones with "vices" like this. What about the way--historically and maybe even today--too many Russians drank and smoked to excess?


----------



## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Bellinilover said:


> I once read one critic's opinion that Alessandra Marc had the most beautiful soprano voice he had ever heard (this was circa 2000). I'd be tempted to agree; I love her voice. Her recorded Elektra with Sinopoli is my favorite.
> 
> Regarding "fat Americans" -- I don't disagree that too many Americans today are overweight (at certain times in my life, I've been in that category myself). However, you also see many Americans who are _too thin_. Looking at photos and video of people from the 1970's/1980's (I was born in 1978), what strikes me is that, back then, there were a great many people who were neither "fat" nor "skinny" and who were _in shape_. Today, I think it's far more common to see people who are very overweight and out of shape, or to see people who are too skinny and look unhealthy and even anorexic. It's like the "healthy medium" has disappeared.
> 
> But I do want to point out that Americans aren't the only ones with "vices" like this. What about the way--historically and maybe even today--too many Russians drank and smoked to excess?


I think several factors are in play. I go back thirty years farther than you, and can say that in the '50s really fat adults were uncommon, and fat young people downright rare - so rare that I can picture clearly the "fat kid" I attended school with (he was, of course, teased about it). In those ancient times kids walked to school, played outdoors, and had no computers or smart phones to keep them immobilized. TV was rather new, had only 3 channels, and didn't run all day in most homes. Meals were prepared and eaten at home, and there was no too-convenient fast food loaded with unhealthy carbs and nasty fats.

All this began to change in the '60s. Simultaneously the postwar food industry pushed processed, packaged, "shelf-stable," denatured, addictive foods laden with salt and sugar, driving our consumption of sugar, flour and other concentrated carbohydrates higher and higher, and precipitating the current epidemic of diabetes and heart disease. Perceiving the growing health problems produced by our unnatural diet and lifestyle, people started "dieting" in a big way, trying all sorts of fad diets - low-fat, low-carb, high-protein, whatever - that failed to address, or addressed only partially, the underlying fact that we were just living lives contrary to our natural needs as organisms. Probably a small number of people are too thin as a result of resorting to extreme dietary measures - a sort of near-anorexia - but I must say I don't notice many, maybe because I've always been scrawny myself; it's apparently my natural shape - my mother's genes, I guess - and I haven't worried about it since the jocks in gym class taunted me for being a "90-pound weakling"!

Harder to assess is the effect of an environment and food supply loaded with unnatural chemicals and electrical fields. I'm sure we're gradually killing ourselves, and the planet as a whole, with practically everything we eat, drink, wear, wash with, and talk and type on, including this computer.

Dear me. I must get up now and exercise.


----------



## Pugg (Aug 8, 2014)

Bellinilover said:


> I once read one critic's opinion that Alessandra Marc had the most beautiful soprano voice he had ever heard (this was circa 2000). I'd be tempted to agree; I love her voice. Her recorded Elektra with Sinopoli is my favorite.
> 
> Regarding "fat Americans" -- I don't disagree that too many Americans today are overweight (at certain times in my life, I've been in that category myself). However, you also see many Americans who are _too thin_. Looking at photos and video of people from the 1970's/1980's (I was born in 1978), what strikes me is that, back then, there were a great many people who were neither "fat" nor "skinny" and who were _in shape_. Today, I think it's far more common to see people who are very overweight and out of shape, or to see people who are too skinny and look unhealthy and even anorexic. It's like the "healthy medium" has disappeared.
> 
> But I do want to point out that Americans aren't the only ones with "vices" like this. What about the way--historically and maybe even today--too many Russians drank and smoked to excess?


I do think this is for all country's with a great economy, all we want is more, to stratify.........., what exactly?


----------



## Seattleoperafan (Mar 24, 2013)

. I don't understand this unless she has fallen on hard times. Here is Miss Marc after dieting off more than a hundred pounds and she has on no makeup whatsoever and has done nothing with her hair. On top of that her dress looks like she bought it at Goodwill. The gay man in me would want to get all made up ( she makes up wonderfully) and have a dress that flatters my new figure. Yet nothing to show off any pride in her accomplishment. I don't understand the psychology here. She is almost 60 and still sounds reallly, really wonderful. She "tears this spiritual up":as they say. Check it out.


----------

