My impressions of many of the artists Ralph mentions coincide with his. Much has changed, but there are other factors at play than purely vocal ones.
Like Noah, I became seriously interested in opera and singing in general at an early age. Since the 1960/61 season, I’ve seen most productions at the Stockholm Royal Opera, attended concerts etc. I’ve also collected thousands of LPs and CDs, mainly of singers who were no longer active when I explored their legacies.
That season I was thirteen. “My” opera house offered about twentyfive different operas per year, some productions dating far back. I just missed Jussi Björling,but my first Manrico, Radames and Siegmund was Set Svanholm, then 56. I heard veterans like Joel Berglund, Sven Nilsson, Leon Björker and Sigurd Björling. It was still a true ensemble with most works given in Swedish. Annual guest appearances by Birgit Nilsson, Nicolai Gedda and Mattiwilda Dobbs (Swedish-married) were grand occasions but not necessarily that much better. More unique evenings let me hear Dorothy Kirsten, Cesare Valletti, Boris Christoff and Inge Borkh surrounded by “our” singers. I heard recitals by Giuseppe di Stefano, Teresa Berganza and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf at the Concert Hall.
My first real foreign trip was to London in 1967, with Sutherland and Pavarotti in La fille du regiment and Solti’s Die Frau ohne Schatten. There was also a mixed bill gala including Christoff (again) and Bumbry in part of Don Carlo, and Sutherland in Lucia’s Mad scene. They were of course magnificent, but I also appreciated a few evenings at Sadler’s Wells with opera in English.
Of course I was an immature listener. My ears were better than now, but my understanding worse. Yet I started to realize that the music theatre I could see at home with singers like Ragnar Ulfung, Ingvar Wixell, Margareta Hallin, Elisabeth Söderström, Aase Nordmo Løvberg, Berit Lindholm, Kerstin Meyer and others appealed to me at least as much as the “stars”. This was reinforced by the most glorious season I can now imagine. As a student at Berkeley in the autumn of 1972, I was able to hear most of the San Francisco Opera season: Sills, Sutherland, Nilsson, Lindholm, Arkhipova, Verrett, Resnik, Pavarotti, Domingo, Jess Thomas, Thomas Stewart…
In that huge theatre my first impression was that I wanted to reach for the volume control. It was not as overwhelming as I expected. But Sills and Pavarotti in Lucia di Lammermoor remains maybe the best “Italian” singing I ever heard – she expressive and reminding me of Söderström at home, he a bit of a happy circus elephant but still a credible stage actor. And Domingo and Verrett in L’africaine had dramatic presence. On my way home the next summer I managed to see Marilyn Horne, Tucker, Vickers, Gobbi and a few more of similar star magnitude at the Met.
I won’t tire you with my later adventures. Just some conclusions.
Several of these grand voices for me, used to our much less glamorous and vocally gifted singers at home, were a bit disappointing. More than now I took it for granted that they would produce glorious sounds. Some gave convincing portrayals of their roles. But the Met and Covent Garden were too large for the kind of opera I craved. Few had the acting skills to compensate.
Records gave a true and fair view of these singers. They could really produce the sounds I had heard on discs, and in some cases like Di Stefano (in 1964) the wear and crudeness I had heard on records became insignificant when watching him from eight or nine metres.
More than now they were stars. Folke Abenius (Swedish director and head of the Opera for some years) said to me that Schwarzkopf walking from the wings to centre stage for her recital here was a whole course in acting.
Almost all were fully capable of singing the roles they essayed, at least in the way they had decided to do it. And they knew it. They had been trained before historically informed practices and conductors intent on producing “their” interpretation had started to complicate life for a seasoned singer, not to speak of today’s interventionist interpretation of how to move and look. Some with just a good voice and little formal musical or stylistic knowledge had been groomed to master their craft so that they felt self-confidence – a conviction they were able to convey to me as their listener. I knew from Stockholm how singers before entering the world’s larger stages had served an intensive apprenticeship for up to ten years in theatres where they sang a lot, acquiring stagecraft and dependable technique, and often a detailed knowledge of their roles from singing them in the vernacular. This was true of most of Europe, and even the UK where ensemble opera at a good level had finally arrived.
Add to this that orchestras had not yet become quite as loud – the Stockholm Opera’s pit was enlarged in the 1970s – and that musically talented youngsters started to go into popular music and rock, rather than classical singing. Those who did become opera singers are now too often tempted to undertake too much too soon by directors and agents who are mainly interested in young, fresh faces, rather than experienced singers.
Dual-career families and the dominance of free-lance careers also are important. Swedish opera houses used to have thirty or forty soloists. Now there are ten aging ones, with everybody younger on more temporary contracts.
To compensate we still get singers from Eastern Europe where training long remained old-fashioned, and even from Asian countries where learning from good examples is still held in higher regard than in the West, where cultural obstacles make it easier to kick-start your career.
I’m now a bit unfair. In any generation there are wonderful and less wonderful singers. Today’s young people face unfair competition from all those old records you and I like. There still are extremely talented young singers. In some ways they are better equipped than former generations: they know languages and know how to promote themselves. But both their priorities and those of listeners are different from in my youth. I’ve sometimes talked with older singers who question whether someone today has time and patience to let young freelance singers develop, if they require assistance in learning music and can’t rapidly integrate in directors’ innovative conceptions.