Growing up in the nation’s capital, I followed the local opera scene with interest. This included the endless attempts to popularize this highbrow form. The most creative of these was probably “Opera in the Outfield,” where music lovers gathered at Nationals Park to watch Renée Fleming sing on a giant screen. Plácido Domingo was the head of the Washington National Opera at the time and showed up to give a speech. Sitting only 50 feet away, I imagined I could feel his aura bathing me with inspiration.
“Opera in the Outfield” is a popular event that has been running for 13 seasons now. It is nice to see some success in making artistic music more relevant to everyday life, since this is not usually the case.
Two hundred years ago, there was no need to use special promotional tactics to draw such crowds. In the 19th century, opera was popular with people from all walks of life, not just the wealthy and educated. A night at the opera combined the big-budget production of a movie with the liveliness of a concert, and divas were like pop stars. The A-list ones received much higher salaries than composers, could make or break a production, and drew a hungry cult following.
The Bel Canto Style
While opera was an international genre, its heart has always been in Italy. In the early 19th century, one of its most important composers was Gioachino Rossini. At the height of his fame, Rossini was admired even more than Beethoven.
Rossini, along with his contemporaries Vincenzo Bellini and Gaetano Donizetti, helped form a new style of opera known as bel canto, meaning “beautiful singing.” As the term suggests, Rossini’s arias demanded an elegant tone, a flexible vocal range, and well-controlled melodies that the singer could embellish at length. While this style was intended to come off as effortless when heard, it was anything but.
The music historian Charles Burney (1726–1814) described a singer’s profession in a way that could easily apply to the bel canto style. When tastes are governed by “refinement, subtlety, high notes, or rapid divisions,” he writes, then the singer must “torment himself day and night in attempting impossibilities, or he will be heard with as much indifference as a ballad-singer in the streets.”
The Dramatic Flair of Maria Malibran
Diva means “goddess” in Italian. To her fans, Maria Malibran certainly seemed like one. Written documents of this period reference Malibran more than any other performer. One letter to the singer from an admiring friend (and biographer), Ernest Legouvé, describes the emotions that the young man felt when hearing her sing: “It is on one’s knees, Madame, it is on one’s knees that one must speak of you.”Malibran gave her first public appearance at the age of 5 or 6. She was not happy with her abilities and walked off the stage in mid-performance, claiming she sang like a dog. The audience, wildly applauding her, disagreed. Her childhood was spent in constant practicing and performing, so after growing up, she acquired a fondness for the dolls and games she missed in youth. Contemporary accounts describe not only her virtuosic singing but also her great acting skills. Malibran was as comfortable with Rossini’s comic roles as with Bellini’s tragic ones. Audiences were amazed at how she seemed to fully inhabit her characters with genuine emotions.
She made her official debut on Jan. 14, 1828, at age 19. The role was in Rossini’s tragic opera “Semiramide,” based on the legend of the Assyrian Queen Semiramis. Struck with stage fright, she was poorly received at first. But controlling her nerves, she gradually won over her listeners. Fanning out her mezzo-soprano voice in an astonishing range, she abandoned herself to the emotions of her role, skillfully improvising embellishments to Rossini’s written notes. By the end of the performance, the audience became gripped with “mass hysteria.” From then on, the public referred to her as “La Malibran.”
The Incomparable Voice of Henriette Sontag
Henriette Sontag was two years older than Malibran. Coming from a theatrical family, she also appeared on the stage at a young age. She sang in many famous roles, including the soprano part at the debut of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and even performed in the same opera where Malibran made her sensational debut. While Sontag lacked the dramatic power of Malibran, her vocal technique was said to be superior.Sontag was particularly adept at doing what all great divas of the age were expected to do: improvising embellishments to a written part. Not all singers could pull this off. Once, the soprano Adelina Patti embellished the famous aria “Una voce poco fa” from “The Barber of Seville” in an excessive and overlong manner. After the performance, Rossini approached her, saying “Very nice, my dear, and who wrote the piece you have just performed?” The composer would later try to prevent bad embellishments by ornamenting the notes of his arias in more detail.
Rossini considered Sontag an exception to this rule. He once visited her in Paris to thank her for varying a song from his opera “Matilde di Shabran,” and even gave her permission to ornament his arias as she saw fit.
Like Malibran, Sontag had a successful career for a decade before marrying a Sardinian nobleman. She retired for almost 20 years, but at the end of her life revived her stage career and traveled across the Atlantic. While touring Mexico, she died in a cholera epidemic at age 48. Although dying in middle age doesn’t accord one the cult status of a more youthful tragedy, Sontag remains one of the stars of her age.
Opera divas seem quaint in an era of pop stars, who outclass their predecessors in spectacle and global fame. Yet divas stand out as personalities who built their reputations without cameras or media exposure. They can’t hog the spotlight anymore, but they still claim a space on history’s stage.
