lbert Francis?! Pick up! It's Grace Ann!"
Some voices pull one out of sleep, or off the corner, or from blocks away, through the door and to the phone. Grace Bumbry's voice is one of them.
"Do you know what? I bought this
CD that says it is my Gioconda. It says it's me and Bergonzi! My heart is broken. It's not Bergonzi. I mean, it's not me, either. But I don't need that kind of documentation. But poor Carlo, that great tenor, and here is -- well, let me just say, somebody else, singing his role. I mean, a deaf person is going to know that isn't me, but what if somebody thinks that is Carlo? Can I sue them? I want to sue them. It isn't me! It's Martina. I have to say, put it out with her name. She was wonderful! But I want mine, too! I want vengeance!"
Well, maybe Bumbry could give them a tape and have them put it out to make redress?
"Oh, I don't know. I never hung onto too much. Let me see."
There are sounds of doors opening, boxes being tossed around and some heavy files being tossed on the floor.
"Well, what do you know? I have this little old closet right here -- why Albert Francis! A miracle! There are a thousand tapes of Grace Bumbry, and they're alphabetized! Call you back!"
o know Grace Bumbry is to adore her. Words on paper can't convey the five-opera marathon a conversation like that involves. Grace Ann is funny, self-mocking and formidable, too. The wild laugh that punctuates her sallies is like a thrillingly executed two-octave Bellini run. Best of all is the little-girl giggle that tells you she knows she's been naughty and she is proud of it.
Not everyone loved Bumbry or her singing. Someone at the Met said, "That's the greatest voice anybody ever ruined." She did seem to get caught in a strange cycle. Some seasons she was a mezzo -- with one of the most stunning sounds documented in the twentieth century. Some seasons she was a soprano, occasionally very e
ffective (as Tosca and Bess, for example) but occasionally misguided (as Norma, or Abigaille in Nabucco). When she left the stage at age sixty, word was that her voice was shot.
Then one rainy night, Jack Mastroianni, Bumbry's New York manager, and I watched a video of her unannounced last performance. It was as Klytämnestra to Eva Marton's Elektra, in the Roman amphitheater for Opéra National de Lyon.
Neither of us had ever encountered a Klytämnestra like that. Wonderful as the aging Ludwig and Rysanek had been, one was too used to singers who had to contrive, bellow and fake their way around the writing. Those who had the high notes lacked everything else. Those who had the all-important middle were apt to shriek at the top and bark at the bottom. And for most, maintaining some kind of heft throughout that killer scene was impossible.
But glorious bronze tone simply rolled out of Bumbry. She had the power in reserve and the vocal responsiveness the role requires, so she always sang, never barked, never merely intoned. When she moved upward there was the thrill of a still great voice unfolding. Her lowest tones had a heart-stopping voluptuousness. And as theatrical as her behavior was, her realization of pitch, rhythm and word was scrupulous, utterly musical and never cheap.
Some time passed. Finally, Bumbry arranged a private concert in the hall of SRI, Swiss-Italian Radio, for February 2000. She told Mastroianni, "I want to show you what I can do. If I can't bring it off, then it's just as well I'm gone. But if I can...." So Mastroianni, some members of his staff, people from the SRI and Decca, and I went to the radio station outside Zurich to hear Grace Bumbry.
When we entered the hall, a huge, gorgeous woman, ageless, stood in front of the piano. She wore a short black dress that fit snug around her high breasts, adorned only with a strand of pearls. She was in spike heels, very high.
"Hello, gentlemen," said Bumbry, sounding just a bit like Mae West. "I have a cold. Good day." She turned and started to walk out. We nearly fainted. She walked right into the wooden panels at the back. There didn't seem to be a door there. She stopped and seemed to be heaving. Were those sobs wracking her?
She was convulsed with laughter. She turned to face an ashen group. "Was it my backside that has you looking that way, or the fear you wouldn't get to hear me?" she asked. She was assured it was the sudden denial of her voice. "Well," she said, sitting down on the edge of the stage, suddenly a little girl in a big reddish wig, "I do have a cold. But I try to be professional. You're just going to have to bear with me!"
She hopped back up and sang the immolation scene from Götterdämmerung. The opening recitative showed a huge, dark sound that was glorious. In the middle she pulled in and sang lightly and sweetly, like a soprano. Then at the end came a surging, massive block of tone, moving higher and higher. The almost animal cries of "Grane, Grane, mein Ross" and the insane abandon of her final greeting to Siegfried were overwhelming. And though Bumbry had never sung the scene before, her phrasing and diction were those of an artist.
Next, Bumbry sang Didon's recitative and farewell from Les Troyens. Age has brought an inwardness and pathos I don't remember from her wonderful scenery-chewing Santuzzas or her incredible Ebolis. Again, the lower part of her voice had a voluptuous grandeur of tone; the low E-flats that are so prominent, the long descending scales ("Esclave, elle l'emporte en l'éternelle nuit") from F-sharp to low E-natural were like a surging purple sea. The aria proper, "Adieu, fière cité," was sung in something close to a girl's voice. That there was so much richness and size in reserve added to the heartbreak.
"Well, Jonathan, I suppose we had best jump to Herr Brahms." Five Brahms songs rolled out on an endless cushion of velvet, a magical demonstration of legato. Bumbry was generous and grand in manner -- not inflated, but very full. She had a perfect portamento -- not a slide between intervals, but a beautiful pouring of the voice lightly through all the notes between two widely spaced tones. In a way, she was "bowing" the line as a great cellist of the old days would have done.
After the last Brahms selection, Bumbry became a little girl who has just sung her last party piece. She turned and glided back to the wall. This time one of the panels opened -- there really was a door there -- and she vanished.
We were left nonplussed. I think we had all expected Bumbry to be a solid professional with voice left, but the burnished abundance of tone and breath, the well-centered pitches, the sense of immense power in reserve were stunning.
When Bumbry came back in, I mentioned the way she switches from voluptuary to girl to grande dame in her manner. Surely she should have done Kundry.
"You know, Wieland Wagner was just desperate for me to do it. He asked me to listen to Knappertsbusch's performances. He even got me the records. I sang with a coach at those speeds and was nervous. I could do it, but only if I was really in peak condition. And you can never know when something's going to hit you. Like this week, phlegm and a little Bronco-Bill -- that's what I call bronchitis. I was honest with Wieland, and he said, 'You're right. He will be gone soon, and you will be my next Kundry, with a human conductor.' But he died. I'd still love to do that part!"
umbry in action is a phenomenon. We took her to see Cecilia Bartoli singing her spectacular Fiordiligi at Zurich Opera. Bumbry was the tallest, grandest person there, and she dominated the auditorium. Until the house lights went down, all eyes and opera glasses were on her. Afterward, we all went out. Bumbry sat opposite Bartoli at the table. Alexander Pereira, director of Zurich Opera, was also present.
"Oh, Sealseelya," she said to La Bartoli -- and she kept calling her that (Bumbry is fluent in three languages and very good in two additional ones, so it must have been just a little deliberate) -- "I don't know how you do these Mozart girls. I'm just in awe. It always seems to me it comes down to this. 'Oh, signore so-and-so who's lusting after me, I have gas' -- and you sing for thirteen minutes all over your range. And then suddenly there is this modulation into a harder key, and you sing, 'Oh, wait, my gas is passed!' and that's another ten minutes all over your range, faster! Then you have three hours of recitative, and you know that is killing, and then you have another big scene. 'O Cavaliere, is that a quill pen or are you just happy to see me?' And you have fifteen minutes of singing all over your range, with a conductor who you just know is going to beat four as two and get mixed up, and then you sing, 'You mean that is a quill pen, and you're happier to see my sister? Vendetta!' And that's another half-hour. Then you have to blend into a thirty-minute finale. I'd have to go into a clinic for a week after one of those roles!"
This was delivered so rapidly, while Bumbry buttered a roll and ingested veal stew with the utmost delicacy, that Bartoli sat goggle-eyed. "Well," remarks Bumbry afterward, "I was giving her lessons in grandezza. She is great and so famous. You can't be that nice! Crack the whip. Make them fear! Then give them a kiss and thank them!"
There's little doubt that Bumbry was a tough cookie. Word was she was difficult. Arrogant. Impossible. Once, a famous conductor tried to get Wolfgang Wagner to hire Bumbry for the new Bayreuth Tannhäuser, the opera in which she created a sensation as die schwarze Venus in 1961. She would return as Venus, eternal, vocally glorious. "Too old," replied Wolfgang. Was the ancient Wagner's remark brutally uttered in front of Bumbry? "Don't, honey," she says. "You know, a lot of life for a tall girl who sings is being put down by little men. I'll tell you a secret. Sometimes it hurts. But they die. We go on."
Bumbry is fiercely intelligent. Black women of her generation were expected to be obedient. Of the challenges of being a black artist, Bumbry says, "That is very private to me, and I have spent my life going back and forth about it. And some people said, 'Oh, she's black and pushy -- that's why they're hiring her.' And others said, 'Oh, she's black -- let's not hire her.' And when I sang Schubert and Liszt and Brahms, and even Erik Werba praised me -- and he was tough -- they said, 'Sing spirituals, don't be so pretentious.' And when I sang spirituals and tried to do it in a way that wasn't slick, they said, 'That's all she can do, and she's crude! A real artist sings Brahms and Liszt!' And when directors and conductors would come along, I would see they were unprepared and didn't care. For my first Eboli, I read the play, all the history, looked at paintings and went over and over the music. I can count on one hand the conductors or directors who knew as much. One said to me, 'You are an overachiever, not a natural talent.' How was I to take that? Act like a cleaning woman and shut up? So maybe I fought, sometimes unwisely."
Talk of her soprano ventures yields up some defensiveness and tension. "I had those notes, those roles were in my voice. The biggest disaster I had was Forza, when I listened to the conductor and sang it differently than I felt it. He had some other sound in his head. But I could only work with my voice. I should have said, 'Fire me, or listen to me with respect and let's work together.' But no, I didn't want to be difficult, I wanted to please him, and I almost lost my voice. But I could have done it well. And I cannot betray myself. I felt I had to challenge myself to do Lady Macbeth and Abigaille. Let people hate what I did. They hated me, not Verdi, not my colleagues. But it wasn't enough for me just to do Carmen and Santuzza. I had those other qualities in me, and I knew I could realize them. But sometimes you are lucky, and then sometimes it doesn't work. So, as my mother would say, 'Pick yourself up, never let them see you cry, and know how to get out of there fast.'"
ALBERT INNAURATO is a playwright and writer on music.
all photos: © Beth Bergman 2001; except: © Gary Renaud 2001 (Rehearsing Santuzza)
OPERA NEWS, March 2001 Copyright © 2001 The Metropolitan Opera Guild, Inc.
As Abigaille in the Ghita Hager production of Nabucco at NYCO, 1981
"Crack the whip! Make them fear! Then give them a kiss and thank them!"
With Simon Estes in the Met premiere of Porgy and Bess, 1985
Rehearsing Santuzza in Franco Zeffirelli's Met Cavalleria Rusticana, 1969
Bumbry as Carmen, in Jean-Louis Barrault's production for the Met, 1967