Two books, two lives, two divas: it ought to be possible to compare and contrast, to find little moments of recognition sparking from one across into the other. Or maybe they'll just offer totally different perspectives on the over the top antics of international opera? Demonstrate how things have changed - or maybe, more tellingly, haven't changed - between the heyday of Rosa Ponselle in the 1920s and 1930s and that of Regine Crespin in the 1960s and 1970s?It is obvious from the opening paragraphs, however, that these two accounts of sojourns in sopranodom are as different as it's possible to get.
The Ponselle biography begins with a brief summary of the American soprano's Italian origins and explains how her family arrived in Connecticut. It then moves to Naples: "Of all the wonders of Italy, perhaps none is more recognisable than the image of the Bay of Naples, with its azure sky, the port, the teeming city itself, and Vesuvius looming in the backgrounds. Like Venice with its gondolas, like Rome with St Peter's and the Colosseum, the Bay of Naples suggests ancient mysteries beyond what the eye can see. Unlike those other, equally famous cities, Naples also has a heart that sings, for dozens of the most familiar "Italian songs" are actually the voice of emigration, evoking the much loved places or people from that cherished sea and strand. From O Sole Mio and Torna A Surriento to Funiculi, Funicula, Santa Lucia and Addio, mia bella Napoli, this repertory brings back memories of things loved and lost."Here, on the other hand, is how Regine Crispin begins her account of her Italian origins. "Mannolini! It could be the name of a general under Garibaldi, a gondolier in vividly beribboned hat, an old Italian aristocrat - Il Conte Mannolini has a nice ring, don't you think? - or a plump, merrly singing castrato of the Sistine Chapel. Mannolini was my grandmother. And she sang - off key as a soldering iron but at the top of her voice - all the time. She's the one who made me love singing." Crespin continues with a lively recreation of summer evenings when she and her grandmother would regale assembled friends with, in addition to the usual repertoire of O Sole mio and Funiculi Funicula, a slightly dodgy song about a "fish without bones" whose risque lyrics, she declares, sailed her right over her head.To compare the two studies too closely is perhaps unfair. After all, Rosa Ponselle has been dead for more than fifteen years, while Crespin is still very much alive; one book is a biography, the other an autobiography; Crespin takes a highly coloured European view of things while he Ponselle book is written from that highly serious and curiously formal perspective which Americans often bring to opera. It makes much use, for example, of contemporary reviews and newspaper articles, all of them thoughtful and articulate, some of them enormously prescient. But while Mary Jane Phillips-Matz plods diligently through all the predictable stages of an operatic career (struggling young singer, big break, one success after another), Crespin cleverly varies the rhythm, introducing both discordant notes (an abortion, unhappy love affairs) and unexpected syncopations.
Half-way through the book, just when you suspect she may slip into the dreaded "and then I did this and then I did that" formula familiar from so many show business memoirs, she throws in a chapter called "The Art of Singing" which invites the reader, with apparent artlessness, to have a go.This is a stroke of brilliance, for you have only to take your first deep breath before your realise, instantly and forever, just how insanely difficult the singing of opera really is. And then she produces her punchline: a list of the king of advice your singing teacher (and she has been one herself for years) is likely to offer during the course of a lesson. "Sing behind yours eyes, on a slight smile. Ah, no, not so toothy. . ." "No, higher on that sound, behind the nose, just there where you snore . . ."Crespin is a tad too liberal with exclamation marks, and her larger than life enthusiasm, occasionally spills over into gushiness. But at the end of her book you feel you've been chatting, not just to an extraordinary woman. In a lyrical foreword to the Ponselle autobiography the American soprano Beverly Sills describes the Rosa she knew: "complex, moody, noisily teary, hilariously funny, warm, encouraging, relentlessly critical and very, very easily hurt." This woman, unfortunately, gets lost somewhere among Phillips-Matz's operatic accounts and analyses.
