Io son l'umile ancella

Mirella Freni

First, read sister vilaine fille’s heartwarming tribute to Mirella Freni.

My first complete opera recording purchase was the von Karajan La Boheme with Mirella Freni and Luciano Pavarotti (cf. my first opera recording, an excerpt CD of the Serafin La Boheme with Renata Tebaldi and Carlo Bergonzi). Freni’s Mimi has yet to be supplanted by another recording; I suspect it will remain unsurpassed, as it is both the technically superior and (in my heart) sentimental choice. The remarkable length of Freni’s career seems Topic A on everyone’s mind (from fans littering in opera-l to Joe Volpe’s Blackglama “What becomes a legend most?” tribute), but beyond that, the Freni mystique doesn’t seem to populate or influence much of the current operatic mythology (esp. queen-built mythology) as much as other Met Mimi exponents like Renata Scotto, even Ileana Cotrubas, or more recently Angela Gheorghiu. Only when Freni was repackaged in the last decade (a decade dominated by white bread divas) as the “Last Prima Donna” (capital L, capital P, capital D) did she enter the nebulous imagination of the queen. All this discussion may be incidental to the actual musical performance, but the divinity of the Diva, for better or worse, transcends the score and the stage, and lives “forever” in the shared canticles of the common worshippers. Of course, the catch is that there is not one mythology: the memoir of every queen traces the lonely narrative of defying myth while establishing another. (I know there are “mostly sane” Carol Vaness connoisseurs; the confusion mounts when I mouth my adulation for the late-90s-vintage Catherine Malfitano). One’s “understated delicacy” and “relatively placid” is another’s “shattering”, “ferocity”, “oozes sex and despair” (oozes? sex? despair? Must Dig Up That Recording From The Mountain Of Scottos and Prices). Indeed, as sister vilaine fille declares, there are many varieties of intensity in opera (as varied as the multiple personalities of the cabal waiting by the Met stage door at every evening’s end). That Guleghina (Oceanliner, Skyscraper, 747), which my sister loves to hate, shall not be placed on the same altar as the Freni; but there is no need, for the catacomb is vast and virtually bottomless. (The smear of filth can be contained!) The Aida, the Butterfly, the Manon Lescaut that I will take to my hospice won’t be the Freni (but the Price, the Scotto, the Albanese respectively--accounting current taste). (News: I shall not arise from the grips of death to look for a Micaela, Juliette, or a Nannetta.) However, my deathbed La Boheme shall be the Freni, not because she embodies the true “recitar cantando” (Sieglinde says “huh??” to vilaine fille’s Peri fetish; gurgling and cooing are valid sounds too!), but because she happened to be the Columbia House Classical Music Club La Boheme, moved a miraculous Mimi that lived once in that young boy’s heart, and, with such small hands, built the vivid garden that now houses the obese Sieglinde. Underneath the turgid, calcified layers of filth, queerdom, nostalgia, suspicion, arrogance, and rabid dementia, that “understated delicacy” is probably still Sieglinde’s truest heart.

Adieu, notre petite table

Freni Gala, 15 May 2005

One can’t simply jump onto a diva’s bandwagon at the tail end of her career and expect to be touched profoundly by such things as a gala anniversary celebration of her operatic and Met stage debuts, even as an unannounced farewell to the Met stage. (Oversentimental Sieglinde may be able to fake it, but she fakes many things.) If the diva is Mirella Freni (a full half-century on the operatic stage and 40 years since her Met debut), master technician of longevity, singing always “on interest, not capital” (more accurately, on the interest of the interest), who toured the vocal fachs with remarkable restraint (hundreds of lyrical Mimis, Lius, and Micaelas before spintos Aida, Elisabetta, Desdemona, Tatiana; and then when the voice roughened in age, selective verismo), the ecstacy or poignancy of a quiet goodbye (to a relatively placid career) becomes complicated to access. I know, however, that to those who have been there from the beginning, the charge of the gala afternoon was immensely different. Imagine being 20ish in 1965 and hearing her Mimi during her debut season at the Met, then marking the slow ooze of 40 years with dependable Freni performances (though she didn’t sing at the Met at all in the 70s), and now being 60ish and realizing that this “Non ti scordar di me” may have been the last occasion. Alas, 40 years of understated delicacy; with the patience, silence, and consistency of a mother, she has become a second mother to many; but now the mother bows low and with tears in her eyes moves on. Still, to those who were seeing La Freni for the first (and last) time Sunday afternoon, there was a feeling of general loss. I've never bought the Freni title “Last Prima Donna” because there will always be prima donnas in our midst (of varied sorts, now and forever), and therefore always a “last” prima donna in every batch of artists as viewed by succeeding eras; but the occasion of half-built music* for this particular prima donna served to prefigure the moment when our own Voigts and Flemings and Gheorghius and Mattilas make their final bows (predictably, with scary, majestically bloodcurdling versions of “Non ti scordar di me”) and maybe that inevitability was the ghost I saw when the confetti fluttered down silently from the sides and the heavy golden curtain fell (slowly, so gently) on the small, youthfully blonde, tearful Mirella Freni for the last time.

[*N.B. Sieglinde whispers in my ear and says there were three or four other artists at the gala who should be farewell’ing as well. I shall get to that issue at a later time.]

Weekend Wrap-Up

Neighborhood News


Ten things:

1. Full moon: Sieglinde is in line with NYCOF regarding Wednesday’s Met Clemenza.
2. The mother awakens: La Cieca enters the blogdom.
3. A cut above: our own four razors and his dictaphone are one year old.
4. A hole refilled: trrill reactivates, rises beyond operablogqueerdom.
5. Sister in Yankeeland: Why pine for Paulie when we got Tino.
6. Were there others on stage in the Faust?: Sieglinde could only see Bobby; AUV helps out and notices the sopranos.
7. Queen of Pirates reaches next generation: our girl in Kiwiland discovers the soul of the bel canto resurgence.
8. Hey, Mr. Postman: I really meant to send the package to douchebag.
9. May is TAFTO (Take A Friend To Orchestra) Month: take me!
10. Almost always never ten.

UPDATE [10:52am] : Hold it; there are ten after all!
10. The Gheorghius: setting fire on both sides of the Atlantic (but always an ocean between them these days).

Roberto Alagna

Faust, 10 May 2005, Beyond Words


No, that’s not Sieglinde posing with Bobby. (That’s Sieglinde’s spiritual godmother, I-only-wear-60s-couture Lois Kirschenbaum, trying to get some at the Met stage door.) Meanwhile, Sieglinde joins the chorus of Alagna admirers whose summer goal is to be the next Mrs. Gheorghiu. Kidding aside, I have never felt such love for male voices until this man’s blossoming renaissance as our leading man of opera. Simply beyond words, the joy in my heart is immense. Those who waited by the stage door after the opera (I was too spent to hang around) told me how warm, generous, infectiously happy, and boyish he was with everyone (Lois or otherwise), exuding an authentic joie de vivre through and through. News: still shaking, Sieglinde is finding it very hard to write any more on this subject. Falling for a voice consumes and paralyzes thoroughly like middle school puppy love. Recovery may be impossible.