another COVID exercise, originally published 2020
substantially revised 2025
One of the many ironies of the Sills career is that her prime years are scarcely represented by her studio recordings. Yes, we have the complete Giulio Cesare, hastily recorded by RCA after the production’s critical triumph, but, after that, Sills’ discography took a highly checkered course. Her recordings can be divided into two lots: the ones made for Westminster between 1968 and 1973, and the ones made for EMI between 1974 and 1978. Over a period of scarcely more than a decade, Sills managed to record fifteen complete operas (the Merry Widow “highlights” in English are all but complete), seven and a half recital albums, and one album of duets. The output is remarkable, and a sure sign of Sills’ bankability.
The Westminster recordings, all but the first recorded by EMI in London using EMI studios and engineers, were released domestically by a pop label, ABC, and received pratically no circulation outside of the United States. That arrangement resulted in a legal tangle as to who owned the rights to the recordings that apparently continues to this day. The Sills Westminster recordings were last spotted belonging to DG around the turn of the century. Probably nobody knows to whom they have devolved since, which is a shame as, in this day of complete boxes of recordings at very attractive prices, Sills’ earlier recordings, uneven as they are, are certainly ripe for one solid reissue that puts everything together once and for all.
Of Sills’ complete opera recordings, only Devereux, Manon and Lucia were made prior to that infamous October of 1970, and none of them show her to her best advantage. The Manon is probably the best of the lot, although that celebrated characterization can be heard to better, fresher and more spontaneous advantage in a live performance from Buenos Aires with the same tenor made a few months before the studio recording.
The Lucia recording finds her off-form and tired-sounding. As for Roberto Devereux, she never had any business singing it in the first place.
The lucky part – and we have the internet to thank for it – is that we do have a sizable collection of live recordings of Sills made between 1966 and 1970 that show what this talented but overly ambitious singer was like when she hadn’t yet become an institiution who had ruined her voice. These live performances reveal an instrument very different from that heard even her earliest studio recordings. That instrument is nearly miraculous and she thrived in repertory that suited her voice ever so much better than the bel canto roles her own brand of all-American hubris led her to attack. The Sills instrument is in pristine shape here, and reveals one of the great singers of her brief day, rather than America’s Queen of Opera.
What I propose to do here is to offer a selective critical roadmap through the quadrillions of bits and bytes that constitute the YouTube library, providing a tour of some of the finest Sills recordings to be found anywhere. I think it a fair argument that Sills live is generally preferable to Sills in the studio, as these recordings – all taken from those brief prime four years – show. All told, the tour takes about four hours, although it is all conveniently broken up (except for the complete Lucia recording), so it need not all be taken in at once. On the other hand, singing this good can be addictive, so be forewarned: like potato chips, you won’t be satisfied with only one track.
A good place to begin is with the role that started it all: Cleopatra. At this 1968 concert in Cleveland, Sills performed three of Cleopatra’s arias in the first half, and a pair of Rossini arias (from Guillaume Tell and Barbiere) in the second. The evening finds her in spectacular voice, although we will come to see that spectacular voice was the rule and not the exception during Sills’ few glory years.
Handel, Giulio Cesare
Sills opens with Cleopatra’s first fast aria, which absolutely dazzles in its technical aplomb and brilliance of execution. It is stunning on a mechanical level, but the singing is never mechanical. Birdlike it most certainly is, but Sills here is less a standard canary and rather more some wonderful, unique and now extinct breed whose song always had soul behind it. Sills flies through the coloratura (and coach Roland Gagnon’s lavish ornaments, which don’t seem out of place here) and sounds as though she were having a great time and enjoying the assurance that she’s doing something no one else can.
Given the brilliance of the act one I aria, Sills’ handling of Cleopatra’s great lament at the end of act two comes as something of a surprise. Avian coloratura sopranos often lack the means for the kind of sustained singing an aria like “Se pietà” requires. Legato isn’t often a skill upon which coloratura sopranos concentrate during their training. Sills’ formidable teacher Estelle Liebling equipped her with the means to do something slow and sustained as well as with the means of singing a lot of notes in a short time span.
Hypnotic is a good word to describe Sills’ “Se pietà”, sung as it is at what is an almost excruciatingly slow tempo. Objectively, the aria is sung too slowly, yet Sills pulls it off with complete aplomb and the same techincal assurance that went with the act one aria, only here the techincal near-perfection is used to completely different ends. There’s not even much ornamentation: for once Gagnon leaves the line alone and lets Sills and Handel make their points together.
Although the voice is by no means large, Sills shows that she can use it with extraordinary tragic dignity. I cannot stress too much Sills’ ability to sustain seemingly endless lines as part of her genius in her best years. With no disrespect to her dazzling coloratura flights, I am not at all convinced that Sills’ greatest distinction didn’t lie in her ability to sustain a line as she does in this aria.
If Sills was a bird – a flighty Cleopatra, not unlike Shaw’s character – in “Non disperar”, here she’s a full tragic queen, far more Shakespearean than Shavian. That both characters can come from the same human throat (and both be so magnificently sung) is no mean achievement.
“Da tempeste il legno infranto”
And so we come to one of my favorite Sills performances of all, the climactic “Da tempeste” from the third act of Giulio Cesare. I vividly recall my teenaged jaw dropping when I first heard the da capo of the aria on the studio recording. Two years after that recording was made, live and from Cleveland, Sills proves that the amazing feats of bravura she accomplished in the studio were no fluke and not tricked up for the microphone. She really couild sing the aria this brilliantly live, without apparent effort, and about as spectacularly as anyone has ever sung it. If anything, the tempo here is even faster than on the recording.
A feature of Sills’ virtuoso displays is the fearlessness of her attack. (And ‘attack’ is definitely the word to describe the way she launches into the da capo.) The aria is also one of Gagnon’s best efforts: yes, the da capo is almost completely recomposed, but that’s an accepted possibility for Handel performance. It’s not just recomposed, though: it’s recomposed to show Sills off to the greatest possible advantage. Sills didn’t usually wear dresses so perfectly tailored to her considerable gifts. (One should also mention Sills’ excellent performance the first time through the A section: not only can she sing Gagnon; she can sing Handel too.)
If Sills’ Cleopatra was Shavian in act one and Shakespearean in act two, it becomes baroque in the finest sense in the third act. The Cleopatra of this“Da tempeste” is not only an 18th century operatic heroine rejoicing in her triumph over adversity, but also a baroque diva triumphant. Sills doesn’t take us out of the character to bring down the house with cascade upon cascade of notes: she grasps that bravura is part of the character she is portraying. She gets Cleopatra instinctively: regardless of the fiddling with the score the New York City Opera edition involved, Sills produces a genuine baroque heroine the likes of which we may not have heard since.
Rossini, Guillaume Tell
“Ils se sont eloignés…Sombre forêt”
The second half of the Cleveland program was a harbinger of the unwise future that was still a few years later than the Sills of this concert. To accompany the three Handel arias, she programmed a pair of Rossini numbers, one from Guillaume Tell and one from Il barbiere di Siviglia..
By far the treasure is the Tell aria, and the hyperbole of the person who posted the aria on YouTube turns out not to be hyperbole at all. Although the aria is sung very slowly, Sills sustains the line with no apparent effort and the floated pianissimo A-flats written by Rossini are duly ethereal. No less ethereal are the pianissimo high D-flat and C and in the cadenza of her (and Gagnon’s) making. It is, indeed, ravishing.
That said, Sills is somewhat outside the music looking in, particularly in the lengthy recitative. Her French is excellent, if not flawless, but the grammar of the piece eludes her. As natural and idiomatic as the Handel arias were, this foray into the bel canto repertory finds her on terrain that is less congenial to her musical instincts. One doesn’t sense that one is hearing Rossini, but, rather, a gorgeous abstract piece of singing. We never get the feeling that Sills knows exactly what she is singing about or who the character of Mathilde is. This coming from a singer who was able to create three very different portraits of Cleopatra in as many arias.
Rossini: Il barbiere di Siviglia
The Cleveland concert concluded with Rosina’s “Una voce poco fà”, several years before Sills undertook the role onstage. Then as here, she selects the soprano key of F for the aria, a logical choice for a singer with a top half of the voice better than its lower half. The performance is fleet, brilliant almost at times, but performed with rather tame (for Gagnon) ornaments in a piece for which tradition allows all manner of decoration and rewriting. (Recall Rossini’s alleged response to Patti’s performance of the aria: “very nice…who wrote it?”.) As with the Tell aria, the feeling persists that Sills is on the outside of the music looking in; most surprising is the lack of character in the singing. Sills could perhaps be forgiven for not knowing who Mathilde is; she must have worked with Liebling on this aria at some point (is that why the ornaments don’t sound like Gagnon?), and, yet, she gives us little sense of Rosina’s personality and spirit, nor is there much sense of comedy in what she does. It’s still very good as far as the notes go, and the voice is far, far more solid than it would be when Sills started to sing Barbiere onstage…but it’s not really Rossini.
A composer extremely well suited to the Sills voice and temperament in their prime is Mozart, and, yet, because Sills subsequently worked so hard to identify herself with the bel canto repertoire, we’ve lost sight of what an exquisite Mozartean she was.
Sills’ stage repertoire of Mozart heroines wasn’t large (once past Donna Elvira in the saladiest of her salad days): Donna Anna, Konstanze, the Countess (yes, the Countess, although she fails to mention having sung the role in both her autobiographies), Madame Herz and the Queen of the Night. All roles calling for great personal dignity and musical poise, characteristics her singing conveyed effortlessly during the period under consideration here.
We can begin with the pons asinorum (or is it the bête noire?) of coloratura sopranos, the Queen of the Night. Sills kvetched at length about the role in both her autobiographies, and subsequently rewrote history, claiming that she sang the role far more frequently than she indeed had. (She sang a mere 17 performances of the role over a span of only a few years; the last peformance didn’t even include the act two aria.) Her first memoir, Bubbles, mentions that she sang only a single ‘perfect’ Queen of the Night in which she managed to hit all 5 high Fs and that the performance was broadcast from Tanglewood. The YouTube evidence, however, shows that she wasn’t in such flawless form that night. For a perfect Queen of the Night (for there was at least one), we need to turn to the New York City Opera, probably in 1966, when she first sang the role in a new production a scant few weeks following the Cleopatra triumph. Sills’ newfound superstardom had already kicked in by the time of this performance, as, very unusually for a Queen of the Night, she gets applause when the scenery first discloses her.
I always maintain that, when discussing Queens of the Night, there are two names you have to mention, and then you can proceed along to the rest. Those two are Edda Moser and Cristina Deutekom, dramatic sopranos both, and clearly what Mozart had in mind when writing a revenge aria with four Fs in alt. Sills isn’t in that class, but, alongside the many lesser mortals who have taken on the role, she ranks high, at least on the basis of the performances we’re considering here.
Mozart: Die Zauberflöte
New York City Opera, 1966 (?)
One of the finest of the lesser mortal Queens of the Night was Erika Köth, and Sills bears comparison to so acclaimed an interpreter of the role. Sills can match Köth’s speed and articulation in the allegro section, and possesses the more attractive timbre. She also has a real trill, something Köth oddly never had. Sills also brings more grandeur to the recitative and adagio section of the aria. Although Sills was emphatically never a dramatic soprano, she was still a practiced Donna Anna (rather than a Zerlina) singing the Queen of the Night. Although that’s very much as it should be, it doesn’t happen very often.
(Anyone trying to make out the words should be made aware that the aria is performed in the Ruth & Thomas Martin translation, as was standard for the City Opera in those days. It is what it is, but it’s not the worst thing in the world that Sills’ usually very fine diction is not at its cleanest here.)
In the second act aria, Sills sounds like what she said she was not: a great Queen of the Night. This one belongs in the annals of great performances of the aria. I suspect that the recording under consideration her was taken from the same NYCO performance as the “O zittre nicht,” althought I cannot be sure. She certainly hits all four Fs. She also manages the difficult triplets and murderously tricky final volleys of chromatic staccati. One can only praise such a Queen of the Night.
This poses the question of whether this performance is representative of Sills’ other 15 complete performances of the role or whether this wase just a lucky night (whenever it was.) Given how consistently good her singing is during her greatest years, one is tempted to suggest that her Queens of the Night were a lot better than she chose to admit they were.
There may be other reasons behind Sills’ aversion to the role. Perhaps she wanted to avoid being typecast in the part (as has happened to many an even mediocre Queen.) Or perhaps, following her taste of prima donna stardom as Cleopatra, she no longer wanted to be seconda donna in an ensemble opera. That then poses the interesting question of what sort of a Pamina she might eventually have made had she continued in the Mozart Fach.
Regardless, we are lucky indeed to have Sills in such excellent performances of the Queen’s two arias.
Tanglewood, 1968
Erich Leinsdorf, cond.
0:00 “Ruhe Sanft” from Zaïde
7:32 “Exultate jubilate”
22:05 “Ah, se in ciel benigne stelle”, concert aria K. 538
29:30 “Martern aller Arten” from Die Entführung aus dem Serail
If Sills’ Tanglewood Queen of the Night wasn’t the perfect one she spoke of in Bubbles, she did have a great night at Tanglewood a couple years later, in the form of this Mozart concert given under Erich Leinsdorf’s baton. The program is farily monstrous: Sills’ part of the concert accounts for 38 minutes of very difficult music. Many sopranos would simply have pogrammed the “Exultate jubilate” and left the rest of the evening to the orchestra. Sills, however, gives us “Ruhe Sanft” from Zaïde, the aforementioned motet, a later (if empty) concert aria, “Ah se in ciel benigne stelle” and Konstanze’s Marternarie. One thing for which she could never be faulted was skimpy programming.
Perhaps the finest piece of singing of all that memorable night would be the opening Zaïde. The purity of line, the security of the legato, the shimmering silvery tone and the sustained pianissimo singing are almost hypnotic in their beauty. Recall that this is the same singer as the Sills of the wobbly and rather acidic tone of her bel canto years, only here she’s producing sounds of exquisite purity. Listening to a performance like this, one begins to ask oneself whether the dazzling agility of Cleopatra’s “Da tempeste” may actually be the thing Sills does second best. She may have been most at home in this kind of spianato singing. For sheer radiance, I’m not sure that any Sills document tops this performance of an aria that often seems to go around once too many. There’s quite a bit of ornamentation in the various reprises, but it largely respects Mozart’s line and adds to the magic of he performance.
In the “Exultate jubilate”, Gagnon’s ornaments call attention to themselves in a way they didn’t in the Zaïde, but it cannot be denied that Sills flies through them. There’s a series of triplets that is dazzling, as are the perfectly articulated trills. Throughout the motet, it’s not a question simply of the way in which the trill really does alternate two different notes, it’s also one of how Sills turns them into something, not just musical, but structurally seemingly inevitable.
What becomes obvious is that Sills had a firm grasp of Mozartean style. She catches the shape of a Mozart phrase instinctively…in a way that she got Handel in the Cleveland concert and in the way she didn’t get Rossini (and subsequently largely wouldn’t get Donizetti.) The cadenzas at the ends of the first and second movements are tossed off with aplomb, and don’t overstay their welcome.
In the familiar “Alleluja” we perhaps don’t get much of a sense of religious exultation and jubilation, but we do get to use the word dazzling again to describe the passagework, everything in place and going at fast galop rather than the more usual allegro canter. Sills is taking risks with the tempo, but manages to be completely accurate and even exhilirating. (A warning: she does something weird – can it be a mistake? – in the last few bars. It’s not terrible-weird, but be prepared.)
The concert aria “Ah se in ciel benigne stelle” is far from being one of Mozart’s best display pieces, but Sills’ execution of it is exemplary. There is just less opportunity for magic as there is in the other music on the program. Still, there can be no doubt that we are listening to a born Mozart singer with an absoultely first-rate florid techinque and an understanding of the composer’s music.
As for the Marternarie – the only music on the program that she had sung onstage – the performance is stunning, fearless, and altogether marvelous. Konstanze’s defiance is evident in Sills’ handling of the text: this is a dramatic performance, but also a highly musical one. (That’s not a combination of which Sills was always able to see the virtues.) The tone of defiance is not only verbal: the way in which Sills attacks this fiendishly difficult music without flinching communicates musically what the text tells us. The whole of the aria’s wide range is there, the low Bs and high Ds all taken handily in the horse racing sense of the term. Note an extraordinarily long breath in the fourth section of the aria, and, maybe as the best indicator of Sills’ virtuosity and musicality, the way in which she stays perfectly in sync with the orchestral strings in the final velocissimo passage. (There’s another surprise at the end as well, one I rather fancy.)
Listening to this performance, one comes to wonder whether there is a better performance of the Marternarie anywhere. (Sills recorded the aria in the studio as well. While that performance is formidable, this one is amazing.) The whole concert is splendid, however, and shows what a graceful, musical and noble Mozartean Sills was. It is a crying shame that she threw Mozart over completely when she turned to the bel canto fach. There were plenty of unexplored frontiers to explore. Sills might have done something remarkable with, for example, Fiordiligi, and, as suggested above, Pamina as well. With her coloratura techinique, she might even have given musical interest to roles like Giunia in Lucio Silla or Aspasia in Mitridate. One can also regret not having heard her in Mozart’s two opera seria masterpieces, although I am perhaps making a controversial suggestion that the roles that would have suited her best would have been Sesto in La clemenza di Tito (think about it) and Ilia in Idomeneo, whose indescribably lovely music would have been perfect for the Sills of the radiant Zaïde aria.
Gounod: Faust
New York City Opera, 1968
Ballade du Roi de Thulé & Jewel Song
French opera has long been considered one of Sills’ fortes. She will always be particularly associated with the title role in Massenet’s Manon, and the three heroines in Les contes d’Hoffmann also played a major role in her career. She appeared as Philine in Mignon very early on in her City Opera career (question: how did she escape critical notice in the role? or did she sound appreciably different then than she did when she made it big?). She sang her first Marguerite in Faust in the City Opera’s last season at the City Center, and then took the part in a new production done in 1968 at the State Theater. That production was the only time Sills worked with the City Opera’s semi-resident enfant terrible, Frank Corsaro.
This recording of Marguerite’s big solos comes from that production, and does indeed demonstrate Sills’ affinity for French music. She handles the text more sensitively than she does Italian, and she gives a wonderfully fresh performance of music that I usually find tired and dull. Sills is lovely as she conveys the introspection of the King of Thulé ballad, sung in varying shades of piano that are possible only with excellent breath support and technique. She manages the difficult feat of convincing us that Marguerite is singing to herself while also conveying that the asides during which Marguerite interrupts the aria are, indeed, asides.
As for the Jewel Song itself, the first and most obvious comment is that the trills are terrific. There is excitement and elation aplenty as Marguerite contemplates her newfound finery. Sills captures the mood, as well as the contrast of mood with the Roi de Thulé solo, pulling the ten-minute scena’s two parts together. It’s a delightful performance.
There are audible testaments to the Sills magic: the way in which she holds the audience quiet and attentive at the end of the Roi de Thulé and the big spontaneous ovation when she’s done with the Jewel Song. That’s not [merely] an audience responding positively to a new star, it’s an audience responding to a wonderful performance and getting caught up in the moment. It’s not dutiful applause: it’s the applause of an audience that has been listening.
I’ve been told that I’m overly persnickety about such matters, but, while praising Sills’ sensitivity to the French language, some idiosyncracies in her pronunciation do have to be acknowledged. A YouTube comment (for which the poster was subjected to a virtual beatdown) observes that she has trouble with the vowel E, particularly at the end of words. To choose the most frequent word in the Jewel Song, she sings “belle” as though it were /belluh/ instead of /belleuh/. I find her interchanging of French’s uniquely tricky nasal vowels to be more of a problem: /an/ comes out as /on/ more often than not, just as /en/ comes out /un/, and /ain/ turns out something like what /en/ ought to be. It’s something that will grate on francophone ears rather harshly, although I think I may have an explanation for the phenomenon. An integral part of Sills’ technique (it can’t merely be a bad habit) was the systematic darkening of vowels. I suspect it was part of Liebling’s method and a means of avoiding singing on dangerous open vowels, particularly in the upper range. Whereas most coloraturas vocalize on /ah/ (with adjustments at the top of the stave), Sills’ vowel of choice is a good deal closer to /oh/, even in the middle range. (This can be heard most especially at the end of downward runs.) This idiosyncracy spilled over, I think, into her French pronunciation. She’s not singing the wrong nasal vowels: her technique naturally darkens all vowels, so that when she tries to sing /an/ it naturally comes out /on/. Not that that makes it right, of course.
with Michele Molese and Norman Treigle
Marguerite is by no means a bird role, even if a degree of agility is required for the Jewel Song. It calls for a full-fledged lyric soprano capable of sustaining the big dramatic moments in the Church Scene and Final Trio. Given how strongly I criticize Sills for having attempted repertoire too dramatic for her voice, she did possess more voice than the average coloratura soprano, and that, under some circumstances, it could handle pressure. Does she perhaps give a little too much in the Final Trio from Faust? I’m not sure that she’s singing on vocal capital here, but she’s coming close. Still, if she is giving more than she should, the trio is brief, the music is congenial, and the only thing she’s trying to do that she shouldn’t is sing loud at the top of her range. There’s nothing like the misuse to which she would subject the voice later on.
The results – with NYCO stalwarts Michele Molese and Normal Treigle – certainly are exciting. I think the excerpt makes it clear that Sills is a true lyric soprano (rather than a soprano leggero or lirico-leggero), although it also makes it clear that Sills ought not to attempt anything much heavier than this.
Alas, Faust was exactly the kind of thing she should have continued singing, but didn’t. Working with Frank Corsaro might also have helped her as an actress. No disrespect of Tito Capobianco, but Sills could well have benefitted from working with a variety of directors rather than the same one over and over. (It’s an argument that can be made about Joan Sutherland and Richard Bonynge as well.) A question worth asking is whether the freshness of Sills’ approach to Marguerite’s music might have had something to do with Corsaro’s influence on her performance.
Meyerbeer: Les huguenots
“O beau pays…À ce mot seul s’anime”
Carnegie Hall, 1969
Speaking of French opera, one of my most favorite Sills documents is her performance of Marguerite de Valois’ aria from Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots. It’s taken from a 1969 concert performance of the opera at Carnegie Hall that also featured Tony Poncet and Angeles Gulin. I can’t but imagine that the latter two felt most frustrated when Sills walked out at the beginning of the second act and blew the roof off the joint with twelve minutes of absolutely magnificent singing.
She creates the necessary mood of repose in the first section of the aria, ornamenting the reprise copiously and concluding it with an elaborate cadenza ascending to a lovely and effortless top D. She then attacks what a friend of mine liked to call the Moon Maiden Trio with that near-ferocity that lends such a brilliant edge to her virtuoso displays, caps that with a brilliant cadenza, a further D, and then throws herself into an exhilirating dash through the cabaletta. The cadenza there, accompanied by a not very traditional flute, is (as it should be) more elaborate than the ones that preceded it, and is of course capped by a full-voice D that tells the audience that now is the time to go crazy. (An indicator of the Sills magic that she could keep the audience from applauding at the conclusion of the first section of the aria. She was clearly holding Carnegie Hall spellbound that memorable evening.)
Gagnon’s ornaments don’t seem excessive here, but, then, the Queen’s aria is a showpiece and not much else. The use of a flute in the cabaletta’s cadenza isn’t entirely his idea, either: Sills’ teacher, Estelle Liebling, in her Book of Coloratura Cadenzas includes a cadenza with flute for this aria. On the other hand, I wonder what Liebling would have had to say to Sills’ l disregard for her rule that you should always save your highest note for the end of the aria
Sills’ singing here truly does qualify as Golden Age. Readers may well know about the endlessly disputed Mapleson Cylinder of [either Suzanne Adams or] Melba in the cabaletta to the Queen’s aria, in which the music is dashed off with spectacular ease and virtuosity. Sills at Carnegie Hall that night is the equal of that historic performance (whosever it was.)
Richard Strauss: Ariadne auf Naxos (1912 version)
Erich Leinsdorf, cond.
This justifiably famous performance of the original 1912 version of Zerbinetta’s aria from Ariadne auf Naxos achieved some currency before the days of YouTube. It was included on a bootleg LP of early Sills material and has appeared on CD as well. It’s an essential Sills-in-her-prime document that shows her off in exactly the kind of music she should have kept singing. Zerbinetta (in the 1916 version) and Strauss in general (Sophie and Daphne; not the Marschallin) are things she should have hd in her repertory.
Much has been made of the fact that Sills omits the two high F-sharps Strauss wrote into this version of the aria. By her own admission, she didn’t have the note (“I barely had an F,” she said in an interview), and, if you don’t have a note, the only solution is to leave it out. It doesn’t matter too terribly much here, finally, as Sills fearlessly scales (in both senses of the word) the heights, repeatedly and ultimately climactically up to an effortless high E. Would the performance have rated a perfect 10 with the F-sharps (and the one staccato E she omits right before the end)? Very probably. I suppose some deductions need to be made in good faith if the Sills performance is to be compared to the few other singers who’ve attempted the first version of the aria. I’d still give her a 9.7: there is nothing whatsoever with which to quibble in the rest of the performance of the aria.
Donizetti: Lucia di Lammermoor (complete opera)
with Michele Molese, Dominic Cossa and Robert Hale
Charles Wilson, cond.
New York City Opera, 1969
And, so, into the fray with Sills’ first venture into the bel canto repertoire, her celebrated interpretation of Lucia. She first sang the role in Fort Worth in 1968 (see below) but truly established herself in the role in the New York City Opera production (a Capobianco venture) the following year. In Beverly, she mentions some pretty loopy thinking on Capobianco’s part about the opera, and a determination to operate outside the established Italian tradition, starting with the decision to perform the opera absolutely uncut.
Sills and gang basically ripped out Liebling’s supplement to the Schirmer score about the traditions that had developed around the opera and attempted to start from zero. She’d have done better to have worked at least somewhat with a good Italian coach or conductor. This group of Americans put together a performance that is indeed very strange in places. Perhaps the idea was to put on a Lucia that differed from the production playing across the plaza with its rotation of Sutherland, Scotto, Moffo and Peters. If that was the goal, they succeeded.
They also awarded the company’s de facto prima donna with an all-out prima donna vehicle. Yes, Manon gave her a star part, but she isn’t quite the kind of star for the evening that Lucia is. Indeed, Lucia may well be the most privileged of prima donna roles in the repertory. That said, the performance still remains an ensemble effort: Molese, Cossa and Hale all make an impression and seem to be working along with soprano and conductor at “rediscovering” the opera.
Sills’ Lucia may have its excesses and lapses of taste, but it is (at this point in her career) an often fascinating characterization that offers some of her loveliest singing anywhere. When she connects with Lucia, she truly does connect. She just doesn’t connect all the time, and is led astray in quite a few places, either by Gagnon, Capobianco, conductor Wilson, or her own lack of understanding of the Donizettiean melos.
One should mention that this live performance, which took place a year before Sills’ studio recording, is preferable in every way to the latter. I must confess to a bias for live performances in general, but the recordings we are considering here do make me wonder whether Sills might be one of those singers (like Callas) who are far better heard live than in the studio.
18:05 “Ancor non guinse…Regnava nel silenzo…Quando rapito in estasi”
Much the least satisfying part of Sills Lucia is, for my ears, the cavatina. I find the ornaments intrusive and cavalier in their rewriting of Donizetti’s line, constantly pushing the voice upwards so as to be more “dramatic”. Sills did have a remarkable top, and she manages to sing the rewritten notes, but to what avail? We have here, I think, the first evidence of the attitude that would plague Sills as she progressed through the Donizetti repertory: not trusting the composer. The feeling you get listening to Lucia’s cavatina is that Sills and team felt that, while Donizetti had some good ideas, they need Sills and her coconspirators to put them across.
Sills knows that she’s telling a ghost story, but she wants to tell her version of it, not Donizetti’s. She applies what she takes for drama to the music rather than finding the drama within Donizetti’s lines, as generations of great Lucias before her managed to do.
The recitative is largely free of such exaggerations, although there is one definite indicator of the kind of performance this is to be: Sills pronounces “Ravenswood” as an American would pronounce it in English (/rayvenswood/ rather than the farily standard Italianized /rahvensvood/.) I have no doubt that she thought that terribly clever.
The biggest problems come in the primo tempo of the aria. In it, she pushes the line up too far at the end of the first verse and loses the line again at one point in the second verse. We get the first instance of one of her most hateful habits – plunging into naked chest voice for dramatic effect at “di sangue roseggio”, although, to her credit, she does give the impression that the trills are there to depict Lucia’s terror. The cadenza, already not suprisingly, pushes her up too far in her range. If all of this adds up to a Lucia, it’s not the one Donizetti wrote.
She simmers down for the cabaletta, which is sung fleetly and well, the ornaments sometimes unusual but still ornaments rather than a rewriting of the line. She does, however, push too hard on an interpolated high D in the coda as well as the penultimate D. As we’ve seen, unpleasant high notes were rare at this point in Sills’ career. Perhaps she wasn’t fully warmed up by this point, or perhaps her acuti are suffering temporarily from her attempts to be dramatic. She nonetheless gets a huge ovation for the aria, although it’s not being overly cynical to question whether some of the applause might already be a response to Sills the star rather than to Sills the musician. (It is, of course, equally possible that there was stage action that excited the audience so. That is always a drawback of sound-only recordings.)
If you liked Sills’ performance of “Regnava nel silenzio”, you will no doubt like what follows. If not, let me assure you that the performance improves considerably with Edgardo’s entrance.
30:56 ‘’Lucia, perdona…Sulla tomba che rinserra…Veranno a te”
Sills is in lovely, expressive form throughout the duet with Edgardo, and truly outdoes herself in her tracing of “Veranno a te” (39:11). Given a simple melodic line to spin, Sills does meltingly lovely things. The feeling is all there too: she sounds every inch a character afflicted with depression taking leave of a lover and sole source of comfort. It’s a truly magical moment.
A bit later on, Sills and Molese indulge harmlessly enough in the usually omitted cadenza that’s supposed to take Edgardo to a high E-flat. They manage to sing it by exchanging parts, although singing in 10ths doesn’t sound like singing in 6ths as Donizetti intended. Still, it’s interesting to hear the cadenza for a change. For obvious reasons, the cadenza had long been eliminated by the Italian tradition; it’s one more example of how the New York City Opera bel canto revival) chose to ignore that tradition. On the other hand, Molese gets away with an extra B-flat on “ne stringi il ciel” which is an old Italian trick. That leads one to conclude that Molese was more interseted in becoming a great Italian tenor than Sills was in becoming a great Italian soprano.
49:24 “Il pallor funesto, orrendo…Tu che vedi il pianto mio”
egregious high C 53:00 tu che vedi 59:53
The duet with Enrico continues to illustrate these points. When she can spin out a line (“Soffriva nel pianto”) the canto can be both bel and infinitely expressive. When she wants to get dramatic, she works against her best interests. An example I often cite is the interpolated high C on “Ah, il core mi balzò” (53:00): not trusting Donizetti’s written note, she tosses in something that fits not at all into the rest of the line, not so much as to show off her top C but as to show off how dramatic she can be. In the duet’s cabaletta, however, she does manage to be genuinely dramatic within her means while staying within Donizetti’s lines, and the results are deeply satisfying. We feel for this Lucia as she gets backed into a corner, and, for a while, Sills seems to grasp that she doesn’t have to sing badly to convey the dramatic situation.
In the ensuing recitative with Raimondo, she is indeed eloquent, and, in the performance of his aria, Robert Hale is very much worth hearing for the abundant ornamentation he adds to the second verse of his cabaletta. It’s decidedly surprising, but it also proves that Samuel Ramey didn’t hold the City Opera monopoly on bass agility.
1:19:02 Sextet: “Chi mi frena in tal momento?”
The challenge of the Sextet for a smaller-voiced Lucia is that it requires her to dominate a large and rather noisy ensemble. Sills rises to the challenge handily, producing sufficient volume without any loss of quality in the voice. She doesn’t push, she goes with Donizetti instead of against him, and everything works out just fine as a result, including a big D-flat at the end to bring down the house.
Unfortunately she ruins the rest of the Act II finale after Molese’s non-traditional extra high notes on “son tue ciffre?”. Lucia is supposed to answer “si” and Donizetti provided a note on which to sing the word, allowing a good Lucia the chance to encapsulate all her conflicting feelings with just that one spot of tone.
Sills, alas, uses the moment as an excuse for what I find one of her most maddening mannerisms. Rather than staying to the written note and meeting the musical challenge as well she might have, she decides to get dramatic again and speaks the word. But she doesn’t just speak it: she plunges into chest voice and kind of grunts it. It’s a very ugly sound that fits not at all into what Donizetti is trying to do at this point in his music.
As for the stretta to the Act II finale (which is nice to hear uncut for a change), Sills again produces ample tone to be heard over the ensemble. She’s not the loudest of Lucias, but she has the sense not to force, and wraps it up with a good top D.
1:48:13 Mad Scene: “Il dolce suono…Ardon gl’incensi…Spargi d’amaro pianto”
And so to the moment people have been waiting for all evening long: the Mad Scene. Fear not: I’m not going to tear Sills to shreds. Indeed, it may be the best part of her performance.
She starts out both gorgeously and expressively, singing quietly in the middle of her range, concentrating on the text, audibly unhinged and moving in her own fog of fond recollection. Then, at “il fantasma” she switches to her vulgar shouting mode, further increasing what she takes tso be the drama of the moment with a cadenza up to high C on “ne separa”. That irritating moment past, Sills calms back down, and gets right back on point, again communicating Lucia’s madness through Donizetti’s music. Never mind some untraditional pushing of the line upward and listen to the beautifully sustained “e non si dice” right before the start of the aria proper.
She begins latter in the same mode. “Alfin son tua” is worthy of the record books, the pianissimo tone beautifully sustained, the coloratura incorporated as part of the line, all of it infused with infinte feeling and pathos. This is work of a very great artist. She is even more more intensely eloquent at “del ciel clemente”.
That brings us to the cadenza, an Italian tradition as rethought by Americans. There is no reason why the overwhelming majority of Lucias should choose to sing the same cadenza (although they have), so the incorporation of some variety is welcome indeed. One could argue that Sills and Gagnon incorporate too much variety, although there are sufficient shreds and patches of the traditional cadenza to keep the listener orientated. The only real fault with the cadenza is that you think it’s going to end twice before it actually does. There is certainly no quibbling with the virtuoso display it affords Sills. One might question withether all the notes deepen our experience of Lucia’s madness, but I suppose that is a question one can ask of most Lucias.
(A small warning: in order to play every single bar of the score, as well as to avoid extended applause with the curtain up (and Lucia lying in the traditional heap on the stage) Wilson does something weird at the very end of the cadenza. Fear not: we still get an E-flat.)
Sills is back on her best expressive form during the tempo di mezzo, but be prepared for something else weird before “Spargi d’amaro pianto”. While the something weird makes it possible to play every possible note of the score, it strikes me as detrimental to the dramatic progress of the Mad Scene. Others may disagree, champion completeness, or, of course, not care.
As for the cabaletta, Sills does much more with the words than a most Lucias do at this point in the evening, and accomplishes the feat of communicating that she’s singing to Edgardo. In the reprise, the ornamenation can politely be termed lavish but it generally doesn’t mar Donizetti’s line. Sills knocks out a properly climactic E-flat, and the house goes bananas, especially when she steps in front of the curtain to take her solo bows for the evening. (In the Capobianco production, this time in accordance with tradition, Lucia took her curtain call after the Mad Scene, and not at the end of the opera.) The audience’s applause and the number of curtain calls taken by Sills indicate that something extraordinary was happening onstage during the Mad Scene, although, at this point in Sills’ career, there is no need to invoke acting as an apologia for inconsistent singing. It’s a wonderful Mad Scene in purely musical terms, and probably the fleeting pinnacle of Sills’ involvement with bel canto.
Some may find my reservations about Sills’ Lucia (and about “Regnava nel silenzio” in particular) to be overly harsh, and perhaps they are. I’ll admit that some of them stem from their being the first signs of what would go wrong a year following this often gorgeous complete Lucia. While there is a very great deal to be enjoyed about the performance, it also can be reckoned the beginning of the end. Whereas, if Sills had to continue in the bel canto repertory, this Lucia could have laid the groundwork for operas like Linda di Chamounix or Rosamonda d’Inghilterra, it instead was used to set up the Roberto Devereux that would ruin her voice a scant year following the performance just considered.
Donizetti: Lucia di Lammermoor
Fort Worth, 1968
As a footnote to the NYCO performance, Sills’ first Lucia from Fort Worth the preceding year has survived, allowing us to sample her first thoughts on the Mad Scene. As might be predicted, the City Opera performance is more deeply felt, and shows her having grown into the role, although most of the essentials are present in Fort Worth. The cadenza is shorter, but dazzlingly sung, and the E-flat is stunning. The opera was performed with the traditional cuts, so Sills moves directly along to “Spargi d’amaro pianto” following the cadenza. The ornaments are more elaborate than what was heard in New York, and are, to my ears, a bit much. There’s another stunning E-flat at the end. As a piece of vocalism, it is remarkable, but Sills would capture Lucia far more movingly a year later.
Very interestingly, there is markedly less applause than in New York. Make of that what you will.
Handel: Semele
Robert Shaw, conductor
After the Donizetti, consider Sills again in Handel, a composer with whom she unquestionably felt an affinity. Sills participated in a performance of Handel’s “bawdy oratorio” Semele under Robert Shaw in 1969. The heroine’s big display piece is “Myself I shall adore,” interesting words to put in the mouth of a prima donna, all the more as they are repeated so many times in the course of the aria.
Sills’ performance would justify some self-love. It is, in a word, astounding. The reams upon reams of ornamentation work very well in the context of an aria that repeats itself as much as this one; all those notes can be seen as part of the joke. There can be no second thoughts about the suitability of the music for the voice or of the singer for the music. Sills is a perfect fit for Semele, not least of all because she manages to sing all of Gagnon’s ornaments without the slightest show of effort. She just sets off the fireworks with complete nonchalance, as though they were the easiest things in the world. (They aren’t.) And, yet, the facility doesn’t detract from the brilliance, which isn’t always an easy balance to strike – and the brilliance only goes to enhance the dramatic situation.
The reason I’ve included another Handel aria following the complete Lucia was to illustrate how much more at home Sills sounds in this type of music. I don’t mean to say that Sills was a bad Lucia…but she was a magnificent Semele. Had she stuck to the repertoire that suited her, she would have been a magnifcent Semele for many years to come. As it was, this, the best part of her career, would be over within a year. It was quite a loss to the opera public.
(in 8:29!)
In a comment about the 18th century soprano Elizabeth Billington, no less a personage than George III stated that “an essential service to the court” could be done by Lord Carmarthen “if he can get her to sing pathetick [sic] songs, and not to over-grace them.” The comment reminds me very much of Sills, who, despite the fantastic brilliance of things like the Huguenots and Semele arias, might be most treasurable as a singer when spinning out simple spianato lines.
Consider “Se pietà” from Giulio Cesare, or “Veranno a te” and “Alfin son tua” from Lucia, or, as a final exhibit, this performance of the Schubert “Ave Maria” in its original German three-verse incarnation from a Philharmonic Hall recital in 1970 with Charles Wadsworth at the keyboard. The timing of the song – eight and a half minutes – suggests a tempo too slow for the music’s own good (let alone for the good of the singer’s lungs), but Sills pulls the feat off. The voice is at its pristine loveliest, and, without all those notes to hide behind, Sills laid bare like this emerges as perhaps a better musician.
It’s a remarkable document, like the other ones I’ve considered in this article, and we are fortunate to have it to understand what Sills in her prime was all about: this is a singer about whom to get excited. People did, and justifiably so. There is something sensational to the Sills of the her brief glory period, in both the coloratura and lyric sides of her vocal personality. Although a choice need not be made, I leave it to the reader to decide whether the endlessly spun silvery lines of the “Ave Maria” show Sills to her finest advantage of all.
Word Handler 