Leyla Gencer's legacy as a formidable singing actress is undiminished -- without the aid of a single commercial recording
Pirate Queen BY IRA SIFF
For many, Leyla Gencer is the undisputed Donizetti soprano of the two decades from the 1960s to the '80s, yet the vast majority of those who hold her in such high esteem never actually managed -- for reasons geographical or chronological -- to see her perform onstage. The title "Queen of the Pirates" is one that Gencer does not love, but she realizes that, without having made a single complete commercial opera recording, she is one of the best-represented sopranos on CD today. Despite the neglect of recording companies -- EMI had Callas, Decca had Tebaldi and Nilsson, RCA had Moffo, Price, then Caballé -- Gencer's career was a major one. Her opera performances spanned thirty-three years (195083, with recitals until 1992) and seventy-two roles, sung in virtually all the great houses (save the Met), encompassing everything from Verdi (almost the entire soprano canon) to Wagner, Mozart, Gluck, Mayr, Massenet, Tchaikovsky, Pacini, Ponchielli, Bellini, her beloved Donizetti, and two major world premieres, Pizzetti's Assassinio nella Cattedrale and Poulenc's Dialoghi delle Carmelitane (in which she created the role of Mme. Lidoine), both at La Scala. It was the superhuman intensity of their portrayals, so widely lamented as the missing ingredient in today's reigning sopranos, that brought artists such as Gencer and Magda Olivero to prominence when the pirate-record boom began, in the '60s.
I reached Gencer last summer by phone at her apartment in Milan; the interview was conducted in Italian. Speaking with Gencer provides a surprise; it is not often that one so emotional and abandoned in performance, so shrouded in mystique, turns out to be so succinct, articulate, clear and direct in conversation. And there is not the slightest sense of a diva living in the past; on the contrary, Gencer runs the Young Artists program at La Scala, and while she hopes to impart the best values of her era, she feels strongly that one must move with the times.
Gencer was born on October 10, 1924 -- or 1928, depending upon which sources you believe -- near Istanbul, to a Polish Catholic mother and a wealthy Turkish Muslim father. "I had, as a child, a French governess. I spoke French before my native tongue, Turkish. She was a countess who was very poor and had lost her child, and she remained with us for years. Perhaps this passion of mine for theater was inculcated in me by her. For example, she was Catholic and took me to church every Sunday. I saw this as a performance. She accustomed me to reciting poetry and singing songs in French. And then, I read a lot. I devoured French literature, Italian literature -- because I entered an Italian school -- American, English, German literature, and thought of becoming a woman of letters, or an historian, or even an archaeologist. Everything but singing!"
Gencer enrolled at the conservatory at Istanbul several years before meeting the great Italian soprano Giannina Arangi-Lombardi, who was teaching in Ankara and had come to Istanbul on summer vacation. "I wanted her to hear me, but at that time I wasn't remotely thinking of making an operatic career. I thought of being a concert artist. From the first day she heard me, a wonderful thing happened. If you want, I'll tell you. I didn't know she was the most famous Aida of her era, so I dared to sing 'O cieli azzurri,' with a pianissimo high C. She looked at me, very interested, made me sing it again, and then said, 'May I come to your house for fifteen days, because here I am bored with this lady' -- in front of the lady hosting her! I was rather amazed, and I said, 'Signora ... I ... gladly. I have just an old building, a family villa, very run-down. I don't know if you will be comfortable. But it is on the Bosphorus. It's run-down but beautiful.' She said, 'Yes, you will host me for fifteen days, and I will teach you to sing.'"
Every morning at ten, she put on her most elegant dress, with pearls, and her diamonds on her fingers, sat at the piano, and we studied. I learned my first opera arias, from Ballo, Aida, Forza del Destino, and when I sang them my whole life, I sang them just as she had taught them to me. In September, I went to Ankara and did a year with her, sang vocalises, did her technique. She told me I was a lirico-spinto, tending toward the dramatic. I believed myself to be a coloratura. In fact it came to be that I was a dramatic coloratura the rest of my life. Thus, in 195051 I studied with her. Then suddenly she went to Italy on vacation and died of a heart attack, and I was left without her, without anyone. But I had the good fortune of having the great Italian baritone Apollo Granforte, who had come to teach at the theater [in Ankara], and it was the same technique -- to sing all'italiana, on the breath, which is the most correct."
Gencer's opera debut, in 1950 at the State Theater in Ankara, was as Santuzza in Cavalleria Rusticana, in Turkish. After an invitation to sing a recital for RAI in Rome, Gencer secured an audition for the Teatro San Carlo in Naples. "At this time there was Tebaldi, there was Callas, there were all these great singers, and I thought, 'I'm not ... I don't think I....'" But the audition yielded an offer for Cavalleria, this time in Italian, in the outdoor Arena Flegrea -- the following week! Those performances, themselves a sort of audition, were heard by Tullio Serafin, and the young soprano made her official Italian debut in Naples in 1954, as Cio-Cio-San in Madama Butterfly under Gabriele Santini. A month later, she appeared with Serafin as Tatyana in Eugenio Onegin. The career was launched, and a number of performances ensued -- many Butterflys and many Traviatas, as well as a U.S. debut in the title role of Francesca da Rimini, in San Francisco in 1956 (and the distinction of singing Liù there opposite Leonie Rysanek during her brief flirtation with the role of Turandot). Then, in 1957, came two major turns -- her La Scala debut (as Lidoine), the beginning of a long association with the house, which raised her to the next level, and a curious shift in repertoire. Suddenly, Lucia, Sonnambula, Puritani, Gilda, Anna Bolena and Poliuto began to appear on her schedule, along with the lesser-known Verdi operas -- La Battaglia di Legnano, Gerusalemme, I Due Foscari, and then that defining role, Norma. But the pivotal moment, in 1964, was the assumption of Queen Elisabetta in Donizetti's Roberto Devereux, a year before Montserrat Caballé achieved her breakthrough in Lucrezia Borgia and followed it with Devereux. Gencer, with her abundant use of disembodied pianissimos and explosive glottal attacks, employed a vocal approach in these roles very similar to that of her Spanish colleague, but with far more abandon. And, in spite of the fact that Gencer came first, and Caballé and others cashed in on the resurgence of these operas, Gencer has only kind words for the competition. "Caballé heard me first in 1965 in Anna Bolena at Glyndebourne, and she said, 'This is also my repertoire. I will sing only this.' She had beautiful piani. I made Maestro Gavazzeni listen to her. 'Come, listen to this girl, maestro, who has a beautiful voice and very beautiful pianissimi!' And he said, 'Yes, but it's a small voice.' He had not understood it -- not even he!"
What Gencer's career, and image, had previously lacked was a vocal identity. She sang very well, she was extremely musical, and although the middle voice was not distinctive, she had a ravishing pianissimo, good agility and a solid top. But within the musical language of the bel canto roles, particularly those of Donizetti, her voice and approach to phrasing found a "face." The combination of solid technique and blazing intensity suited perfectly the heroines of the dramatic soprano d'agilità repertoire and created an imperious image that fascinated a public that had previously admired but not adored her.
Gencer first experienced Maria Callas onstage at the Met, as Norma in 1956, and was deeply affected by what she saw and heard. Speaking on the radio in 1979 about the role of Norma, she said, "It is useless to talk of my Norma, when we have the unattainable one of Maria Callas. So let's listen to hers." For a short time, Gencer was compared, not always favorably, to her GreekAmerican colleague. She would be the first to admit that her physical acting style was more generalized, her voice less distinctive (but also less flawed). But she is clearly her own artist, and the comparison is pointless. While Callas's success in New York impressed Gencer, she felt there were levels of interpretive understanding on Callas's part that escaped the American public and press. Likewise, Gencer felt, after singing Caterina Cornaro at Carnegie Hall, that New York Times critic Harold Schonberg failed to appreciate her achievement fully.
Perhaps the ferocity with which Gencer attacked her roles is part of what kept her from a big career in the U.S., where, she maintains, the critics were mainly interested in "voce pura." For example, in Roberto Devereux, compared with Caballé's majestic, haunting approach to Elisabetta, or even with the dramatic potency Beverly Sills applied to her lyric instrument in this role, Gencer's final scene made the others seem virtually tame. One had the feeling she was on the very edge of what is possible, giving more than she should. And yet, during her prime, the voice carried her through. As the more plaintive Maria Stuarda, in a 1967 outing opposite Shirley Verrett's searing Elisabetta, Gencer springs to life in the confrontation scene, denouncing Elisabetta with terrifying vehemence, then, after some rigorous ensemble singing, demolishes her rival with a perfectly placed interpolated high E-flat.
Of this canny use of voice coupled with emotion, the soprano says simply, "But this was my strength. It was a force of nature. What I try to impart to my kids at La Scala is that it's necessary to have a technique, to know how to use the voice without becoming fatigued. If one has a solid technique -- and this is also somewhat a gift of nature -- one will last long, like me. Nowadays young people are more intelligent, but they do not have the voice. That is, they have the wrong techniques, because there are no great teachers of singing. I believe there are voices, but they do not arrive at the mastery of their instruments. The voice is the most beautiful, most marvelous gift of nature, but also the most delicate. If it is used badly, it becomes a common instrument and finishes quickly. Unfortunately, today this happens very often also because of the incompetence of those who run the theaters, and because of the agents. When there are beautiful voices that start well, they make them work, because now only money counts. In order to earn, the agents ... well, without an agent you cannot even get an audition, my kids tell me. This is not right. I had no agent. The theaters phoned me. I did everything myself, because I did not sing for the money."
Between 1957 and 1979, Gencer portrayed eight of Donizetti's most demanding heroines (nine, if you count both Paolina in Poliuto and Pauline in the French version, Les Martyrs), while still singing everything from Manon to La Gioconda. She essayed the dizzying heights of Lucia's mad scene and hurled herself into the heavier music of Anna Bolena, Maria Stuarda, Roberto Devereux, Caterina Cornaro, Belisario and Lucrezia Borgia, always singing fearlessly, but with delicacy and style where called for. "For me, Donizetti is a very great composer of the nineteenth century, who has never been understood, never had his proper value. Donizetti can be very interesting if it has great interpreters, because he is a true man of the theater. When we arrive at Donizetti, there is no longer the bel canto of the Baroque era. Now, the melodrama becomes sung theater, really. In my era I understood it this way -- no one taught me. This was my truth. But I feel it was truth also because, if any of it has remained true to you all, it means that which I did was true.
"In Donizetti, even a rest has a meaning, a fermata has a meaning, onstage and musically. One must fill these pauses. They are not empty, they are full of significance, dense with meaning. When I study a score, I study it historically, within its historical framework. All the events, for example, of Donizetti's queens. I have read everything on them. I didn't just read the notes, just seek beautiful sounds, but went to the depth of the interpretation. I saw music not just as notes, but sang within the notes. It's not just the purity of sound that is important for me. What is important is the interpretation of the character."
One of the prime weapons in Gencer's arsenal of vocal effects is her chest voice, a register that, in her instrument, sometimes sounds as if created out of sheer will for the service of expression. "Some great singers -- I will not say their names -- have said they did not use chest tones." [She laughs.] "They were chest tones! But, they were perhaps what we call mixed. Technically we say 'a mixed voice.' They should be mixed. But sometimes in the passion of singing, an unmixed one escaped me. But it was effective, yes? Because it was sincere -- it was real!"
And what does this commercially unrecorded yet heavily documented diva think of pirate records? "I'm told there are some seventy operas. I never made a lira off them. But this doesn't interest me. I am interested that they know me, that I still give emotion. It's a sin there are no studio discs, because I had a very phonogenic voice. But one can say this -- live recordings are much more sincere and true in execution than those made in the studio. I consider myself a woman truly, greatly, strongly fortunate. I try to transmit what I have had from life as an artist, and above all the continuity I have had in my career. Tradition is necessary, the basis of everything -- roots. But it is necessary to unite roots, tradition, to the demands of the times in which we live, to the taste. Taste has changed. Taste is more rigorous, less decadent, meaning the tradition of long notes, added high notes, this is no longer acceptable." (Gencer is an enthusiastic fan of Riccardo Muti.) "When I sang Roberto Devereux, I sang it as written, and still I had a triumph. Today, we are not in the nineteenth century but the twenty-first. One cannot put one's hand to one's heart and sing bel canto from morning to night. No one will come -- they'll be bored. Today, theater is more modern, more alive, more demanding, more pure.
"Even if I made no recordings, with live discs, all the young people know me. They write me long letters. They tell me, 'It's as if we were in the theater. We see you. We hear you through your discs as if we were there.' This is a great miracle!"
Ira Siff teaches voice and interpretation and directs opera; he stages Werther for Sarasota Opera in February. As La Gran Scena Opera Company's Madame Vera, he stars in a new VAI DVD, The Annual Farewell Recital, set for release next month.
OPERA NEWS, November 2003 Copyright © 2003 The Metropolitan Opera Guild, Inc.
The diva as Donizetti's Maria Stuarda at the Edinburgh Festival in 1969, opposite; a 1956 curtain call for Zandonai's Francesca da Rimini at San Francisco Opera, above
In Dallas's Lucrezia Borgia, with Matteo Manuguerra, 1974
Antonina in Donizetti's Belisario at La Fenice, 1969
"I had no agent.
The theaters phoned me."
Gencer offstage, 1967, top; with Veriano Luchetti in
Spontini's Agnes von Hohenstaufen in Florence, 1974