Litvinne was born Françoise-Jeanne
Schutz in St Petersburg in 1860. Her
father was Russian, her mother French-Canadian
and at the age of fifteen the girl went
to Paris to study, eventually taking
lessons from the famed Pauline Viardot-Garcia.
She made her debut in 1883 and travelled
to Brussels, the Paris Opera and back
to St Petersburg and Moscow and was
invited to La Scala in 1890. A little
hiatus after her marriage saw her leave
the stage but she soon returned giving
Parisian premieres of Wagner (Isolde,
Brünnhilde in Götterdämmerung
in 1899 and 1902 respectively). And
it was as Isolde that she made her Covent
Garden premiere, later singing Aida,
Gioconda and Donna Anna. Though she
was renowned as a Wagnerian she did
a lot of work in other repertoire, from
Gluck to Saint-Saëns, until her
operatic retirement in 1917, though
she continued to sing in recitals until
1924. Thenceforth she became as notable
a teacher as she had been singer, counting
Koshetz and Lubin amongst her pupils
– as a delightful pendant both make
a little appearance at the end of this
disc.
We have here a number
of items made for Fonotipia and the
Gramophone Company. Malibran doesn’t
date them but the earliest derive from
sessions made in 1902 and they are notoriously
hard to come by; in one discography
from the early 1970s the existence of
one of these discs is wistfully hoped
for but not expected. Here it is – here
they are in fact. It’s no use pretending
that you will find many an easy listen
because you won’t. Deficient original
recordings and pressings, damage, and
distortion afflict a number of them
and a veil of surface noise has been
left intact. But I ought to stress that
these are no ordinary documents – my
reviewing colleagues on this site, God
love them, who vomit at the sound of
light crackle on a 1946 Decca had better
head for the hills now.
What sort of voice
did Litvinne have? Hers was a strong
dramatic soprano, of course, with a
big range and well suited to Wagner.
It had a powerful centre but a more
strained top and embodied a certain
contralto depth. It’s not an especially
beautiful voice – but then neither does
it curdle – and is forcefully projected
even in the 1902/03 sessions with a
fine technique. It was I suppose a cosmopolitan
French sound and less explicitly Gallic
than others. Her Massenet though is
noble and loftily phrased with that
mezzo power to the fore. The Aida is
tough listening with one of those banjo-sounding
plinking piano accompaniments. Her singing
is plain but attractive and my only
concern centres on the transfer. She
sounds fractionally more soprano sounding
than we know from other sessions – is
the transfer too fast? Her Schumann
Ich groll nicht is not for everyone.
It’s a frankly operatic voice barely
scaled at all in this lied. Nor can
the recording cope – there’s some unmerciful
blasting – but against the sheer inappropriateness
of a voice this big taking on a song
of this kind we can still listen to
her thrilling chest voice. An exciting,
exaggerated, utterly "wrong"
performance – but insightful into her
way of doing things on the recital platform.
I say Ich grolle nicht but as with other
performances she re-recorded a lot of
her repertoire and there are two recordings
of it here. The earliest sessions were
made with none less than Alfred Cortot
and the later ones with an unidentified
pianist (unidentified by me at any rate).
We can test her technique in the coloratura
demands of Meyerbeer – full of trills,
registral leaps, and divisions – all
fine. She has some dicey moments up
top in Verdi in a brace of performances
that don’t really show her at her best
and her Samson reveals something that
contemporary critics didn’t seem to
comment on – a certain shortage of breath
deriving from insufficient breath control.
Her Carmen is slightly
untidily phrased but the Gramophone
Le Cid (Cortot’s recordings were always
with them not Fonotipia) reveals much
the same qualities as her Fonotipia,
though in worse sound with that wobbly
piano sound preserved intact. Her Ho
jo to ho is dramatic and fiery if
scrunchy at the top of her range – but
one can certainly see why she was so
admired in Wagner – and we get a surprise
in Ich grolle nicht, the second version.
This was actually from her 1902/03 sessions
and therefore predated the 1905 one
I mentioned earlier. The Cortot accompanied
one is much better – phrasing is much
more appropriate, she is more measured
and less operatically insistent; the
voice is better reined in. It’s hardly
a lieder voice but it shows how changeable
interpretation can be. To cap it all
the 1902 disc is in better shape than
the 1905. She was actually a pioneer
of mélodie on disc. Her Hahn
is not here but her Fauré is
– a big voiced and rather no-prisoners
Les Berceaux (the early disc of it with
Cortot suffers from a rough copy). Her
Isolde is rather compromised by the
recording and some technical limitations
in the voice but her Gounod Sapho is
very accomplished indeed.
Litvinne made about
forty sides and one private cylinder.
Here we have twenty-four of them in
obviously variable states of preservation.
The inherent problems shouldn’t be minimised
but neither should the value of this
disc in preserving the voice of a singer
of significance in late nineteenth and
early twentieth century music making.
You will spend your life trying – and
failing – to find all her 78s so enthusiasts
should start here. It would have been
appropriate to have some documentation
about textual, vocal and discographical
matters but we get a simple paragraph
on her biographically. Never mind –
the music’s the thing. For all the inherent
problems I must say I found her fascinating.
Jonathan Woolf
Félia Litvinne (soprano) 