"Sweet memories of our land fill him with strength and courage": Freni as Micaëla

Franco Corelli and Mirella Freni -- not as Don José and Micaëla, alas, but as
Gounod's Roméo and Juliette, at the Met in 1969 (photo by Louis Melancon)

MICAËLA: Your mother was leaving chapel with me,
and that's when, while kissing me --
"You'll go," she said to me, "to the city;
the route isn't long, once in Seville,
you'll search out my son, my José, my child.
And you'll tell him that his mother
dreams night and day about her absent one,
that she regrets and that she hopes,
that she forgives and that she waits.
All that -- right, sweetie? --
on my behalf you'll tell him;
and this kiss that I give you,
on my behalf you'll pass it on to him."
DON JOSÉ: A kiss from my mother?
MICAËLA: A kiss for her son.
DON JOSÉ: A kiss from my mother!
MICAËLA: A kiss for her son.
José, I pass it on to you, as I promised.
DON JOSÉ: My mother, I see her!
Yes, I see again my village!
O memories of other times!
Sweet memories of our land! etc.
MICAËLA [overlapping JOSÉ]: His mother, he sees her!
He sees again his village!
O memories of other times!
Memories of our land! etc.
BOTH: Memories of our land,
you fill his/my heart with strength and courage. etc.
DON JOSÉ [to himself]: Who knows of what demon
I was going to be the prey!
[Collected again] Even from afar my mother protects me,
and this kiss that she sends me,
[with élan] this kiss that she sends me
wards off danger and saves her son.
MICAËLA [like recitative -- animatedly]:
What demon? what danger?
I don't really understand. What does that mean?
DON JOSÉ: Nothing, nothing!
Let's speak of you, our messenger;
you're going to return to our land?
MICAËLA: Yes, this very evening . . .
tomorrow I'll see your mother.
DON JOSÉ: You'll see her! Well then, you'll tell her --
[with spirit that her son loves her and reveres her,
and that he repents today.
He wishes that back there his mother may be happy with him
All that -- right, sweetie? --
on my behalf you'll tell her,
and this kiss that I give you,
on my behalf you'll pass it on to her.
MICAËLA [simply]: Yes, I promise you . . .
on behalf of her son,
I will pass it on as I've promised.
DON JOSÉ: My mother, I see her!
Yes, I see again my village!
O memories of other times!
Sweet memories of our land! etc.
MICAËLA [overlapping JOSÉ]: His mother, he sees her!
He sees again his village!
O memories of other times!
Memories of our land! etc.
BOTH: Memories of our land,
you fill his/my heart with strength and courage, etc.

with Franco Corelli (t), Don José; Vienna Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan, cond. RCA, recorded November 1963

with Jon Vickers (t), Don José; Orchestra of the Théâtre National de l'Opéra (Paris), Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, cond. EMI, recorded July and September 1969
And finally, um, a 53-year-old Micaëla?

with Neil Shicoff (t), Don José; Orchestre National de France, Seiji Ozawa, cond. Philips, recorded July 13-22, 1988

by Ken

When last we convened, the immediate plan called for further consideration of three roles that (in addition to Nannetta in Verdi's Falstaff, which we've already considered as much as we're going to) figured importantly in the burgeoning international career of Mirella Freni: Micaëla in Bizet's Carmen, Adina in Donizetti's Elixir of Love, and inevitably her early-career signature role, Mimì in Puccini's La Bohème.

The most fun, certainly, would (or rather will) be Adina, because, while the role may not have figured all that prominently in her career, her assumption of it unleashed an opera-long explosion of sheer vocal joy. But I thought we needed to hold off on that, at least to consider Micaëla, because, as I noted last time, it's such an extraordinary thing to have a singer achieve international sizzle status off of what we normally think of as second-line (if not third-line) lyric-soprano roles like Nannetta and Micaëla. As I said before, other future stars have sung one or both of these roles on their way up, but I can't think of another soprano who was sprung to stardom by either.

Falstaff, to begin with, is such a resolutely ensemble piece that you wouldn't think Nannetta, so carefully threaded by Boito and Verdi through the opera's Merry Wives scenes, before being let loose in the magical final scene in Windsor Park as the Queen of the Fairies, the wives' secret weapon for the tormenting of Falstaff, could be that kind of attention-getter. My theory is that Nannetta embodies the most magical of the many strands of magic woven into the opera: the love and hope invested by the near-octogenarian Verdi in the children, Nannetta and Fenton.

Ostensibly Falstaff is "about" Sir John's grotesque attempt at wooing the Mistresses Ford and Page and the comeuppance delivered by these Merry Wives of Windsor. But in the end, it seems to me, the really important thing that happens is Alice Ford's triumphant thwarting of her husband's monstrous plan to marry their daughter off to the wildly inappropriate Dr. Cajus. There are a lot of reasons why I return so frequently to the 1963 RCA-Decca Falstaff recording conducted so wonderfully by Sir Georg Solti, but certainly one indelible attractions is the performances of Freni and Alfredo Kraus as Nannetta and Fenton.


NOW, AS FOR MICAËLA

We're going to look at the role itself in more breadth next time. For now, with more issues swirling in my head than I could pull together for this week, we're just listening to this chunk -- actually most of the number, minus only its introductory moments -- of the Act I duet, "Parle-moi de ma mère," when Micaëla finally finds Don José among his army comrades in Seville and fulfills her dual mission as messenger from his mother.

As for Micaëla, well, she has a certain importance in her opera too, and it's maybe a higher level of importance than is often realized in performance. She doesn't have that much to do, and while she has some key plot functions, those functions really only affect the way the main action, which is to say the way Carmen and Don José come together and destroy each other, unfolds. And the music Bizet gave her, while manageable by a second- or third-line house soprano, is pretty exposed and not at all easy to sing well -- and if the Act III aria isn't sung really well, it can sound like a drab piece of writing.

I think we can tell from the gradual pacing of the 1963 recording with Herbert von Karajan that the maestro considered the role of Micaëla pretty darned important, and we can understand why it was one of the first things he seems to have thought of for her when she came to his attention. Yes, her French is terrible, and her 1963 and 1969 Josés aren't exactly masters of the language either. (I think we can hear Corelli sometimes trying to reconfigure his vowels from Italian to French, though not terribly successfully. Meanwhile Vickers brought his own odd set of vowels to every language he sang in -- not necessarily the same set of vowels for each language, but never quite the ones the language calls for.


THAT SAID, THOUGH, MY GOODNESS, THE SINGING!

Casting José is one of the more difficult feats in the operatic repertory, and we aren't going to be able to avoid talking about its particular vocal demands. For now we're hearing something unusual and special: two tenor voices of simply enormous size, and considerable beauty as well, which their owners took pride in being able to scale down to a virtual whisper. Though there are plenty of vocal things to pick at in both Corelli's and Vickers's Josés, these are extraordinary instruments to begin with, and when voices of this size are scaled down to the mostly lyric proportions of this music it takes on an entirely different character, not to mention becoming far more powerful and beautiful in a far richer and grabbing way, than when the role is taken on by a vocally lighter-weight tenor.

As for Freni, in both the 1963 and 1969 recordings the sheer gorgeousness and vital humanity of her singing is on a level I've never heard approached by another Micaëla.


A QUICK WORD ABOUT THE 1988 RECORDING

Maybe I wouldn't have bothered with the 1988 Philips Carmen if I didn't happen to have it on CD, in much the way that I might not have bothered with the 1969 EMI recording if I hadn't realized that I do happen to have it on CD. The Philips performance has its points of interest, starting with Jessye Norman's for-records-only voicing of the title role, for which she had obvious vocal suitabilities. Anyway, I went ahead and started making audio clips of the Micaëla excerpts I intended to present here. As I made them, I became less and less sure what to do with them.

What a curious idea, to put it mildly, it was to have Freni rerecord Micaëla at 53. This is one of opera's quintessential "young miss" roles. In an Act I spoken-dialogue exchange between José and his lieutenant, Zuniga, we learn that she's 17, and this is bound to be a ginormous stretch for a 53-year-old soprano. Freni at 28 was still in her vocal prime for the Karajan recording, and at 34, with Frühbeck de Burgos, her voice floats and soars with pretty much the same seemingly effortless ease and beauty, and the French is a little better too -- at least she now has some approximation of the unstressed "e" sound, so that now she can get through the very first word in our excerpt, the simple word "votre" ("your"). (Curiously, the unstressed "e" of the second syllable of votre is pretty much the same vowel as the "o," but in 1963 the second syllable came out as some mysterious verbal contraption like "treh.")

The 1988-vintage Freni hasn't lost her understanding of how Micaëla's music is meant to go, and she's not bad, really, especially when the voice isn't under stress -- I've heard any number -- too large a number -- of noticeably less satisfying Micaëlas. Still, by her own standard (and she did after all set the standard in the role) the results aren't happy. The dynamics now frequently tend toward "loud," and the role's frequent sustained mid- and upper-range notes take on a wide-splatter vibrato. For a while my plan was to present Freni's 1988 Micaëla excerpts in a sidebar, and I may go back to that when we do our Micaëla tour next week. (We're going to sample some other Micaëlas as well, in case readers are wondering what Freni could do with the role that so many other of its exponents couldn't.)

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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