# Finale: Voi lo sapate. Callas, Simeonato, Muzio



## Seattleoperafan (Mar 24, 2013)

You can't play Simeonato on this website for some reason but click on the Youtube link and it should work. If it does not you can find her in the last round.


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## Seattleoperafan (Mar 24, 2013)

I meant to make it where you could see who voted for whom but I always have to mess up something LOL


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

It's hard to choose between Callas and Muzio in this. Both are classic renditions, strongly felt, and sung by voices fully equal to the music. Callas offers a little more nuance in places, and so I'll vote for her. But I'm sorry that Lina Bruna Rasa got left behind, because in my judgment she bests both of them, and in fact knocks every other singer I've ever heard out of the running. She accomplishes that rarest of things: she makes us forget that she is a performer. She simply IS Santuzza. She is as nuanced as Callas, maybe more so, but hers are not the refined, considered nuances of a singer but the seemingly spontaneous and uncontrollable emotional fluctuations of a betrayed Sicilian girl, uttered in a voice that really could belong to that girl. Among the many details I could choose. I would cite - because it touched me so deeply - her intense, inward delivery of the line, "Priva dell'onor mio rimango."

For anyone who wants to reconsider or reaffirm their initial response to Bruna Rasa, here she is:


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## Tsaraslondon (Nov 7, 2013)

The too mature Simionato is easily outclassed here by the much younger Callas in wonderful, secure voice (recording here just before she turned 30) and by Muzio. 

I'm voting for Callas, but really I wish I could offer up a tie, because I like Muzio too. Ultimately perhaps I prefer Callas's more refined touch (a bel canto approach to singing verismo - the emotions coming from the music, not from added glottal stops and sobs), but Muzio doesn't overdo the histrionics either. 

I'm afraid for once I don't agree with Woodduck. I prefer both Callas and Muzio to Rasa, who, for me, goes a bit too far over the top. You could argue of course that the music calls for it and indeed she was apparently Mascagni's preferred Santuzza. Her version just isn't so much to my taste.


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## Seattleoperafan (Mar 24, 2013)

Tsaraslondon said:


> The too mature Simionato is easily outclassed here by the much younger Callas in wonderful, secure voice (recording here just before she turned 30) and by Muzio.
> 
> I'm voting for Callas, but really I wish I could offer up a tie, because I like Muzio too. Ultimately perhaps I prefer Callas's more refined touch (a bel canto approach to singing verismo - the emotions coming from the music, not from added glottal stops and sobs), but Muzio doesn't overdo the histrionics either.
> 
> ...


Normally I would make a Callas poll multiple choice but my instincts were right that Muzio had a chance to get enough votes to be respectable. The fact that some very smart people in our forum wished they could have voted for other artists makes me feel that even though I erred in putting too many mezzos in the contest for this crowd's preferences, that I created a pretty well balanced mix. When there is lots of dissention in the vote I feel happy LOL. Next I shall dig up some of my baritone treasures for you.


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## nina foresti (Mar 11, 2014)

Man oh man was this one a toss up. I feel guilty especially being that I am in the middle of reading "The Divine Claudia" whose voice is hard to beat, but Maria won by 2 (unusual for her) appealing glottal attacks which, to me, were very necessary in this aria.


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## Shaafee Shameem (Aug 4, 2021)

While I appreciate Simionato, this comes down to La Divina vs La Divina. Interestingly, Rasponi states that Callas’ two favourite sopranos were Muzio and Ponselle, and I’ve read somewhere that Callas listened to Muzio’s Traviata recordings when preparing the role. Regardless of how far this is true, one can spot the similarities between the two: the veiled, tear laden tone, the inward pathos-ridden phrasing and the dignity and elegance of reading, even in verismo. Of the two, I slightly, just so slightly, prefer Callas, like Tsaraslondon, due to the Bel canto schooling that elevates this music. I particularly love how she treats the line ‘Io piango’. Instead of gasping or lurching, she executes something like an acciacatura, which to me is far more intense.


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## MAS (Apr 15, 2015)

To think that we'd not have Callas's recording of *Cavalleria Rusticana* had not the original singer been indisposed! I can't remember who it was, but it was revealed in one of Gramophone magazine's contests, centering on Callas. I don't remember all of the questions (What was her favorite color? was one. Answer: red), but who she was deputizing for in that recording was another. Barbieri or Nicolai?

In my view, to have Callas pitted against any other soprano or mezzo is to lose, be it the divine Muzio or Ponselle. The very sound of the voice is in the character - it was the first and only recording of the opera that I had as a burgeoning operaphile and I needed no others.


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## MAS (Apr 15, 2015)

Seattleoperafan said:


> I meant to make it where you could see who voted for whom but I always have to mess up something LOL


Too bad, as there are 18 votes so far and just a few comments. Many lurkers in this contests who are too shy (?) to offer an opinion? :devil:


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## Shaafee Shameem (Aug 4, 2021)

MAS said:


> To think that we'd not have Callas's recording of *Cavalleria Rusticana* had not the original singer been indisposed! I can't remember who it was, but it was revealed in one of Gramophone magazine's contests, centering on Callas. I don't remember all of the questions (What was her favorite color? was one. Answer: red), but who she was deputizing for in that recording was another. Barbieri or Nicolai?
> 
> In my view, to have Callas pitted against any other soprano or mezzo is to lose, be it the divine Muzio or Ponselle. The very sound of the voice is in the character - it was the first and only recording of the opera that I had as a burgeoning operaphile and I needed no others.


I think it was Barbieri. I have read it somewhere. It can't be Nikolai anyway. She recorded for Decca and made a Cavelleria recording in 1957 with Del Monaco.


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## MAS (Apr 15, 2015)

Shaafee Shameem said:


> I think it was Barbieri. I have read it somewhere. It can't be Nikolai anyway. She recorded for Decca and made a Cavelleria recording in 1957 with Del Monaco.


That makes sense (also Barbieri was in several EMI recordings).


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

MAS said:


> In my view, to have Callas pitted against any other soprano or mezzo is to lose, be it the divine Muzio or Ponselle. The very sound of the voice is in the character - it was the first and only recording of the opera that I had as a burgeoning operaphile and I needed no others.


I had the same experience with Cav and Pag. My high school library had the EMI recordings and I got to know the operas through those. I haven't been satisfied with any I've heard since. Callas is the main, though not the only, reason. I think the last performances I heard were Met broadcasts from the 2010s, and they were barely bearable. I'll venture to say that verismo is harder to do nowadays than even Verdi or Wagner.


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## Becca (Feb 5, 2015)

Woodduck said:


> I had the same experience with Cav and Pag. My high school library had the EMI recordings and I got to know the operas through those. I haven't been satisfied with any I've heard since. Callas is the main, though not the only, reason. I think the last performances I heard were Met broadcasts from the 2010s, and they were barely bearable. I'll venture to say that verismo is harder to do nowadays than even Verdi or Wagner.


If only Del Monaco wasn't on the Suliotis/Gobbi/Varviso recording. Not that I'm suggesting that Suliotis would compare, but still, probably better than many.


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## Tsaraslondon (Nov 7, 2013)

Becca said:


> If only Del Monaco wasn't on the Suliotis/Gobbi/Varviso recording. Not that I'm suggesting that Suliotis would compare, but still, probably better than many.


That was actualy the first recording of the opera I ever heard. My father bought it for my Greek mother, having been told by the guy in the record shop that this Greek soprano, Elena Souliotis (as it was spelled then) was the next big thing. Even to my as yet untutored ears, I thought Del Monaco just bawled. Other than that I loved the set and played it incessantly. We even had the piano score and I used to play the overture and the intermezzo on the piano.


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## Revitalized Classics (Oct 31, 2018)

MAS said:


> To think that we'd not have Callas's recording of *Cavalleria Rusticana* had not the original singer been indisposed! I can't remember who it was, but it was revealed in one of Gramophone magazine's contests, centering on Callas. I don't remember all of the questions (What was her favorite color? was one. Answer: red), *but who she was deputizing for in that recording was another. Barbieri or Nicolai? *


I have read that the recording dates for Cavalleria Rusticana (in Milan) were 16-25 June 1953 and 3-4 August. However, Frank Hamilton's chronology of Callas says that she was only there 3-4 August to save the project.

I've looked into it but only came away with _more_ questions. There are a couple of reasons why it might not be Barbieri, Nicolai, or even Stignani. I'm running out of candidates.

Barbieri appeared and was recorded live as Preziosilla in Forza del Destino at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino til at least _14_ June 53 (w. Tebaldi, Del Monaco, Protti et al. conducted by Mitropoulos). She sounds good here, two days before the start of the June sessions, in the Rataplan @ 2:04:09




She did not sound in vocal difficulties.

More significantly, Barbieri sang Santuzza 3 times in July 53 at Caracalla, i.e. after the June sessions and before Callas recorded the part in Milan. If she were in bad shape for recording the role, this seems weird to me: I'd have thought she would have cancelled these performances?

Nicolai would go on to record the role of Santuzza for Decca in January '54 in Milan.

Simionato is out of the picture, too: she was singing Adalgisa and Amneris with Callas in London during those June 53 sessions and would record the part later for Decca.

Stignani is an odd case. She did sing Santuzza as late as June 50 at the Rome Opera. Also, she did record Adalgisa with EMI in '54. But she had also just recorded Amneris for _Decca_ in Rome in Oct '52. There was also the second recording of Aida with a different cast, including Tebaldi, Campora, Bechi and Stignani, which became the soundtrack for the 1953 film with Sophia Loren. So I don't know if she was still with Decca rather than EMI in '53? I wondered why she could manage Adalgisa in '54 but not Santuzza a year earlier.


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## MAS (Apr 15, 2015)

Woodduck said:


> I had the same experience with Cav and Pag. My high school library had the EMI recordings and I got to know the operas through those. I haven't been satisfied with any I've heard since. Callas is the main, though not the only, reason.


It's the only recording of the opera with a real Sicilian in the cast! Not that Di Stefano does anything different than offer his beautiful diction and his normal voice, pushing it for effect.


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## Tsaraslondon (Nov 7, 2013)

Revitalized Classics said:


> Stignani is an odd case. She did sing Santuzza as late as June 50 at the Rome Opera. Also, she did record Adalgisa with EMI in '54. But she had also just recorded Amneris for _Decca_ in Rome in Oct '52. There was also the second recording of Aida with a different cast, including Tebaldi, Campora, Bechi and Stignani, which became the soundtrack for the 1953 film with Sophia Loren. So I don't know if she was still with Decca rather than EMI in '53? I wondered why she could manage Adalgisa in '54 but not Santuzza a year earlier.


But Stignani does duck some of the high notes in the 1954 *Norma*, as indeed she did at Covent Garden in 1952. She'd have been 50 in 1953.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

MAS said:


> It's the only recording of the opera with a real Sicilian in the cast! Not that Di Stefano does anything different than offer his beautiful diction and his normal voice, pushing it for effect.


I didn't know Di Stefano was Sicilian.


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## Revitalized Classics (Oct 31, 2018)

Tsaraslondon said:


> But Stignani does duck some of the high notes in the 1954 *Norma*, as indeed she did at Covent Garden in 1952. She'd have been 50 in 1953.


I've looked at La Scala's archive, and Stignani sang Santuzza there as recently as March '52. She'd also worked with Serafin in the Trovatore with Callas, Penno etc., as recently as Feb '53. So I'm just surprised that it would not work out vocally even at that age, notwithstanding my other query if her Decca work was over by '53 and she was back with EMI for the project.


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## MAS (Apr 15, 2015)

Woodduck said:


> I didn't know Di Stefano was Sicilian.


He was born in a little village near Catania. Pop. 12,116, not so small.


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## marlow (11 mo ago)

MAS said:


> He was born in a little village near Catania. Pop. 12,116, not so small.


'Giuseppe Di Stefano was born in Motta Sant'Anastasia, a village near Catania, Sicily, in 1921. He moved to Milan with his parents when he was six. He was the only son of a carabiniere turned cobbler and his dressmaker wife. Di Stefano was educated at a Jesuit seminary and briefly contemplated entering the priesthood. When he was 16, he burst into song after losing a game of cards, and the friend with whom he was playing said he must get his voice trained.' (Wiki)


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## marlow (11 mo ago)

I’d say our of those Calkas comes out top. Still have a regard for Cosotto though!


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## Tsaraslondon (Nov 7, 2013)

Revitalized Classics said:


> I've looked at La Scala's archive, and Stignani sang Santuzza there as recently as March '52. She'd also worked with Serafin in the Trovatore with Callas, Penno etc., as recently as Feb '53. So I'm just surprised that it would not work out vocally even at that age, notwithstanding my other query if her Decca work was over by '53 and she was back with EMI for the project.


She also sang Adalgisa in 1957 when Callas returned to Covent Garden for the first time since 1954. This was the occasion on which the conductor Sir John Pritchard granted the audience an encore of _Mira, o Norma_, not the 1952 performance. Mind you, with Callas's new svelte appearance, Stignani must have looked more like Norma's mother than ever!

I don't know when Stignani actually retired but it must have been soon after that. Still, I wonder if we shall ever know who was originally slated for that 1953 *Cavalleria Rusiticana*. I'm just pleased that Callas got to make it instead. It's been one of the most highly recommended ever since, despite the less than brilliant sound.


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## Tsaraslondon (Nov 7, 2013)

Tsaraslondon said:


> I don't know when Stignani actually retired but it must have been soon after that 1957 performance.


It was actually 1958. Her final performances were in London as Azucena and Dublin as Amneris.


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## Parsifal98 (Apr 29, 2020)

I understand why Callas leads the poll. Hers is a touching rendition full of pathos and I love her inflections and use of glotal attacks throughout the aria. When I first heard her recording, I thought she was the greatest Santuzza of all. But something was bothering me then that is still bothering me now: the vibrato on some of the high notes is quite slow and borders on the wobble territory. The note starting at 1:42 is the main offendant, and also turns slightly shrill after the first beats. On a technical level, if I compare Callas to Muzio, who suffers no such slackening of the vibrato, then my preference goes to the latter. And I do not prefer Muzio solely on technical terms. She also gives quite the rendition, with a splendid use of her beautiful and tragically-sounding chest voice. La Divina it is (the first one mind you)!


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## Tsaraslondon (Nov 7, 2013)

Parsifal98 said:


> I understand why Callas leads the poll. Hers is a touching rendition full of pathos and I love her inflections and use of glotal attacks throughout the aria. When I first heard her recording, I thought she was the greatest Santuzza of all. But something was bothering me then that is still bothering me now: the vibrato on some of the high notes is quite slow and borders on the wobble territory. The note starting at 1:42 is the main offendant, and also turns slightly shrill after the first beats. On a technical level, if I compare Callas to Muzio, who suffers no such slackening of the vibrato, then my preference goes to Muzio. And I do not prefer Muzio solely on technical terms. She also gives quite the rendition, with a splendid use of her beautiful and tragically-sounding chest voice. La Divina it is (the first one mind you)!


Gosh. If you're hearing too much vibrato and wobble from Callas in 1953, you must find most of today's dramatic sopranos unlistenable. I don't hear it, by the way.


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## Parsifal98 (Apr 29, 2020)

Tsaraslondon said:


> Gosh. If you're hearing too much vibrato and wobble from Callas in 1953, you must find most of today's dramatic sopranos unlistenable. I don't hear it, by the way.


That is why I don't listen to them


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Parsifal98 said:


> I understand why Callas leads the poll. Hers is a touching rendition full of pathos and I love her inflections and use of glotal attacks throughout the aria. When I first heard her recording, I thought she was the greatest Santuzza of all. But something was bothering me then that is still bothering me now: the vibrato on some of the high notes is quite slow and borders on the wobble territory. The note starting at 1:42 is the main offendant, and also turns slightly shrill after the first beats. On a technical level, if I compare Callas to Muzio, who suffers no such slackening of the vibrato, then my preference goes to the latter. And I do not prefer Muzio solely on technical terms. She also gives quite the rendition, with a splendid use of her beautiful and tragically-sounding chest voice. La Divina it is (the first one mind you)!


You're a hard one! "Quite slow" doesn't decribe any vibrato I hear in the Callas performance. "Slightly slower on a few high notes, not approaching a wobble, and not compromising the performance" would be more like it to my ear. I will say, though, that I've always felt that Callas's high notes almost always sounded to me like something attained rather than something released (think Sutherland or Nilsson), and even in her first recordings there's a tension in the high notes, typically involving that slowing of the vibrato, that can make me a little uneasy. Whether I'm really bothered by it depends somewhat on the music she's singing, and somewhat on the mood I'm in. It's in this characteristic that I think young Callas reveals a ***** in her vocal armor, and adumbrates the particular sort of trouble she would eventually have. I'm one of those admirers and lovers of her work who, in discussions about what happened to her voice, believe that there was a technical flaw there to begin with, a problem which those factors that did impinge on her served to exacerbate. Just as we can't know or weigh all of those factors, we can't really say how, or whether, she could have avoided the particular kinds of difficulties she came to have.


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## Viardots (Oct 4, 2014)

Here's a highly critical (and some might find it rather harsh) re-assessment of Claudia Muzio by Michael Scott in *The Record of Singing, Vol. 2* (yes, the same Michael Scott who in his book _Maria Meneghini Callas_ often expresses his grave disappointment over Callas' weight loss), nonetheless worth reading and discussing:

(His key points are highlighted)

"Muzio's great personal beauty, the unique and characteristic quality of her voice-once heard it is never forgotten-the unquestioned sincerity of her style and manner, her lonely and unhappy private life with its broken romances that led to an early death, are the stuff of which legends are compounded. They deeply affected her contemporaries, and over the passage of years her reputation seems actually to have grown, even in those centres where she appeared comparatively infrequently or not at all. Undoubtedly the principle factor in this has been then almost continuous availability of a small but remarkably successful group of recordings she made in the last years of her life. This is not without its sad irony, for she actually paid to make them. There are those who affect to find in them, notwithstanding her failing powers, the best of Muzio. Undoubtedly they are her most characteristic performances, as we should expect from a singer in her early forties. They represent her her art in maturity and from the best of them we can still hear much of that 'fine and communicative enthusiasm' of which Henderson wrote. *Yet familiarity and closer examination reveal not only vocal decadence but a certain musical slovenliness, even coarseness*; in particular 'Casta Diva' (Norma) and 'Ah! Non credea' (La sonnambula) are hardly more than sketches. As is apparent from her earliest recordings, she had neither control nor finish on her technique to create a stylish effect in this music. By 1934, instead of a gracefully nuanced legato informed by the breath, and the imaginative and purely musical detail such as we can still hear in the singing of Patti, Melba, Sembrich, Nordica and others, she offers a kind of generalised emotion and curiously mannered enunciation. It is often affecting in some of the music she sang, for example Refice's Cecilia, but for Bellini it is at once too fussy and not detailed enough. In his music it is hardly possible to exaggerate the importance of a clean and accurate execution. Detail is of the essence of the style; the fioritura, in particular, is neither window dressing nor singers' vanity. Thus Norma's 'Casta Diva'-a prayer to the moon-it is not being too fanciful to hear in the descending chromatic runs a musical metaphor for the moonlight slanting through the leaves of the oak trees. To make the proper effect these must be sung with both delicacy and precision.

The arias from Trovatore and La Forza del Destino still please for their soft and rounded high notes, which make an agreeable change from some of the shrill agitations of her contemporaries. Although the shortness of breath, also to be heard in the pieces from Norma and Sonnambula, may be attributable in part to the heart disease from which she was suffering, acoustic records suggest that the voice was never fully supported. In 'Amami Alfredo' (La traviata)made in 1911, though her singing is at its freshest and free of mannerisms, she has not the necessary expansion for the big phrases and is obliged to snatch breaths. *Of all her recordings 'Addio del passato' most clearly defines the limitations of her art and also her voice. *The way in which she rationalises her failing powers demonstrates plainly enough how much her priorities reflect the tastes of her day. Her reading of the letter is most dramatic and done after the fashion of a tragedy queen in deepest parlando. It is true that Verdi has written 'con voce bassa' but he added 'sensa suono' and it is surely wrong that the speaker should so dominate the accompaniment; rather should she take her cue from it and let the voice rise and fall in line with the melodic cadence. Certainly Muzio's does not seem basically a musical approach when at the end, as Violetta's anguish intensifies and speech is heightened into song, instead of moving imperceptibly from one to the other without any obvious laryngeal adjustment (as Maria Callas does perfectly in a live recording from La Scala), she engages vocal gears so abruptly that it sounds as if someone else has started to sing. In the aria she equates the symptoms of her own heart condition with those of Violetta's consumption, thus turning her breathlessness to dramatic advantage. Unfortunately she exaggerates it so greatly that we should hardly be surprised if Violetta expired before the end. What is only implicit in Verdi's music, she makes explicit, and by so doing she is obliged to alter note values; in particular, by attenuating precisely those notes which are marked to be stressed, she shifts the rhythmic accent in such a way as to give a chopped up and jerky effect to the phrasing when the opposite is intended. Her interpretation is a document, not so much of style as of her own mannerisms: the glottal attack, sudden, often dislocated, pianissimo, the rough way of relinquishing notes-the high As, for example, she lets go with something like a yelp-and her extraordinary enunciation.

Of them all it is the last which is the most mannered and upon repeated hearings becomes the most tiresome. *She has a way of holding the tones in the mouth and almost chewing out the words with the result that most of the vowel sounds are, to some degree, impure and distorted, 'a' and 'o' especially, but she is not consistent, and they vary considerably . Since there is virtually no trace of this idiosyncrasy in her two early HMV recordings and it is much less apparent on the Pathé and Edisons, it was probably, at least in its origins, a deliberate affectation, an attempt to translate into opera the pretentious delivery of some stage actors and actresses of that time, the 'birignao'. By 1934 it had become a bad habit and there are countless instances of it on her Columbia records; often, as it seems, for no apparent reason.* In the opening phrases of Tosca's prayer 'Vissi d'arte, visa d'amore, non foci mai male ad anima viva!', 'd'arte' becomes 'duartoy', 'non' almost 'nun' and the 'a' in 'viva' modified to 'e'. The consonants are also affected; 't' changes to 'd' and even on occasions disappears altogether. None of this can be blamed on recordings which are exceptionally good for their age; the only criticism that could be made of them is that being closely recorded they expose her faults all too clearly.

Her mannerisms were undoubtedly informed by genuine feeling and for many of her audiences they came to be enjoyed in themselves; record collectors too have come to love them, and indeed it could be said that she was loved for, rather than despite, them. *The fact remains, however, that by the end of her career the mannerisms had taken over, and taken the edge off the finish of the music with the result that there is a sameness, a lack of characteristic detail in her interpretations; on records Violetta, Margherita, Maddalena and Cecilia all seem to be dying from the same excess of neurotic temperament. And it was not only on records that she became self-indulgent. *Even when she was young, so we are told, she often came off the stage in a complete daze; once, during a performance of Andrea Chénier at the Met, after she had finished the aria in Act Two she actually fainted away. All of which suits her legend, but *Noel Coward's dictum is worth recalling: it is the actor's business to indulge his audience, not himself. If that applies in the legitimate theatre, how much more appropriate it is to opera, where the discipline of the music demands that at all times the singer shall be in complete control.*"

About Muzio's famous recording of 'Addio del passato' from La traviata, John Steane offers a completely different opinion in The _Grand Tradition_ and explicitly singles out Scott's criticisms of the recording for counter-arguments, but due to lack of space and time I won't cite Steane here. The point is, no singer is perfect and opinions are never unanimous about almost anyone.


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## Tsaraslondon (Nov 7, 2013)

Viardots said:


> Here's a highly critical (and some might find it rather harsh) re-assessment of Claudia Muzio by Michael Scott in *The Record of Singing, Vol. 2* (yes, the same Michael Scott who in his book _Maria Meneghini Callas_ often expresses his grave disappointment over Callas' weight loss), nonetheless worth reading and discussing:
> 
> (His key points are highlighted)
> 
> ...


Thank you for posting this. It makes very interesting reading. We should all maybe also take note of your final sentence.

As for Muzio, I do like her, but have often felt the same as Scott about some of her recordings. Certainly she is no Ponselle (or Callas) in Bellini, and she would probably not be a first choice for Leonora in *Il Trovatore* or even for Violetta. (My thoughts on her _Addio del passato_ fall somewhere between Scott and Steane.) and though I can understand why people are affected by the mere sound of her voice, I don't think she had Callas's superb musicianship, her astonishing grasp of the stylistic needs of different composers and periods. There are countless stories from conductors she worked with about her knowledge and deep understanding of the differences between, for instance, Verdian and bel canto ornamentation, even of the differences between Donizetti and Bellini. Callas wasn't a voice. She was a musician, whose first intrument just happened to be her voice.

Anyway, I digress. Getting back to Muzio, I think my favourite of all her records is that little song by Donaudy _O del mio amato ben_, a performance filled with veiled sighs and tears, sung with complete simplicity and naturalness. It's the track I always play when wanting to be reminded of her genius.


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## Viardots (Oct 4, 2014)

Tsaraslondon said:


> Thank you for posting this. It makes very interesting reading. We should all maybe also take note of your final sentence.
> 
> As for Muzio, I do like her, but have often felt the same as Scott about some of her recordings. Certainly she is no Ponselle (or Callas) in Bellini, and she would probably not be a first choice for Leonora in *Il Trovatore* or even for Violetta. (My thoughts on her _Addio del passato_ fall somewhere between Scott and Steane.) and though I can understand why people are affected by the mere sound of her voice, I don't think she had Callas's superb musicianship, her astonishing grasp of the stylistic needs of different composers and periods. There are countless stories from conductors she worked with about her knowledge and deep understanding of the differences between, for instance, Verdian and bel canto ornamentation, even of the differences between Donizetti and Bellini. Callas wasn't a voice. She was a musician, whose first intrument just happened to be her voice.
> 
> Anyway, I digress. Getting back to Muzio, I think my favourite of all her records is that little song by Donaudy _O del mio amato ben_, a performance filled with veiled sighs and tears, sung with complete simplicity and naturalness. It's the track I always play when wanting to be reminded of her genius.


"O del mio amato ben" happens to be my favourite Muzio recording too, as it encapsulates all the qualities that make her unforgettable.

Based on Scott's argument that the vocal personality exuded by by Muzio's singing in her late career is one of neurotic temperament, I think she is ideal for Tosca. An aircheck of Act 1 of a performance at the San Francisco Opera in 1932 (albeit in poor, Mapleson cylinder-like sound) is available on the Romophone issue that features Muzio's Columbia recordings in the main. Tosca is indeed a neurotic personality, which turns out to be the reason why Callas so disdained the role despite it being in her stage repertoire at one time or another in her career.

I have to make several corrections to my earlier post as the in-built grammar checker seems to have its own idea about certain words.


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## Parsifal98 (Apr 29, 2020)

Woodduck said:


> You're a hard one! "Quite slow" doesn't decribe any vibrato I hear in the Callas performance. "Slightly slower on a few high notes, not approaching a wobble, and not compromising the performance" would be more like it to my ear. I will say, though, that I've always felt that Callas's high notes almost always sounded to me like something attained rather than something released (think Sutherland or Nilsson), and even in her first recordings there's a tension in the high notes, typically involving that slowing of the vibrato, that can make me a little uneasy. Whether I'm really bothered by it depends somewhat on the music she's singing, and somewhat on the mood I'm in. It's in this characteristic that I think young Callas reveals a ***** in her vocal armor, and adumbrates the particular sort of trouble she would eventually have. I'm one of those admirers and lovers of her work who, in discussions about what happened to her voice, believe that there was a technical flaw there to begin with, a problem which those factors that did impinge on her served to exacerbate. Just as we can't know or weigh all of those factors, we can't really say how, or whether, she could have avoided the particular kinds of difficulties she came to have.


Listening again, it is true her vibrato is not as slow as I described it on nearly all of the high notes. I have expressed myself wrongly, for I was not referring to all of them. But I say nearly because the one starting at 1:42 still bothers me. I have fortunately did not say that she was wobbling, but even the wobbling territory to which I was referring is further away than I have made it seen. It is still closer than I would prefer, and I know where this slowness of vibrato will lead. I have been listening to Melchior and Flagstad a great deal over the past week, so maybe my vibrato-meter had become too sensitive when I did the poll.

I agree with you about what you've described as the ***** in young Callas's armour, the technical flaw which has always been there. My feeling is that the seeds of vocal decline were planted sooner than we usually dare to admit (the initiating event being for many the weight loss). I am also an admirer of Callas, and own many of her great performances. She was my favorite singer for a while. But over the years, I have come to appreciate other singers who often find themselves overshadowed by her sheer artistry, musicality and fame, but who on a technical level could surpass her. Such newly found appreciation for these artists is mostly thanks to many members of this forum.


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