Article by Jon Tolansky

Back in 1967, shortly after the Six Day War, Leonard Bernstein and Isaac Stern featured in a documentary called A Journey to Jerusalem, covering their tour celebrating the reunification of Jerusalem, which climaxed with a concert on Mount Scopus. There was an off-stage scene where a young boy performed for the two great musicians an emotionally charged song he had composed about his late mother. Afterwards his father said to Stern “He is a genius!”. “He is not a genius” replied Stern, “he is very gifted”, and he went on to say that in his and Bernstein’s profession the word “genius” is only reserved for the very few specially remarkable people who qualify for such a description.

Isaac Stern – a truly great, very tough but, like all the very finest musicians, humble artist – only applied “genius” to the greatest composers, in line with the fourth definition the Oxford Illustrated Dictionary for many years gave of the word: “exalted intellectual power, instinctive and extraordinary imaginative, creative or inventive capacity”. Even so, within that description lies room for those few very special and exceptional performers who are able to recreate the inventions of geniuses with such inspiration, facility and truth that they virtually reincarnate the entire letter and spirit of the creator’s vision. In opera, this is the phenomenon the audience experiences through the genius of Angela Gheorghiu, who returns to the Royal Opera House Covent Garden this July to perform one of her most famous portrayals – the tragic, beautiful and complex Violetta, in Verdi’s La traviata.

Verdi knew very well that he was making colossal and unprecedented demands on the lead soprano when he conjured up his operatic vision based on the novel La dame aux camelias by Alexander Dumas. Violetta Valery is a courtesan of high society Paris, but she is a delicately sensitive and extremely volatile woman and she has a deeply noble spirit. When she meets Alfredo Germont, and he pours out his heart to her, she is shaken. As Angela Gheorghiu so tellingly said to me once in an interview “she is shocked to be in love!” And this is because she unexpectedly realises how profoundly lonely she has been – and how intensely she is capable of loving as well as being loved. The glamour and exciting high life of her profession seem so empty to her now. At first she is torn between her old ways and her new awakening, but her deeper feelings mature, and she goes to live with her beloved – only to have her new life cruelly destroyed by his father who will not allow his son to be with her. In agony, she agrees to give him up for the sake of the “family honour” – forcing her to have to return to her abandoned old ways for a while. At the end, Alfredo’s father recants, but it is much too late, as Violetta is now fatally ill, and after a very brief passionate reunion with Alfredo, she dies, leaving him broken-hearted and his father full of remorse.

The conflicts in Violetta’s life find expression in extreme and very sudden fluctuations of her emotions, which are heightened by her physical condition – she is a consumptive, and in fact her days are numbered. Verdi portrayed this exceedingly precarious existence in one of the most dangerously demanding roles in all opera. It is sometimes said that each act requires a different kind of soprano, but really it is a case of Verdi writing an enormous spectrum of vocal and psychological changes that need an artist not only of the most remarkable versatility but also the highest technical and musical discipline. Violetta requires immense coloratura virtuosity, the utmost lyrical delicacy, intense dramatic power, and a combination of elastic flexibility and controlled precision – as well as a vivid acting capacity to bring the duality of the character’s vivacious femininity and inner complexity alive on stage. Altogether the musical and theatrical balancing act between mercurial freedom and rigorous accuracy is highly fragile. If the draconian and almost impossible to satisfy Verdi were alive he would surely applaud Angela Gheorghiu for unfailingly portraying his Violetta with all the exceptionally far reaching qualities he envisioned in his inspired creation – for her total realisation of them is a part of the genius of this great artist.

Yes, just a part, because one of the most striking aspects of that genius is the way the vocal and musical characteristics and colours can change like a chameleon to suit vastly different styles and personalities. On the surface there are a few loose parallels between Violetta and the role of Manon Lescaut in Massenet’s opera based on l’Abbé Prévost’s (Antoine Prévost) novel about the fatal magical attraction that ignites between Manon and the Chevalier des Grieux after they have a chance meeting one day in Amiens. Manon in due course becomes a courtesan and she is also highly unstable, but in a very different way. She is constantly torn between her passionate love for Des Grieux and her uncontrollable addiction to the attentions of the wealthy decadent socialites of Paris. She is a younger, more immature and, dare one say so, more pathetic and self-destructive creature than Violetta. Ultimately she is equally tragic, for she dies the victim both of her insecurity and the corrupt environment she weakens for, but she is worlds away from Violetta psychologically and musically. Massenet evokes the dichotomy of her alternations between flighty effervescent coquetry and intense longing for love in a wholly different musical language and style from Verdi.

Massenet’s score reveals an astonishing quantity and frequency of markings for very quick changes of tempo, phrasing, dynamics, and precise theatrical characterisation in many of Manon’s passages. Particularly in the first scene, as the fifteen year old girl supposed to be on her way to a convent is dizzied by the new world that has opened up to her both on her journey to Amiens and in the town itself as she changes coaches, her music is often very spontaneously fragmentary and speech-like, with sudden extreme differences of colour and rhythm. This is the language and emotion of a magnetically alluring, capricious and impulsive young person – one second she bursts into abandoned sparkling laughter, the next she whispers in curious wide-eyed wonder. Massenet’s writing here (in Je suis encor tout étourdie) is extraordinarily realistic and life-like – but almost impossible to achieve unless the voice is astonishingly flexible and technically flawless. Angela Gheorghiu’s dazzlingly spectacular realisation of it in her EMI CD recording is surely one of the most amazing marvels of the world’s operatic heritage. The nimble agility, elastically flexible rubato and yet pinpoint precise articulation; the faultless breath control and the perfect intonation; the subtle changes of vocal colour in the varying character of the words and the music; and the enormous dynamic range: in the final analysis, all these exceptional qualities are fulfilling exactly each and every facet of Massenet’s titanic demands.

But we are only at the beginning of the opera, and at the start of Manon’s vocal marathon. Manon and Des Grieux elope, but before long she is being tempted to leave him for the wealthy tax collector De Bretigny, who warns her that Des Grieux’s father is going to abduct him, and in any case will disinherit him if he stays with her. In one of the most poignantly moving moments of the work, Manon, completely alone in her and Des Grieux’s room just for two minutes, sings a little ariette: Adieu, notre petite table – “goodbye, our little table…. yet it was so large for us…..it’s unimaginable that we embraced in so small a space……..the same glass was ours, and with it each of us searched for the other’s lips……..poor friend that loved me……goodbye, our little table”. Angela Gheorghiu brings an intense, hushed pathos to this moment, ingeniously reducing her vibrato to convey a still, tragic numbness and fading the dynamic down to an almost imperceptible thread of acute pain. It is a tour-de-force of artistic power and technical mastery.

In the next act Manon becomes a society belle as the toast of Paris, and Angela Gheorghiu’s voice here has the elegant sophistication of a seductive woman in contrast to the feathery butterfly lightness of the first Act, and yet her colours and characterisation tell us that Manon is really still unstable. Sure enough, she soon longs to be with Des Grieux again, and when she finds out that he is taking holy orders at Saint Sulplice Church she rushes to him and begs him to take her back. Once again, but now with desperate vehemence, she has to sing almost breathlessly with countless sudden changes of dynamic, phrasing and characterisation, all realised impeccably in Angela Gheorghiu’s astonishing performance. As Des Grieux weakens and takes her back, the scene is set for the inevitable tragedy to come, ending with her arrest and death, and his broken heart.
Angela Gheorghiu’s recording of Manon was made in 1999. Much more recently she received tremendous acclaim and a set of top awards for her masterly performance of yet another vastly different role – Cio-Cio San, that is Madam Butterfly in Puccini’s great and harrowing masterpiece, which she recorded in 2008. Here Puccini’s soprano has to conjure up an idealistic 15 year old girl becoming a formidable, intrepid woman as, against all the odds and the misgivings of the very few people she still sees, she defends her belief in her husband’s fidelity – only to be horribly shattered in the end. After waiting for nearly three years, convinced, as she sings in Un bel di (One fine day), that the dashing Lieutenant in the American Navy, Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton, will come back after sailing away just after he married her, she is momentarily overjoyed when he is finally arriving – only to be devastated to learn the truth. He is only on a quick visit, and with him is his American wife whom he has married back home in the meantime – his real wife. He had only bought Butterfly for the so-called arranged Japanese marriage that was brokered for wealthy travelling people like him in those days – a local geisha wife for whenever they happened to be visiting – and he had never remotely understood that she had fallen deeply and devotedly in love. Now he and his American wife must take back home with them Butterfly’s child that was born from the blissful union of love she shared with him on their wedding night – all that time ago. There is no future for the child with a penniless, abandoned mother and no father in Japan. And, there is no future for Madam Butterfly, who renounced her religion and family for her marriage. She decides to commit suicide.

The sheer size and scope of the role of Cio-Cio San is daunting. From the adoring young wife on her wedding night, through the long lonely journey of waiting but still believing, up to the terrible realisation that there is finally no hope, the trajectory requires the greatest vocal and emotional stamina and an enormous range of expression and characterisation. Angela Gheorghiu’s realisation of the complete tapestry and entire panorama again reveals the vast extent of her vocal, theatrical and psychological resources. Already in the first Act, in her love duet with Pinkerton, she most importantly captures the vital and subtle balance of softness and strength that are the essence of Cio-Cio San, as Butterfly is becoming a deeply serious woman. As she sings to Pinkerton, her words and her music transform from intimate gentleness to impassioned intensity: “Love me well with a little love, a child-like love – love me – please – we are a people used to small, modest, quiet things, to a tenderness gently caressing – yet – vast as the sky and as the waves of the sea.”

In the Second Act, before Butterfly even knows that Pinkerton is on his way back, the American Consul, Sharpless, tries to convince her to remarry and take the hand of the wealthy Prince Yamadoori. She is shocked, and, to Sharpless’s amazement, she brings on a child. He had no idea, and certainly Pinkerton has never known. Sharpless realizes the little boy is Pinkerton’s, and he now knows it is no use trying to convince Madam Butterfly of the terrible fate that she is soon going to have to find out for herself. Butterfly hugs her child, whom she has named Sorrow, and who she will rename Joy when Pinkerton returns, and she sings an aria to him: Che tua madre. “To think that this man was saying I should have to go back to singing and dancing in the streets just to keep you alive” – and then, as she turns away from the child, she says to Sharpless “No – death is better than that”. In Angela Gheorghiu’s performance of this heart-rending and ominous scene, her vocal colour and phrasing simultaneously convey the portentous despair of Cio-Cio San’s vision and the dignified control that is a vital part of her personality and her background – the pitiless control that will ultimately be the instrument of her suicide. It is an exact realisation of the very essence of Puccini’s vision – in such complete contrast to Massenet’s Manon, the portrayal of a woman of delicate exterior but powerfully resolute principle and human faith, destroyed both by blind foolishness from a completely alien world abroad, and cold exploitation from the world that, in the end, is just as alien at home: for it was the Japanese marriage broker, Goro, that knowingly set the entire false wedding up in the first place.

The real mark of Angela Gheorghiu’s genius is the vividly truthful and masterly stylistic way she brings to life characters that are so immensely different in dramatic and psychological personality, musical characterisation and vocal writing. Violetta, Manon and Madam Butterfly are only three out of a very large and varied repertoire. As she returns to the Royal Opera House for Violetta, she will undoubtedly bring yet more revelations to the role that made her so particularly famous early in her career when she first performed it there in 1994, creating such an international sensation that at short notice it was televised and recorded for DVD. More revelations, because no matter how many times Angela Gheorghiu has performed a part she knows so deeply and intimately, for each new performance she studies it afresh in the greatest detail, and each time she brings something new and fresh, some new spontaneous nuances, some new subtle psychological details and insights. Simone de Beauvoir said in Le Deuxième Sexe: “One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius”. Angela Gheorghiu continues to become an even more remarkable genius.

Photo above © Sasha Gusov licensed to EMI Classics.