Music: Supreme Sopranos

The bony-faced, roan-haired soprano who stepped onto the stage of Manhattan’s Metropolitan Opera last week had already been honored in England as a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. In more colloquial Italy, she had been dubbed “La Stupenda.” Roughly two hours after her appearance, the Commander sank to the stage singing the words: “Al giunger tuo soltanto fia bello il del per me!” (Though only when you join me can heaven be heaven to me)—and was rewarded with a special American accolade, a sustained roar that lasted for twelve minutes and through ten curtain calls. Never, confessed the Commander later, had she “heard such sound from the throats of an audience”—and rarely had a modern audience heard such sound from a singer. In her triumphant Met debut—in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor—Soprano Joan Sutherland demonstrated even to the doubters that she is the most accomplished technician in all opera.

Sutherland is not necessarily the best singer or the most compelling actress. Her distinction, in an emergent age of great sopranos, lies in a stunning vocal technique that in the last three years has lifted her into the haughty company of the world’s finest. Standing there beside her are five singers, whose achievement challenges the memory of some of opera’s most hallowed names. The other five: Ma ria Callas, Renata Tebaldi, Eileen Farrell, Birgit Nilsson, Leontyne Price.

No two of the group come to the public equipped with the same technique or bearing the same musical gifts. The Sutherland fans fortunate enough to crowd into the Met last week heard and witnessed the best modern demonstration of bel canto singing—which has come to mean the florid, highly ornamented vocal style that almost became extinct a century ago. Sutherland, 35, has brought new life to bel canto. Says she, in her breezy Australian style: “I love all those demented old dames of the old operas.” The attraction is understandable, for Sutherland has just the voice to do the old dames justice. Crystalline, open-throated, reflex-quick, her voice can shower feathery trills on an audience or take perilous leaps with agility and astonishing accuracy. It can trace graceful arabesques of passion or float from note to note with liquid ease. Most remarkable, it does not thin out, as do most coloratura voices, into shrill parody in the upper register. Indeed, Sutherland’s upper register is her best: she can soar in full voice to a high E-flat, a fact that she demonstrated brilliantly last week in the Mad Scene from Lucia.

Curiously, Sutherland came to Donizetti and Bellini from a background in Wagner, a reversal of the process that usually finds a singer moving from lighter to heavier roles. Sydney-born, the daughter of a tailor, she concentrated at first on Wagnerian roles because “I had the build for it” (she stood 5 ft. 9 in., weighed 224 Ibs., now weighs 170). Eventually, on the advice of her husband, Australian Pianist Richard Bonynge, she decided that the bel canto repertory was where she belonged. She put in seven years at Covent Garden while developing the voice that would lead her to the Met.

The Met stage has also witnessed some of the finest triumphs of the other five great sopranos:

MARIA CALLAS, 38, has been in semi-retirement for three years, but her fans hope that she may emerge from it. Only last year she was welcomed back to La Scala in an emotion-laden performance of Donizetti’s Polinto. Recently she has had cordial correspondence with the Met’s Director Rudolph Bing, who canceled her contract three years ago but who now would gladly take her back. How much of her original accuracy, agility and control Callas retains is uncertain; and the Callas voice, even in its finest days, was never the equal of Sutherland’s. Nevertheless, it was Callas who opened up the whole range of classical opera by demonstrating that she could sing anything written for a female performer. Although in a recent recording of Norma, Callas’ voice is badly frayed and painfully wobbly, it also retains all of the lyric intensity, the emotional inflections and nuances, the dramatic insights that no singer of her time can equal. Indeed, Callas herself remains the best argument for her belief that beautiful sound can—and must—be sacrificed at times to powerful drama.

RENATA TEBALDI, 39, is also singing less than she did several years ago, although not entirely by her own choice: when the Met announced that labor troubles last summer forced them to drop Francesco Cilea’s Adriana Lecouweur, scheduled as a vehicle for Tebaldi, Italy’s diva serena canceled her contract for the season. In the repertory she calls her own (Otello, Boheme, Tosca, Forza del Destino, Butterfly, Andrea Chenier) she still cannot be challenged for sheer lovely sound—a sound that when she is in proper form seems to lie in the center of the voice, with virtually no displacement of notes. And although her acting remains as wooden as ever, she still knows how to make a line breathe, how to linger over phrases for maximum dynamic effect. She can still purl out endless pianissimos, infusing them with colors as muted but distinct as a fall landscape. If she has lost anything, it is the powerful, full-throated high notes that once added to her special glory.

EILEEN FARRELL, 41, made her leisurely way to the Metropolitan last season, long after critics had conceded she was the best dramatic soprano in America. “It didn’t give me any special satisfaction to sing at the Met,” she said coolly after her debut in Gluck’s Alcestis. “I never had any great drive to be a singer.” The drive may not have been great, but almost from the start the singing was. A onetime successful radio singer, with her own show, Farrell soon branched into recitals and concert-form operas, where she displayed a warm, vibrant voice, capable to a remarkable degree of denning feeling by alterations in placement and tone (fortunate for Farrell, since for all her sensitivity to mood she is not far ahead of Tebaldi in acting ability). Although she has the power to sing Wagner, she has stuck largely with an Italian repertory, has made her performance of Cherubini’s Medea a stirring modern classic.

BIRGIT NILSSON, 43, is the big Wagnerian soprano the Met started searching for as soon as Kirsten Flagstad retired. Nilsson displayed her vibrant, flashing voice for the first time at the Met two years ago in a performance of Tristan und Isolde. She has triumphed in most of the Wagnerian repertory, impressing not only with her ringing power but with a precision of phrasing and general musicianship that is not always found in Wagnerian opera. Best of all, at 5 ft. 8 in. and 150 Ibs., Swedish Farm Girl Nilsson is capable of lending an air of physical credibility to Wagner that his operas never had at the Met while Flagstad and Traubel trundled massively across the stage. Unlike Flagstad, who had a richer, lower voice, Nilsson believes in imbibing large doses of Italian opera to escape the “German consonants” and the “Wagnerian rut.”

LEONTYNE PRICE, 34, remains the most naturally gifted—and potentially the greatest—soprano now singing. Her voice, which has been compared to a Stradivarius because of its violinlike legato line, is as warm and as opulent as any in opera; her handling of it is a wonder of intelligence sharpened by instinct. No singer, not even Callas, has a more acute dramatic sense, as Soprano Price has demonstrated in her definitive portrayals of Aïda, Butterfly, Donna Anna in Don Giovanni, Minnie in this season’s Met opener, The Girl of the Golden West. (“You can get into this part,” said Price buoyantly, “and swing it around.”) The reason, perhaps, is that the girl from Laurel, Miss., can dream her way into the heart of a role as only the finest performers can.