Mirella Freni (1935-2020)

O my dear daddy,
I like him, he's handsome, handsome.
I want to go to Porta Rossa
to buy the ring!
And if I loved him in vain,
I would go to the Ponte Vecchio,
but to throw myself in the Arno!
I'm pining and am tormented!
O God! I'd want to die!
Daddy, mercy, mercy!
Daddy, mercy, mercy!

Munich Radio Orchestra, Ino Savino, cond. Eurodisc-Vanguard Cardinal, recorded 1959

by Ken

This one is personal. I was a couple of years into operatic consciousness when Mirella Freni burst onto the international scene, and it was hard not to be won over by such a lovely lyric soprano backed by such a warm, winning personality. The "O mio babbino caro" we've just heard dates even a few years farther back, from an operatic recital she recorded for Eurodisc in Munich in 1959, which Vanguard shrewdly licensed in the '60s and issued as the above-pictured Vanguard Cardinal LP, which I'm here to tell you I listened to a lot back then.


JUMPING AHEAD



Freni rerecorded "O mio babbino caro" a bunch of times, but the version we're going to jump to was made 32 years later, when she recorded the soprano leads in all three of the one-act operas that make up Puccini's Il Trittico. By this time, while she was vocally and temperamentally fitter for the grittier Giorgetta in Il Tabarro and the title role in Suor Angelica, you wouldn't have thought of her as a likely candidate for the impossibly young Lauretta of Gianni Schicchi. Still, as we can hear, her lyric soprano, though hardly unblemished, was holding up pretty darned well, even with the roster of heavier-weight roles she was mostly singing by then.

Here, you'll recall, Lauretta is throwing everything she's got at her dear daddy, Gianni Schicchi, to trying to change his mind and help the greedy but snobbish relatives of the just-deceased Buoso Donati find a way around their real tragedy: that Buoso turns out to have disinherited the lot of them. real tragedy. This now stands as an insurmountable obstacle to Lauretta's future with the Donati she adores, her bello, bello Rinuccio.

So, now with a Schicchi on hand to sing for himself those thundering "Niente"s in reply to the implorings of Lauretta and Rinuccio, which we we heard earlier sounded only by the orchestra, here's Freni as Lauretta) in 1991.

PUCCINI: Gianni Schicchi: Gianni Schicchi, "A pro
di quella gente?" . . . Lauretta, "O mio babbino caro"

GIANNI SCHICCHI: For those people?
Nothing! Nothing! Nothing!
LAURETTA: O my dear daddy,
I like him, he's handsome, handsome.
I want to go to Porta Rossa
to buy the ring!
And if I loved him in vain,
I would go to the Ponte Vecchio,
but to throw myself in the Arno!
I'm pining and am tormented!
O God! I'd want to die!
Daddy, mercy, mercy!
Daddy, mercy, mercy!

with Leo Nucci (b), Gianni Schicchi; Orchestra of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, Bruno Bartoletti, cond. Decca, recorded July-Aug. 1991


LET'S REMEMBER THAT ANGELICA ISN'T THAT OLD

As it happens, I've been thinking lately -- one of the innumerable would-be Sunday Classics posts currently floating in limbo -- about another of Lauretta's Trittico "sisters," Sister Angelica, who probably isn't that much older than the 21-year-old Lauretta. Suor Angelica is a piece I've never much warmed to, but it does contain two of Puccini's great achievements. (We should probably stipulate for the record that both Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi were written to librettos by Giovacchino Forzano. The librettist for Il Tabarro was Giuseppe Adami, who had collaborated with Puccini on La Rondine and would do so again with Turandot.)

• First, there's the scene between Angelica and her aunt the Princess, who pays an unexpected visit to the convent where Angelica has been warehoused for more than seven years, with no contact whatsoever with her family. (I'd still like to poke around that scene a little.)

• Second, there's Angelica's coming-to-grips with the shattering news she has extracted from her aunt: that the baby boy she gave birth to out of wedlock -- to the eternal shame of her noble family, who proceeded to pack her away to this convent -- the infant son whom she held only once but who has ever since filled most of the space in her purged imagination died two years ago.

I suggested earlier that the Freni of 1991 was emotionally as well as vocally more suited to the role than the Freni of 1959. However, it's unquestionably true that the young Freni was a good deal closer to Angelica's age as we meet her in the opera; I don't think we're told how old she was when she was dumped into the convent, but add on those seven-plus years and she's clearly still in her 20s. Anyway, I thought it would be interesting to hear the 1959 and 1991 performances together.

PUCCINI: Suor Angelica: Angelica, "Senza mamma, o bimbo, tu sei morto"

Evening has fallen; in the cemetery [the stage setting for the opera specifies that the convent's cemetery is visible at the rear] the nuns are going about lighting candles over the graves.

SISTER ANGELICA: Without mama,
my baby, you died!
Your lips
without my kisses
lost their color,
cold, cold.
And you closed,
my baby, your beautiful eyes!
Not being able
to caress me,
you folded your little hands
in a cross.
And you died
without knowing
how much you were loved
by this mother of yours!

Now that you are an angel in heaven,
now you can see her, your mama!
You can descend through the firmament,
and I feel you wafting around me.
You're here, you're here, you kiss me and caress me.
Ah! tell me, when will I be able to see you in heaven?
When will I be able to kiss you?
When will I be able to die?
When will I be able to die, be able to die?
Tell her, your mama, beautiful creature,
with the light twinkling of a star,
speak to me, speak to me, love, love!

Munich Radio Orchestra, Ino Savino, cond. Eurodisc-Vanguard Cardinal, recorded 1959


Orchestra of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, Bruno Bartoletti, cond. Decca, recorded July-Aug. 1991

A BONUS "SENZA MAMMA"

Since for reasons already suggested I happen to have this audio clip ready to roll, here's one more performance of "Senza mamma."


Maria Callas, soprano; Philharmonia Orchestra, Tullio Serafin, cond. EMI, recorded September 1954

Definitely a keeper, Callas's performance, and I'm always moved by it when I return to it. I wonder, though, whether Callas, even though she was only 30 at the time, doesn't come across as a whole lot more mature than poor Angelica ever gets to be. (In case you don't know the opera, I don't want to be the spoiler who reveals how soon Angelica is going to get her death wish. While I've never been much moved by those last dozen or so minutes of Suor Angelica, I don't think I've ever heard a halfway decent performance of "Senza mamma" that didn't leave me pretty well devastated. And the Freni performances seem to me way, way more than halfway decent.)

LOOKING AHEAD -- "Pst, pst!"

Freni has been a large presence in Sunday Classics posts. In the clip repository I found representations, some of them substantial, of her as Adina in Donizetti's L'Elisir d'amore (a favorite Freni recording of mine, I'm realizing), Massenet's and Puccini's Manon,
Verdi's Violetta, Forza Leonora, Elisabeth in Don Carlos, and Desdemona, and Tatiana in Tchaikovsky's Yevgeny Onegin. These would all be worth revisiting, and there's lots of other stuff worth hearing -- there was a time, for example, when representations of her in her early-career signature role, Mimì in La Bohème, were all around us, and it's probably time we took note of that.

For now, though, I want to offer one more musical peek, at a role that Freni would early on become "too big" to sing, but that once upon a time, as Fred Plotkin reminds us in a useful remembrance blogpost, she not only put significant effort into learning but had it play an important part in the blossoming of her international career.

Inevitably we're going to want to hear Nannetta's shimmering aria in her disguise as the Queen of the Fairies in the magical masquerade final scene of Verdi's Falstaff. Let's listen now to an earlier sliver of instant character magic, from the first Garden Scene, in Act I, as Nannetta and her adored young Fenton steal a moment together. Again we have two performances, but these took place probably not much more than a month apart. But the conductors are different, and one is a live performance and one a studio one. And of course we have two distinctly different Fentons. The Peruvian tenor Luigi Alva was almost as well known for the role as he was for Rossini's Count Almaviva and Mozart's Don Ottavio, while Alfredo Kraus is a luxurious piece of casting for the role. (That summer in Rome he was participating as well in RCA's other operatic project, making his second recording of the Duke in Rigoletto.) His wasn't exactly a beautiful tenor, but it was handled with such command and finesse that his recorded Fenton remains in most ways the best performance I've heard.

VERDI: Falstaff: Act I, Scene 2, Fenton, "Pst, pst, Nannetta! ... Nannetta, "Labbra di foco"

FENTON [softly, behind the bushes]: Pst, pst, Nannetta!
NANNETTA [putting a finger to her lips to signal silence]: Shh!
FENTON: Come here!
NANNETTA [looking around with caution]: Quiet!
What do you want?
FENTON: Two kisses.
NANNETTA: Quickly.
FENTON: Quickly.
[They kiss hastily.]
NANNETTA: Lips like fire!
FENTON: Lips like flowers!
NANNETTA: Which know
the pretty game of love.
FENTON: Which speak nonsense,
revealing pearls,
pretty to look at,
sweet to kiss.
[He tries to embrace her.]
Jolly lips!
NANNETTA [defending herself and looking around]:
Wicked hands!
FENTON: Murderous eyelashes, thieving pupils!
I love you!
NANNETTA: Imprudent!
[He tries again to embrace her.]
No!
FENTON: Yes, two kisses.
NANNETTA [freeing herself]: Enough.
FENTON: I love you so much!
NANNETTA: Someone's coming!
[They separate as the women reenter.]
FENTON [singing as he goes out]:
Kissed lips don't lose their good fortune.
NANNETTA [continuing FENTON's song as she joins the other women]: Instead they renew themselves as does the moon, as does the moon.

Luigi Alva (t), Fenton; Mirella Freni (s), Nannetta; Concertgebouw Orchestra (Amsterdam), Carlo Maria Giulini, cond. Live performance in the Hague, June 20, 1963

Alfredo Kraus (t), Fenton; Mirella Freni (s), Nannetta; RCA Italiana Orchestra, Georg Solti, cond. RCA-Decca, recorded summer 1963

REMEMBERING MIRELLA FRENI: The series so far

Mirella Freni (1935-2020). "O mio babbino caro" (Gianni Schicchi), "Senza mamma" (Suor Angelica), a Fenton-and-Nannetta moment from Falstaff. [2/16/2020]

"On the breath of a fragrant breeze": More from Mirella Freni. Nannetta as the Queen of the Fairies in Falstaff. [2/23/2020]

"When the thaw comes, the first sunshine is mine": Still more Freni. Micaëla's aria (Carmen), Adina reads about Tristan and Isolde (L'Elisir d'amore), "Mi chiamano Mimì" (La Bohème). [3/8/2020]

"Sweet memories of our land fill him with strength and courage": Freni as Micaëla. The Act I Don José-Micaëla duo from Act I of Bizet's Carmen. [3/15/2010]

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