The sultry new sounds
that bossa nova actively came to encompass
would give an entirely fresh and original slant to the much-maligned
term "modern classical music," literally transforming guitarist
Bonfá, the shy piano-playing Jobim, and his partner Vinicius de
Moraes, into latter-day Franz Schuberts for their songwriting skills.
by: Joe
Lopes
Brazil’s Fat Lady Can’t Sing—Epilogue
In 1959, almost two years
after she had officially left the concert platform, Brazilian opera singer
Bidu Sayão returned from her self-imposed retirement to participate
in the recording of a new work entitled A Floresta do Amazonas, written
by her close friend and fellow compatriot, the staggeringly prolific Heitor
Villa-Lobos.
It was a vigorous, soul-stirring
piece cobbled together from the scattered remnants of his stillborn Hollywood
film score for the movie Green Mansions.
But despite the presence
of Brazil’s greatest living classical composer and his favorite native songbird,
the album failed to catch fire with fans and quickly went out of print. Villa-Lobos
himself was to pass away on November 17, a few short months after the recording
was completed; for her part, Bidu would never again step into a gramophone
studio, nor would she perform before a live paying audience.
In that same year, the
revitalized Brazilian motion picture industry, soon to be known as the Cinema
Novo (New Wave) movement, would test its fledgling wings by becoming the
proud beneficiary of a more exceptional multicultural event: the worldwide
release of French director Marcel Camus’ production of Orfeu Negro,
or Black Orpheus, as contemporary English-speaking audiences would
come to know it—a movie based on the musical play penned by Carioca
poet Vinicius de Moraes.
A multi-award winner and
surprise international hit, the film’s extraordinarily influential soundtrack,
co-written by musicians Luiz Bonfá and Antonio Carlos Jobim, with an
able assist from lyricist Vinicius, would help launch the coming bossa
nova invasion of the early to middle sixties.
The sultry new sounds
that this style of world music actively came to encompass would give an entirely
fresh and original slant to the much-maligned term "modern classical
music," literally transforming guitarist Bonfá, the shy piano-playing
Jobim, and his hard-living partner de Moraes, into latter-day Franz Schuberts
for their singularly unique songwriting skills.
Their historic collaboration
would help sweep Música Popular Brasileira (or MPB for short) into
a whole other musical realm, permanently changing the face and focus of jazz
and other forms of popular entertainment for years to come (see my article
"Jazz Can’t Resist Brazil," in the online Brazzil magazine
– https://brazzil.com/2003/html/news/articles/may03/p120may03.htm-,
for more on this subject).
While this was all well
and good for the pop and tourist trades, where did it leave the opera? What
would happen to the over 300-year-old art form in Brazil, now that its feasibility
had been suddenly called into question?
In Act Two of my continuing
series on "Brazil’s Fat Lady," I wrote that in 1960 the country’s
capital underwent a dramatic change from the old Portuguese-dominated center
of Rio de Janeiro to the futuristic metropolis of Brasília.
As an unfortunate consequence
of this move, Brazil’s major theaters and government-sponsored opera houses
were relegated to a perpetual state of penury, if not outright impoverishment.
Opera, as it had been
presented and performed in the land of Carnaval and samba, was in danger of
going the way of the dinosaur; it was gradually being forced to make way for
the sashaying young charms of the seductive new kid on the block, the statuesque
"Girl from Ipanema."
Going on the Record
With extinction unavoidably
looming, there simply had to exist a more practical method for preserving
the rich cultural heritage (or what little of it there was) of the Brazilian
national opera, not to mention the outstanding creative contributions of so
many of its finest proponents, before this cataclysmic event would come to
pass.
The only way this could
be done was through the medium of recordings—ironically, the same technology
that was threatening to displace opera’s intellectual preeminence.
Why threatening? Had not
Bidu Sayão, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Camargo Guarnieri, Francisco Mignone,
and dozens of other classical artists committed their best-known interpretations
to long-playing disc? Had not the prized theatrical works of Carlos Gomes,
Alberto Nepomuceno, and Henrique Oswald been given the deluxe three-record
treatment on the major international labels?
Hardly, is the brutally
honest response to those queries. While even at the zenith of her European
and American opera career, Bidu Sayão had left only a comparable handful
of recorded extracts from her most popular stage parts, with very little in
the way of complete works preserved for posterity.
Her only commercially
available complete opera recording (made in 1947) was a version on Columbia
of La Bohème, with colleagues Richard Tucker, Frank Valentino,
and Salvatore Baccaloni, and the Orchestra and Chorus of the Metropolitan
Opera conducted by Giuseppe Antonicelli.
The album was re-released
a few years ago on compact disc by Sony Masterworks. It was a fine, even nostalgic
production, but paled in comparison to the classic renditions presided over
by Arturo Toscanini, Sir Thomas Beecham, and Tullio Serafin.
Another of Bidu’s signature
roles, that of Norina in Don Pasquale, was launched into the market
only via a private, off-the-air transcription from 1940, and featured Baccaloni,
Valentino, and tenor Nino Martini in the leads, with Gennaro Papi as conductor.
Much later, the Met itself
would issue two wonderful, live broadcast performances from the forties as
lavish gift sets for its subscribers: the first, from the 1940 revival of
The Marriage of Figaro, starred the ever-beguiling Bidu as Susanna,
with matinee idol Ezio Pinza as her Figaro; the second, from a 1947 production
of Roméo et Juliette, had Swedish tenor Jussi Bjoerling’s impassioned
Roméo serenading the soprano’s sparkling Juliette.
But as far as satisfying
consumers with her thoroughly rounded (and much-admired) portrayals of Violetta,
Gilda, Lucia, Manon, Mélisande, Micaela, or even Rosina, record companies
looked to other, more "familiar" names to fill the Brazilian singer’s
studio shoes—Licia Albanese, Erna Berger, Lily Pons, Victoria De Los
Angeles, and Lucine Amara—familiar, that is, to New York record-buying
audiences.
In truth, the rationale
for this decision was quite simple: as regrettable as it may have been for
her legion of loyal followers, the closing portion of Bidu’s career with the
Met and other leading opera theaters had coincided with the advent of the
33S‡long-playing record, occurring sometime around the years 1948-1949.
Moreover, the initial
releases of an exciting newcomer named Maria Callas (first on Italian Cetra,
then on England’s EMI/Angel Records) had spurred renewed interest in the once
neglected bel canto masterworks, as did the recitals of early-period Verdi
on Decca/London by the superb spinto Renata Tebaldi, her main rival
in the opera house.
Commencing in the early
1950s, these two aspiring young artists began to record the standard soprano
repertoire (Tosca, Mimì, Violetta, the two Leonoras, Aïda, Butterfly)
over an impressive ten-year span. In doing so, they joined another dominant
vocal personality of the time, Czech diva Zinka Milanov, who had previously
signed with RCA Victor, in the hopes of giving the paying public a solid run
for their operatic money.
Callas, Tebaldi, and Milanov.
This phenomenal recording triumvirate, accompanied by their usual stage-partners
Giuseppe Di Stefano, Mario Del Monaco, and Jussi Bjoerling, proved to be a
highly potent combination for millions of classical record buyers in North
America and abroad.
Their standing in the
classical music world, however, would make it extremely difficult for past
opera luminaries, such as the diminutive Bidu Sayão, to successfully
compete with on any conceivable basis.
Shunned in the fifties
by an intransigent Met Opera management, poor under-represented Bidu was left
holding the bag, as it were, by this intolerable state of recorded affairs—a
disappointing casualty in the complete opera album wars.
Luckily for collectors,
her varied interpretations of Brazilian folk tunes, art songs from France,
Portugal and Spain, arias from Italian, French and Brazilian opera, and lyrical
Brazilian and French showpieces, written or arranged for her by Villa-Lobos,
Hernani Braga, Reynaldo Hahn, and others, have been beautifully restored by
Sony, with all of the selections undergoing miraculous sonic transformations,
enhancements that have contributed enormously to their shelf-life, as well
as to their future enjoyment.
The Girl of the
Golden West, and Other Recorded Oddities
The not so subtle shifting
of musical tastes in the early 1960s from the classical to the pop arena,
with pop steadily encroaching upon opera and, irrevocably, gaining the upper
hand, was uppermost in the minds of record producers, and clearly reflected
in the preferences and patterns of the album-buying public of that period,
both in Brazil and in the United States.
The times were indeed
changing, as evidenced by the increased attention being paid to native performers
Tom Jobim, João Gilberto, Nara Leão, Luiz Bonfá, Astrud
Gilberto, Baden Powell, Sérgio Mendes, and their work, by a plethora
of entranced American players, among them guitarist Charlie Byrd, saxophonist
Stan Getz, flutist Herbie Mann, pianist Vince Guaraldi, harmonica exponent
Toots Thielemans, and many others.
Pointing the way toward
this newly expansive musical plain, bossa nova, samba, and (to a lesser
extent) other varieties of MPB, experienced a near cosmic explosion on American
airwaves, and in record shops, not seen since the heyday of Carmen Miranda,
almost to the point of oversaturating the imported music mart all too quickly
and too soon, according to some critical ears.
Nevertheless, once firmly
committed to this unalterable path, Brazil’s homegrown talent (and, more importantly,
her audiences) would never again go back to the way things were—the notoriously
volatile Brazilian economy would surely see to that, never allowing for the
majority of its citizens the experience of such First World amenities as regular
concert-going, the purchasing of vast quantities of classical music albums,
the attending of live opera performances, or the listening of classical records
made famous by native-born artists.
In all fairness, it must
be added that the U.S. record industry was experiencing many of the same trials
and tribulations with respect to the marketing and selling of the classical
repertory as Brazil was, only on a more calculated scale.
Once most of the standard
works were more than adequately represented on LP, record companies had nowhere
else to go except to engage in a treasure hunt for rare and undiscovered "gems"
that might still have gone unnoticed in some obscure backwater of the unrecorded
repertory.
A perfect illustration
of this was the concurrent 1958 release of two competing stereophonic versions
of composer Giacomo Puccini’s Italo-American "spaghetti Western,"
the opera La Fanciulla del West (The Girl of the Golden West), based
on playwright David Belasco’s turn-of-the-century stage spectacular.
At the time, this infrequently
performed work—more a provocative, whole-tone experiment by the renowned
Italian melodist than a true successor to his previous Belasco influence,
Madama Butterfly—had been given an inferior rendering (on Cetra)
of a 1950 radio broadcast from Italy’s RAI network, with an even more ineffectual
roster of unknowns doing it a disservice.
It cried out for a modern,
technologically advanced production, with a cast of equally distinguished
stature to promote it; but instead of one new stereo recording, EMI and Decca
treated a reticent buying public to two.
The full story behind
these differing releases need not be retold here, but let it suffice that
EMI’s project was originally to have featured an exceptional, all-star lineup
to include the divine Maria Callas, leading man Franco Corelli (three years
before his Met debut), and veteran baritone Tito Gobbi, with the full forces
of the Teatro all Scala of Milan, under the direction of Lovro von Matacic.
What finally emerged from
these sessions was a disheartening blend of substitute singers: alongside
famed Wagnerian Birgit Nilsson, a last-minute replacement for the departed
Callas, EMI enlisted the aid of the incongruously cast João Gibin,
a barrel-chested Brazilian tenor who later changed his name to the more Italianate-sounding
Giovanni, in lieu of the formerly announced Corelli; second stringer Andrea
Mongelli subbed for Gobbi, another ideal cast member to have been dropped
from the proceedings.
In volume three of the
book Opera On Record, reviewer Edward Greenfield went on to blithely
praise Gibin’s "beautiful shading of tone and dynamic" and his "very
distinctive timbre," which were welcome but decidedly unexpected compliments,
given the tidal wave of sound registered by that titan of the turntable, tenor
Mario Del Monaco, on the rival Decca set.
In spite of this lone
favorable assessment, negative criticism of the whole misguided EMI venture
doomed the album to backorder oblivion; it was sadly prophetic, too, of the
complicated course Brazilian opera singers would inevitably take with regard
to their own future lack of stability in the post-bossa nova period.
Incidentally, nothing
further in the way of commercial recordings was ever forthcoming from Gibin,
only a few sporadic appearances in the States, including a debut at San Francisco’s
War Memorial Opera House in the mid-sixties, followed by a solitary Metropolitan
Opera assignment as Radames in Aïda a few years later.
Aside from Bidu, the only
other Brazilian-born, classical vocal artists to be captured by the microphones
with any degree of consistency over the years have been, coincidentally enough,
two lyric baritones.
An exceptionally versatile
artist, with a "pure, limpid tone, and a gorgeously pliant natural instrument,"
the handsome singer Paulo Fortes made his operatic debut in 1945 as Germont
in La Traviata, at the Teatro Municipal in his native Rio de Janeiro.
For the next half-century,
Fortes would enjoy an immensely diversified entertainment career, appearing
with many of the major stars of the day (i.e. Callas, Tebaldi, Gobbi, Di Stefano,
Del Monaco, and Beniamino Gigli) on the stage, as well as performing on radio,
in television, and in the movies.
He sang throughout most
of Latin America, and even traveled abroad to Italy and Portugal, but preferred
to stay close to his home base in Rio. In fact, prior to his death in January
1997, Fortes held the house record for making the most appearances at the
Municipal of any artist that had ever sung there.
His only two complete
recordings were of Gomes’ Il Guarany in 1959, presented in the original
Italian, and the same composer’s symphonic cantata Colombo from 1963,
both for Chantecler. The latter piece, heavily cut, was recently issued in
CD format on the Master Class label, but is primarily of historical interest.
A trio of thrice-familiar
Puccini operas, made in Bulgaria, of all places, for the budget label Frequenz—one
of Tosca with soprano Raina Kabaivanska, tenor Nazzareno Antinori,
and conductor Gabriele Bellini; another of Madama Butterfly, again
with Kabaivanska, Antinori, and Bellini; and a third of Manon Lescaut
with the same team—co-starred the Brazilian baritone Nelson Portella,
a favorite with European audiences of the early eighties and nineties.
The possessor of a warm
and mellifluous singing voice, Portella’s parts in these frequently performed
soprano showstoppers, while fairly involving dramatically, could hardly be
termed as true theatrical tours de force.
Opposite his splendid
recorded competitors—and there were many to contend with, to be certain—the
vocally lightweight Portella came off as a dependable but dull routiner, an
also-ran before he ever left the starting gate.
Plenty of Pop Stars
So where had Brazil’s
myriad opera talents migrated to all these years? Why were there so few classically
trained singers around to fill the empty stage left vacant by the departure
of that prima donna par excellence and quintessential role model, Bidu
Sayão, from the international operatic scene?
One possible explanation
may lie within the pop field itself. As irreconcilable as it may seem to us
today, Brazilian power vocalists of the 1950s-1960s typically personified
the penchant for over-the-top delivery that was so strongly in vogue at the
time: they were considered the ne plus ultra of the Latinate-style
of pop singing much favored in South America’s largest country—at least,
until the arrival of bossa nova and MPB.
Among female interpreters
of this type were the legendary Dalva de Oliveira, the husky-toned Leny Andrade,
and the creamy-voiced Ângela Maria, three individual stylists who could
be construed as direct descendants of the vocal tradition previously laid
down for them by the French chanteuse Edith Piaf, and the American jazz specialists
Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan—extraordinarily moving artists in their
own right, epitomizing the raw brand of this emotional, all-or-nothing approach
to popular songs that had so imbued Brazil’s own version of the hit parade.
On the distaff side, there
were Agnaldo Rayol and Agnaldo Timoteo, two charismatic male performers who
possessed powerful, tenor-like voices, with all the requisite richness and
passion necessary for full-throated vocalizing of the operatic kind.
One of them, Agnaldo Timoteo,
was widely acclaimed for two solid hits from 1968, the romantic "Meu
Grito" (My Cry) and the tender "Mamãe," a sweetly sentimental
paean to Brazilian mothers everywhere. The other, Agnaldo Rayol, with his
fluffy, pompadour hairstyle and choirboy good looks, physically resembled
the once fashionable African American pop crooner, Johnny Mathis.
Mathis, it should be pointed
out, had taken up serious vocal studies near the start of his career, but
abandoned his operatic pursuits in the mid-fifties in favor of the more lucrative
song sphere. His smooth-as-silk ballad style became instantly recognizable
through the liberal use of head tone and falsetto, whereas Rayol’s
more robust sound can best be described as having a cutting edge to it, what
Italians refer to as squillo (pronounced skwee-lo, and not to
be confused with the Portuguese word for squirrel).
Squillo is a term
used to identify the visceral, penetrating ring in the upper-middle to top-third
of the male tenor voice, a somewhat indefinable trait not all members of this
voice category can lay claim to.
Ideally, Rayol had this
quality in spades. Why he chose the popular song route over a possible career
on the operatic stage, after having been blessed with such a remarkable, God-given
endowment, is not immediately clear, but that he had the right equipment in
his larynx is absolutely without argument.
Like Frank Sinatra and
Tony Bennett before him, two immortal American singers who went through numerous
ups-and-downs in their long musical pathways, Rayol had a late-flowering vocal
resurgence characterized by his warbling of the trenchant main theme to the
hugely successful soap opera Terra Nostra, "Tormento d’Amore"
(Torment of Love), sung as a duet with Welsh singing star Charlotte Church.
Their 1998 Italian-language
recording of the number was an unparalleled cultural phenomenon in Brazil,
and was, undeniably, Rayol’s most financially prosperous pop foray in years,
resurrecting his sagging singing career at a relatively late stage in his
professional life.
It also sounded in eerie
imitation of an earlier 1996 Euro-pop confection, "Con Te Partirò"
(Time to Say Goodbye), recorded jointly by tenor Andrea Bocelli and soprano
Sarah Brightman. That trite tune spirited the blind Bocelli to the top of
the crossover charts, where he has encountered substantial media coverage
ever since, however debatable (or unwarranted) that may be.
This was not the first
time that an Italian popular song had heightened Brazilian awareness of this
crowd-pleasing musical sub-genre.
A major event of thirty
years prior, one that did much to signal the final transition over into the
pop world, and, nearly single-handedly, to derail the classical "gravy
train" in the country, once and for all, was the participation in the
1968 San Remo Song Festival by Jovem Guarda (The Young Guard) emblem
and Brazilian pop sensation, singer-songwriter Roberto Carlos.
His winning entry, a sappily
written love song by Sergio Endrigo, was a Neapolitan-inspired romanza,
"Canzone Per Te" (A Song for You), aimed squarely at Brazilian youths’
recurring obsession with Italianità, and the obviously partisan
Mediterranean judges of the contest.
At that fortuitous moment,
however, O Rei Roberto proved that he could deliver the finished goods
as well as, if not better than, most of the mediocre talents that had comprised
that year’s list of ignoble song candidates, thus securing for himself in
Brazil the permanent and undisputed title of "The King" (Elvis Presley
aside).
The Brazilian Ratings
Battle
As it eventually played
out, the real struggle for audience attention had already begun to be waged
on Brazilian television during the mid-1960s, in the form of live broadcast
song festivals, but with a slightly different angle: it was not to be a battle
between opera (or classical music) and pop at all, but between the burgeoning
Brazilian rock and MPB factions.
This openly competitive
situation, brought about by the rivalry of these two popular entertainment
forms, quickly led to their becoming a regular weekly feature on the major
networks (TV Excelsior and TV Record) of the time.
Strangely, this type of
domestic programming has even permeated the pop culture of North American
television, what with the recent rebirth of "song contests" recycled
as reality shows (American Idol and Pop Diva) ruling much of
the TV-ratings game of late.
In Bahian singer Caetano
Veloso’s candid look at the era, Tropical Truth: A Story of Music and Revolution
in Brazil (Alfred A. Knopf Publishers, New York, 2002), the consuming,
all-pervasive influence that was exerted on promoters, performers and viewing
public alike, by this new and highly attractive format, was convincingly described
in this fashion:
"After this (1965)
festival, producers at the other broadcasting company were also more receptive,
and initiated a kind of programming that would transform television as much
as music. The idea of song competitions had been borrowed from the San Remo
Festival in Italy, but in Brazil, after the success of the first one, it
was to acquire different characteristics and carry a different sort of weight.
Elis Regina’s performance had shown the owners of TV Record how broadly
appealing MPB could be with the Brazilian public, the scope of its potential
audience as well as prestige… MPB started to be taken seriously in
Brazil, in every sense: from the specifically musical aspects to the literary
and the political, there was an aura of mission connected to the songs."
As a result of this sudden
flash with success, fast-rising pop-rock artists of every description and
persuasion, including Roberto and Erasmo Carlos, Wanderley Cardoso, Wilson
Simonal, Elis Regina, Jair Rodrigues, Wanderléa, Chico Buarque, Jerry
Adriani, Renato e Seus Blue-Caps, The Fevers, and Ronnie Von, to be joined
later by Gilberto Gil, Rita Lee, Edu Lobo, Caetano Veloso, Maria Bethânia,
Gal Costa, and Tom Zé, in addition to Italian pop favorites Rita Pavone,
Gigliola Cinquetti, Gianni Morandi, Jimmy Fontana, and others, would reign
supreme (for a time, anyway) as the New Young Guards of the Living Room.
In the same, inexplicable
manner that Carnaval and samba had meshed into a feverish, tropical goulash
of colorful rhythmic delights, Brazilian rock and popular song had somehow
come to terms and agreed to peacefully "coexist," in that genuinely
affecting way that the Brazilian people seem to have of digesting non-native
musical forms—and, most intriguingly, of turning out lush, finger-snapping
oeuvres of deceptively simple structure, despite the presence of so much political
turbulence and economic turmoil, particularly during the military years of
the mid-sixties to early eighties.
Although opera (and by
that, I mean Italian, French, and German opera) had continued to thrive in
a few isolated spots in the country—invariably presented by contracted
visiting artists, foreign conductors and outside producers—the demigods
of Brazilian pop music, once they grabbed hold of the entertainment headlines,
would systematically and conscientiously throttle the classical competition
into the back-pages of the obituary section.
And they still refuse
to let go, as witnessed by the disastrous decline in new and complete opera
recordings, and by the rapid slimming down of the classical recorded repertoire
by the prime international record labels.
Where this bare road will
lead to for the opera in Brazil will be the subject of my final article in
this series.
Joe Lopes, a naturalized American citizen born in Brazil, was raised and
educated in New York, where he worked for many years in the financial sector.
In 1996, he moved to Brazil with his Brazilian wife and daughters. In January
2001, he returned to the U.S. and now resides in North Carolina with his
family. He is a lover of all types of music, especially opera and jazz,
as well as an incurable fan of classic and contemporary films. You can email
your comments to JosmarLopes@msn.com.
Copyright ©
2004 by Josmar F. Lopes
