Voice Detective - The Voice Detective

Alfredo Kraus, Tenor, November 24, 1927

Alfredo Kraus was born on this day in 1927. It is not difficult to acknowledge that he was deserving of the title Tenore di grazie by the way he sang and conducted his life.

Born to an Austrian father and a Spanish mother in the Canary Islands, Alfredo and his older brother Francesco Kraus Trujillo, a baritone, were given a solid musical education starting with piano lessons from an early age and went on to study music and opera alongside each other.

In 1948, the twenty-one year old Alfredo left for Barcelona where he studied singing for two years under a Russian teacher, Gali Markoff, who applied a rigorous and scientific method to his natural but light weight voice. He was also a pupil of Francisco Andres, who taught him a singing technique similar to that imparted by Mercedes Llopart, the great Spanish singer and teacher. Then in Milan, both he and his older brother studied with Mercedes Llopart herself. Under her guidance, he learnt the correct positioning of sound in the “mask” (the facial cavities of resonance), how to lean on the diaphragm, and in fact compress the breath between diaphragm and mask. All these are elements of the famous Lamperti-Garcia singing technique of the mid 1800s.

Like many Spanish singers, he started his career singing Zarzuela on stage in Madrid and Barcelona.

At the age of 29, in 1956 after winning the silver medal at the Geneva International Singing competition he was engaged to make his operatic debut in Cairo as the Duke of Mantua in Rigoletto.

After his successful Cairo debut, he was invited to sing Alfredo, in Verdi’s, la Traviata. Firstly, in Venice and subsequently in Turin and Barcelona during 1957, and at the Stole Theatre in London in 1958, where his partner, was the then equally unknown young soprano, Renata Scotto.

By 1958 he was singing along side Maria Callas in the legendary La Traviata performance at the Teatro Nacional de Sāo Carlos in Lisbon of which a live recording was later released. Of his experience singing opposite Maria Callas in Lisbon, he recalls, with gratitude and special satisfaction.
Overawed by Callas’ fame and reports of her difficult temperament, offstage and on, he was understandably nervous. To his surprise, she proved an outstandingly supportive and sympathetic colleague, whose stimulating presence was a contributing factor to his own success.

Subsequent debuts followed in 1959 as Edgardo in Lucia di Lammermoor at Covent Garden and Elvino in La Sonnambula at La Scala in 1960. His American debut took place in Chicago in 1962 as Nemorino in L’elisir d’amore, followed by his debut at the Metropolitan in New York in Rigoletto where audiences celebrated his finely honed technique, impeccable diction and mastery of the bel canto repertoire.

Kraus managed his career very carefully and ‘stuck to his guns’ so to say. He avoided ever singing outside of his lyrical tenor voice repertoire, though offers to do so were forthcoming and frequent.

He was especially known for his interpretation of Massenet’s Werther, Gounod’s Faust and roles requiring extreme high notes such as Bellini’s i Puritani which the conductor Tulio Serafin thought that the role was made for him, with its fiendishly difficult Tessitura, culminating in a series of D naturals. It goes almost without saying, he sang La fille du Régiment with its nine high C’s. He still sang this aria masterfully at the Gala Lirica in Seville in 1992 even at the age of sixty five years. His superlative technique and determination never to sing beyond his capabilities enabled him to sing and perform into his seventies.

Of his Art and his life philosophy Kraus said: …for the artist has a duty to be a teacher, an educator, beyond popular tastes and fashion. Instead of singing to the gallery, we should sing for that section of the public, be it 50, 20, 10 or even 1%, who really understand. I deeply believe in elitist standards, not from the snobbish social aspect, but from the point of view of quality and excellence. In singing for this minority of the public, capable of truly appreciating what you do, we also help raise the level of understanding of the majority, who have now heard and will know the difference between excellence and mediocrity. Maybe not today, but certainly tomorrow, or the day after. What does it matter if one’s temporary antagonised? I give my art, it is the public who should come to me, not vice versa. This is the way of the bequeathing something valid and worthwhile to the future of our art.’

From a technical point of view, he gave variety to his voice using piani, pianissimi, smorzature, rinforzati and top notes with color bursting into a head squillo, which Mr. Gualerzi, a top Italian critic, felt it was a falsetto. In a Spanish magazine, Ritmo, of March 1978, Kraus responded to Gualerzi’s criticism by saying: ‘I never attempted the falsetto technique. I never felt the need for it, and further, I do not know how to do it. Maschera and falsetto are two wholly different emission techniques. If you do one you cannot do the other. It is not easy to shift the voice from one position to the other.” He reiterated this view in his interview with Bruce Duffie in 1981.
Kraus’ discography is extensive making many full opera recordings with EMI and he was involved with a recording label. Les Pêcheurs de Perles featured in long playing operatic records, later marketed by a record company, Carillon Records, and distributed in Italy by the House of Giancarlo Bongiovanni.

Throughout his career, Alfredo Kraus received numerous distinctions and awards, including Grand Cross of the Order of Alfonso X the Wise; Order of Isabella the Catholic, Commander by Number; Knight of the French Legion of Honour; Austrian Grand Cross of Honour for Science and Art; Enrico Caruso Prize, Italy; Metropolitan Opera House Prize, New York; and the title of Kammersänger from the Opera of Vienna. He also received awards in the islands of his birth, including Canary Islands Gold Medal; distinction as Favourite Son of the City of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria; the Can de Plata and Can de Oro Awards for the Arts, from the Cabildo Insular de Gran Canaria; and the Canary Islands Fine Arts and Performance.
One of his most cherished projects was the establishing in 1990 of an international biannual singing competition and continues in his name to help young opera singers of all nationalities.
Three auditoriums, in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Majadahonda (Madrid) and Aspe (Alicante), and two cultural centres, in Mirasierra-Fuencarral (El Pardo, Madrid) and Tejeda (Gran Canaria) have been named after Alfredo Kraus. A primary school in Lomo Los Frailes (Tamaraceite, Gran Canaria), the Chair of singing at Barcelona’s Liceo Conservatory, and the Aula Cultural (cultural department) of the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria are also named after him. In 2000, the Opera Season in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, organised by Amigos Canarios de la Ópera, took the name Alfredo Kraus, the same year that the Spanish postal service highlighted his career with a stamp in its Personajes Populares (Popular Figures) series.
He died in Madrid in 1999 of a prolonged illness at the age of 71 two years after the death of his wife Rosa whom he married in 1956.

From the Los Angeles Times obituary, it was written that Kraus maintained that it was emotion, not precision, that made an opera singer great. ‘For me, to live and breathe a role is far more important than singing it to perfection, because a perfect voice can be as dull as dishwater,’ he has said. ‘What the public must understand is that singing is a matter of musicality, sensitivity, personality, and above all, maturity.”

Amelita Galli Curci, Soprano, November 18, 1822

Galli Curci was born in Milan, Italy into an upper middle class family of Italo-Spanish heritage. Her musical prowess was evident at an early age graduating from the Milan Conservatorium and winning the first prize as a pianist in 1903.

We have the opera composer Piero Mascagni to thank for encouraging her to have some vocal lessons with Carignani and Sara Dufes, but apparently she remained mainly self taught as she began her career using piano exercises and treatises available from the former greats to hone her vocal skills. Later in New York she coached with coloratura soprano Estelle Liebling.

She debuted as Gilda in Verdi’s Rigoletto at the age of 24 and became increasingly more successful over the next eight years in the coloratura repertoire not only in Italy but in Spain, Egypt, Russia and Central and South America. During this time in Buenos Aires she sang two performances of Lucia di Lammermoor with Enrico Caruso.

Having only been offered a contract for minor roles at La Scala in Milan, she vowed never to sing there in the future. Looking for more opportunities he sights were set across the Atlantic. She married the aristocrat Marchese Luigi Curci an aspiring painter architect, costume and set designer and they became the toast of Italian society.

In New York, Galli-Curci hoped to be engaged by the Metropolitan Opera, but Maestro Gatti-Cassazza had already hired his wife, Maria Barrientos, to sing all the coloratura soprano roles that season. Fortunately, Cleofonte Campanini, of the struggling Chicago Opera, was in town looking for singers and was willing to give the diva a chance. Against Luigi’s (her husband) wishes, the Curci family packed their bags and moved to Chicago.

Her much-anticipated Met debut in the same opera was slated for Opening Night, November 14, 1921, alongside two fellow Italians, tenor Beniamino Gigli, who inherited much of Caruso’s lyric repertory, and baritone Giuseppe De Luca. The new production, designed by Joseph Urban and conducted by Roberto Moranzoni, did not disappoint. Max Smith reviewing for the Herald American wrote:
“How fascinating is Amelita’s impersonation of Violetta, already made familiar during her association with the visiting Chicago Opera Company! How imaginatively vivacious in the first act; how pathetic in the second; how tragic in the last. It was fitting, indeed, that Giulio Gatti-Casazza should bring forward his latest “star” in Traviata. For surely no other role reveals her own peculiar powers, histrionic as well as vocal, to greater advantage: None permits her to disclose more affectingly the characteristic delicacy of her art, the essentially feminine charm of her persuasions.”
Comparisons with the greatest coloraturas of the recent past—Adelina Patti, Marcella Sembrich, Luisa Tetrazzini—followed in the press, proving that even for those who found faults with the new diva, she had clearly joined an illustrious line of bel canto virtuosos. In addition to her appearances in opera and numerous recital tours, Galli-Curci’s fame rested equally on her best-selling recordings. Sales for her records rivalled those of Caruso, and she often recorded popular or light songs as well as opera arias. Her distinctive vocal timbre—soft-grained, velvety, and pure—transferred well to records even by the crude technology of the time.”

Her fame and popularity spread. 1918 was a pivotal year in Galli-Curci’s development as an international star. In addition to being followed by paparazzi (which she adored), Amelita became a celebrity endorser for RCA Victor’s “Talking Machines,” appearing in full-page ads in the New York Times in glamorous outfits throughout 1918 and 1919. She also extolled the virtues of cosmetics, furs, and automobiles.

After the Armistice in 1918, Luigi begged Amelita to return to Italy to save their marriage, but Amelita refused to give up stardom and her affair with Homer Samuels, her rehearsal accompanist in Chicago.

Luigi demanded a divorce, and a public scandal ensued, appearing in the society pages of Chicago papers for almost a year.

Amelita Galli-Curci and Homer Samuels were married in Homer’s parents’ home in Minneapolis on Jan. 15, 1921, and Amelita became an American citizen. She never returned to Italy.

The couple bought a country home in the Catskill Mountains in Upstate New York. They called their getaway “Sul Monte” and escaped the stress of Galli-Curci’s career whenever possible.

The rigours of being in such demand and popularity in both two major opera houses Chicago and New York started to tell in her voice, and in 1935 after refusing to acknowledge an ever increasing growth in her neck and the subsequent pain it caused her, she agreed to have the goitre caused by thyroid disjunction removed by a doctor who was not perturbed by operating on such a famous golden throat. On the contrary he apparently bathed in the glory and many photo opportunities were made with his famous patient. However, the operation was not without consequences, and she was never able to move into the lyric and dramatic soprano repertoire that the doctor had led her to believe would be awaiting her after she healed. The dubious honour of having the damaged nerve, the external branch of the superior laryngeal nerve named after her ensued, and is still referred to as the “nerve of Galli Curci” up until this day.

In their retirement years Galli Curci and her husband Homer became interested in Eastern spirituality and were active members of the Yogananda Society. Galli Curci wrote the forward to Paramahansa Yogananda’s 1929 book Whispers from Eternity. Yogananda’s most famous book being Autobiography of a Yogi, a work known to have inspired many people worldwide, including George Harrison and Apple founder Steve Jobs.

In a video recording Joan Sutherland recounts how she and her husband Richard Bonynge were very excited to have the opportunity to meet their vocal heroine, and apart from exchanging Coloratura talk, she reminisced on how she was very taken by the style and presence of the diva when she opened the door to greet them completely dressed in matching pink apart from a tortoise shell comb in her hair. Sutherland lovingly ordered pink note paper in her honour which always made her remember her.

She was also appreciated and honoured with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Galli Curci died eight days after her 81st birthday at her home in California.

From the forward of Whispers of Eternity she wrote:
“The followers of all religions can drink from this fountain of universal prayers. These invocations are the answer to the modern scientific mind, which seeks God intelligently. The prayers in this book are presented in great variety, and therefore enable each one of us to choose those prayers best suited and helpful to his own particular needs.

My humble request to the readers is expressed in the following lines:

Pass not by, with hurried intellectual reading, the mines of realization hidden in the soil nourishing the word plants in this book. As the author tells us, dig into them deeply, daily and repeatedly, with a pickaxe of attentive, reverential, and meditative study. Then you will find the priceless gem of Self-realization.”

YouTube video with an array of photos including Galli Curci on her Australian tour pictured with a Kookaburra (another famous bird with an amazing trill!)