Dream: Nilsson explains her Norma

Dream:
I am in a small Swiss café after a hard day sightseeing landscapes that (appropriately) resemble the oeuvre of Paul Klee, and as I scan the menu for anything affordable (snails, perhaps ... no, one snail ... welcome to Switzerland), I realize the woman at the next table, hiding behind dark glasses, is Birgit Nilsson. She catches me looking at her. I say, "I've read your book and I know you don't like stalkers, but I'm just the biggest fan of yours ..." Graciously, she invites me to join her.

In a café with Birgit Nilsson! The sky's the limit! Three snails! And dunkelweisen to wash them down.

Nilsson reminisces. She especially recalls her aborted desire to record Norma with Franco Corelli (though he'd already done it with Callas, of course). And suddenly, join with me now in those thrilling days of yesteryear, we are in her hillside villa in the mountains outside Zurich, and the record company, frantic, is threatening law suits, and Corelli is sobbing and hysterical all over the landscape, and Nilsson in the middle is very calmly explaining that she thought she could sing it, but on closer attention to the score realizes this is out of the question. And we circle - besuited lawyers, belawyed suits, Corelli, Nilsson, her husband, his wife, Karajan maybe (no; Serafin), Christa Ludwig (the proposed Adalgisa - of course, she'd sung it with Callas), Tito Gobbi (what was he doing there?), Jon Vickers (who was not singing Pollione if Corelli was, but my subconscious is not easily explained), and me, all of us circling an enormous tree whose flowers (black, gray, brown, maroon, cobalt blue) resemble ribbons tied into flower-shaped knots) and we are circling and chanting as if celebrating some pagan rite, which perhaps explains what I am doing here, and then we all go into the house for a very Swiss sort of breakfast with scones and muesli and rashers of trimmed bacon, and akvavit in the coffee, and the execs simply do not understand Nilsson's reasoning and Corelli does but he's more upset about the damage her decision will make on his own career and the sun rises over the pure white modernist lines of the rather unattractive chalet ...

In the old days, someone would have asked me to sing opposite Nilsson (or maybe even instead of Nilsson), but my subconscious seems to have figured out, over the years, that I am not going out on stage, don't even hint it.

La Nilsson

Reading La Nilsson, the at-long-last translated autobiography of the loudest human being on the planet in the second half of the twentieth century. It's a highly intelligent book (no surprise! she was always a brainy lady) and often amusing (ditto). She never mentions certain issues of interest to Americans - such as the five years or so she did not set foot in the U.S. due to a "disagreement" with the IRS - indeed she never seems aware of her besetting vice, a petty pinching of pennies, which obviously led to that half-million-dollar misunderstanding. (How well I remember standing all night on line at the Met for standing room to her Return performance! She opened the concert with "Dich teure Halle," and on the words "geliebter Raum," she drew them out in a spontaneous (okay, rehearsed) ritard: "Beloved room" - well, the new Met was designed with her voice in mind, was it not? - and it was as if she had leaned out and kissed every one of us on the cheek.)

One of her typical stories: The Wiener Staatsoper said it could no longer afford her rising salary, but they loved her and she loved Vienna - they would give her a ceremonial gold plate to symbolize their appreciation. Next year, again a plate. Third year, again a plate, though she had heard them grumble that the price of gold was up. This time she pulled out her little jeweler's eyeglass (don't all divas travel with one? No?) and inspected it: sure enough, gold-plated silver. She wrote the Intendant: "I hope my voice will continue to be gold and not gold-plate." He had the grace to blush.

She never (hardly ever) says anything unkind about another singer, and she worships several of them (especially Swedes: Bjoerling, Svanholm, Gedda), and she admires many lesser-known conductors while sticking pins of varying length into famous ones like Bohm, Solti, Bernstein - and there is no love at all lost with Karajan. Bernstein once said, "Birgit, you sing that so much better now that I've showed you how to do it." Assuming he was joking, she replied, "Yes, I'm so grateful - I can't get jobs on my good looks forever." Only when she'd finished speaking did she realize he had been serious.

She admires the stage directors of her time, deplores the current trends (don't we all?), hates singing teachers heartily (an old grudge - but what on earth could singing teachers DO with a voice like that?), and rips John Culshaw a new one or two. She's still angry at him about the Solti Ring - he boasted to everyone that you could hear the triangle and every violin in the orchestra, and when she suggested the voices were getting short shrift, he said, testily, "This is an orchestra of 100 prima donnas - they all want to be heard as much as you do." She did not reply, as she wanted to, that no one buys a record for the triangle player; they buy for the soprano as often as not. She adds that she never liked the sound of her voice on the vinyl disks of that Ring, but balances were much adjusted when it was released on CD - and then she liked it far more. This was a revelation to me, as I too never liked the quality of her voice on the London vinyl (the Leinsdorf Walküre is much finer; better cast too) - but the first time I heard the CDs, I leaped out of my seat: "THAT'S what Nilsson sounded like in person!" I screamed to the party assembled. (Full of people who had never heard her.)

But the voice itself - now there's a problem. I never really cottoned to the voice itself. Huge, yes; brilliantly controlled; intelligently produced; a singing actress of no mean accomplishment as well as a superb musician. And loud. The loudest voice I ever heard. (Farrell second, Julia Juon third, Sutherland tie for third.)

But it was a harsh voice. In the book, people are always marveling at its beauty (she says), and beauty was never a quality I found in it. True, I only heard her after she had turned 50 (one of her last Turandots; four Isoldes, Tosca, the three Brunnhildes, a few Elektras, the Dyer's Wife, Sieglinde, a bunch of concerts). So I have set myself to seek out her younger recordings: on youtube, a wonderful Ozean du Ungeheuer from 1964, pirates of her Elettra in Idomeneo from 1951 and an Aida from Cleveland in 1964. It is an immediately recognizable voice. And some of the later sharpness was not yet present (she boasts of perfect pitch in the book, but notes that Vienna pitch was always higher than New York pitch or Stockholm pitch).

Still: Harsh is the word I would use for the sound. Even when she floats lovely pianissimi in that '64 Aida, they are not sensuous pianissimi (as Price's were, or Arroyo's, or Tucci's, or even Milanov's): they are ice-skating on the Nile, as W.J. Henderson would say. I never feel in touch with the character of Aida when Nilsson sings it. Similarly her Mozart and Puccini (other than the Turandot of Act II). It was not the ideal voice for a lover - for me, Crespin in Wagnerian roles, Te Kanawa or Zylis-Gara in Mozart, a cross between Tebaldi and Freni in Verdi and Puccini. Nilsson's is just not the sound of love. She is a superb scornful Isolde or vengeful Brunnhilde or icy Turandot, but she does not make love, vocally. Flagstad, another Nordic singer, is also not sensuous, but the sound is warm and its beauty striking - one can believe in love from such a voice. Not from Nilsson's.

But what an extraordinary voice! What an extraordinary woman! What wonderful stories she tells!

Not least, the tales of how she slowly came to understand her voice and how to use it. She wasn't the sort of woman to let such things be casual - she thought about it every step of the way, and she can write about it intelligently - not a gift every singer has.

So I recommend the book, and you can hear the recordings and come to your own conclusion.

If you ever hear another voice like Nilsson's, let me know. But you won't have to - wherever it is, I'll be able to hear it.

What if they'd said yes?

A game for opera nuts:

The following list is of famous singers and roles they never sang but were offered. Which ones make you glad they said No? Which ones are dreamy might-have-beens?

Joan Sutherland - Louise
Kirstin Flagstad - Marschallin
Tatiana Troyanos - Cassandra
Leontyne Price - Desdemona
Renata Tebaldi - Norma
Victoria de los Angeles - Adalgisa
Leontyne Price - Abigaille
Maria Callas - Vanessa
Kirstin Flagstad - Norma
Tatiana Troyanos - Idamante
Joan Sutherland - Konstanze
Leontyne Price - Vanessa
Birgit Nilsson - Carmen
Lotte Lehmann - Kaiserin

Any others? (I'm sure there are thousands - Nicolai Gedda said 80 percent of a career is saying No, and he sang everything.)

Birgit and the Pirates

I'm reading Nilsson's autobiography, La Nilsson, which (no surprise) is highly intelligent, tactful and gives away few secrets (how she produced that sound, for instance). She doesn't even mention the reason she didn't sing in the U.S. for five years, and she hardly seems to notice her besetting sin of penny-pinching, a standing joke among all her associates and friends. (A natural vice in a farmer's only child, eh?) She likes other singers and loathes singing teachers. Conductors come in half-and-half -- the more famous they are, the more she likes to cut them down to size. And she's still mad at John Culshaw for making the triangle sound more important than the soprano in the Ring.

I did not hear Nilsson till she was 50, and I always found the voice astonishing, its deployment thoughtful, but the sound itself harsh -- I wouldn't call her an ideal Isolde or Sieglinde or even Brunnhilde for that reason, much less Tosca or Amelia or the Marschallin. But she quotes reviews of her early performances in the late 40s and the 50s that marvel at the beauty as well as the size of the voice. (Or just the beauty -- Karl Bohm harrumphed, "She's a soubrette!" when he first heard her sing Wagner.)

But then she made no professional recordings till she was 40 (the Walkuere with Leinsdorf is heaven; she tells a naughty story about it, also her first Turandot recording with Leinsdorf, Tebaldi and Bjoerling -- whom she adored). The other day, on youtube, I found her singing Ozean du Ungeheuer in 1964, and the voice has a richer, fruitier sound than I associate with her.

So I wondered: do pirates exist of her performances before 1960? (she says someone sent her a list of pirated performances that went on for 27 pages -- "that didn't make me happy" -- but it makes ME happy -- and wherever she is, Valhalla no doubt, they don't have numbered accounts). I never hear about them, and I'd love to know what she sounded like in the early years when Wieland Wagner fell at her feet.