Victoria de los Ángeles, ‘Madama Butterfly’ Covent Garden 1957

Victoria de los Ángeles as Butterfly

Victoria de los Ángeles, the radiant Catalan soprano from Barcelona, made her debut at Covent Garden as Mimì in La bohème in late 1950 when aged just 27.  She returned 18 months later for her first London Butterfly.  Covent Garden at that time performed those Puccini operas in English, and both had earlier featured the young Elisabeth Schwarzkopf in roles she was soon to relinquish. But de los Ángeles was given special dispensation to sing in Italian alongside the local cast who continued to perform the English translation of the text, a tribute to her status as an already desirable young star.  Her beautiful voice and winning personality at once established a special rapport with London audiences, which endured long after she retired from staged opera and confined herself to concerts and recitals.

The revival of Madama Butterfly in April/May 1957 was something different.  For the first time, Covent Garden Opera chose to present a repertory Italian opera in its original language, obliging the resident ensemble to relearn the opera in Italian and setting in train a policy that would gather increased traction over the next years.  Furthermore, the conductor Rudolf Kempe, who had already led this opera in English in 1955 with Amy Shuard, chose to reinstate the practice of performing Act 2 without the then customary interval after the Humming Chorus, thereby adding cumulative intensity to its heroine’s tragic narrative.  The Saxon Kempe was much loved by the orchestra and management and audiences, appreciated for the peerless clarity of his baton technique and the versatility of his musical tastes which encompassed Verdi and Puccini as well as Mozart, Weber, Wagner and Strauss.  He was offered but declined the post of Musical Director of Covent Garden Opera more than once during the 1950s, preferring to be welcomed as a regular guest conductor without a title.  His Butterfly is full of pointed detail but unsentimental and notably faster than the norm.  Two years later, the local Bryan Balkwill took ten minutes longer, eight of them in Act 2, over the complete opera.

Nor does de los Ángeles dawdle or ‘milk’ the big emotional moments, as some (especially Italian) sopranos have been wont to do.  The American writer James Hilton Jr. observed in 1954: ‘She does nothing that is in the conventional sense ‘effective’.  She is rapidly becoming one of those great rarities…a personality who makes everyone believe in her characterizations… Even in that there is a flaw, for she really offers no characterization.  The personality is always the same.  Yet the audience believes…that this is the way whichever character she happens to be dressed as must have been’.  While there is indeed an artlessness about de los Ángeles, my own experience is that she did subtly vary her personality to fit the role.  Her Manon, in Massenet’s opera, for which she returned to Covent Garden in the summer of 1960 under the baton of Jean Morel, was altogether more knowing and less innocent than her Butterfly.

De los Ángeles is by no means the only great artist to assume a character by thinking themselves into how that fictional being would behave if they were in that position.  Butterfly is for many an extreme case: a 15-year-old Japanese geisha in the first act, still only 18 in the second act; yet with the lung capacity and stamina to stay the course for a two-and-a-half-hour opera in which she is seldom off stage.  Yet de los Ángeles simply inhabits the role, as she guilelessly explained: ‘I never had to think about technique when singing it.  I never thought ‘Now this note is coming’ or ‘Now I have to do so-and-so.’  I could just give myself totally to the role’.  I still remember the thrill of excitement at first hearing the silvery quality of her off-stage voice singing ‘Ancora un passo’ and then the delicate charm of her first appearance over the hill on to Sophie Fedorovitch’s exquisite set.  Note that she modestly eschewed the optional final acuto on arrival.

At the time of these 1957 Butterflies, de los Ángeles was 33-years-old and in her vocal prime.  The performances fell between her first commercial recording of 1954 with Di Stefano and Gobbi conducted by Gavazzeni and her second of 1959 with Bjørling and Sereni conducted by Santini.  One could argue that her live London performances were superior to either, albeit boasting less starry support from John Lanigan as Pinkerton and the young Geraint Evans as Sharpless.  It was my first experience of Butterfly, and at the age of 12 I was too innocent of life to have fully grasped the appalling outcome of the story from reading the synopsis of the plot in advance.  Its impact in the theatre was therefore devastating.  Two years older and wiser, I returned to Covent Garden to witness another great soprano, Sena Jurinac, as Butterfly.  You may hear and contrast both live performances on Music Preserved.

Nicholas Payne      
11 July 2024

Giacomo Puccini (1858 – 1924)

Madama Butterfly

Track 1: Act 1

Track 2: Act 2, Part 1

Track 3: Act 2, Part 2

This recording was taken from a relay of a performance at the Royal Opera House on 2 May 1957.

The recording is from the Harewood Collection at Music Preserved.

• Victoria de los Ángeles
  Cio-Cio-San
• John Lanigan
  Lieutenant B F Pinkerton
• Barbara Howitt
  Suzuki
• Geraint Evans
  Sharpless
• David Tree
  Goro
• Michael Langdon
  The Bonze
• Joyce Livingston
  Kate Pinkerton
• David Allen
  Prince Yamadori
• Ronald Firmager
  Imperial Commissioner
• Harry Gawler
  Registrar
• The Covent Garden Opera Chorus
  
• The Covent Garden Opera Orchestra
  
• Rudolf Kempe
  Conductor