The Björling Sound; A Recorded Legacy - Stephen Hastings
University of Rochester Press, 2012. 406pp ISBN 978 1 58046 406 2
The heart of Jussi Björling - Yrsa Stenius
Brombergs, 2002. 365pp Unedited edition, no ISBN
These two books approach tenor Jussi Björling in widely divergent ways.
Stephen Hastings has written a book devoted to his recorded legacy, exhaustive
and analytical. Yrsa Stenius is a journalist whose book was first published
in 2002 and now appears here in this limited edition printed edition in English
in 2012.
Hastings has been the Milan correspondent of Opera News for over two
decades and editor in chief of the Italian periodical Musica for 12
years. Both his experience of the surviving discography and the clarity with
which he approaches it are remarkable. In terms of the vocal art his book
is in the lineage of John Steane’s The Grand Tradition, Michael
Scott’s The Record of Singing and Paul Jackson’s painstaking
analyses of Metropolitan opera broadcasts. The difference of course is that
Hastings concentrates on a single singer. Here he comes much closer to the
kind of studies written by Henry Roth on violin recordings and even closer
to Mortimer Frank’s book on Toscanini’s NBC years, and John Ardoin’s
study of Furtwängler’s recordings. Hastings sits closer to Ardoin,
I feel, in his scrupulous analysis and sifting.
The wealth and depth of analysis is inspiring. It’s also not at all
dry. One thing it’s important to make clear at the outset is that this
book isn’t a discography. For that you need Harald Henrysson’s
A Jussi Björling Phonography, the second edition of which was
published in 1993. It’s also not a biography though clearly there is
a biographical element at work; for the biography there is nothing better
than Jussi by Andrew Farkas and Anna-Lisa Bjorling, Jussi’s widow.
Since, negatively, I’ve noted what it isn’t, it’s time to
say what it is. In nearly 400 pages of text (up to page 352) and notes Hastings
provides composer by composer analyses of the entirety of the tenor’s
recordings, with the exception of the dance music records he made under the
name of Erik Odde. There is a discography of his ‘remaining recordings’,
which are lighter ballad material such as For You Alone, Tosti and
traditional songs to which he devotes a few pages of analysis. To give you
some indication of the range of the main body of the book, there are 16 pages
on Gounod’s Faust alone, and a similar amount devoted to Romeo
and Juliet. Yet whilst this is perfectly sufficient to cover in detail,
and with considerable supporting critical apparatus Björling various
performances or surviving arias, this is dwarfed by the two great Italian
blocks of Puccini and Verdi. Pages 122 to 199 alone are devoted to Verdi,
and ninety pages (pages 238 to 328) to Verdi. Thus nearly half of the text
is devoted, properly, to the two composers with whom he was majorly associated,
and of whose performances a huge amount can be said.
Hastings compares and contrasts Björling with other eminent singers.
His superlatives are judiciously employed and mercifully they are not omnipresent.
He contents himself when discussing the Missa Solemnis with the comment
that ‘only a handful of the thirty-nine recordings of full-scale operas
and religious works with Björling can be considered close to definitive
in their all-round excellence’ but that this one is of that handful.
The coolly measured nature of the comment is not Olympian but it is rooted
in a series of value and aesthetic-musical judgements that one can follow
or, if one so chooses, dissent from. I doubt though whether there will be
much dissent given the encyclopaedic nature of the analysis and its closely
argued commentary.
Stephen Hastings makes a good case in favour of Björling the lieder singer.
This is an area of his art that has not been as fully explored as it might,
and the ten Schubert lieder that survive are persuasively advanced as important
documents. Then, too, one notices what is not here: how shocking to see how
little Mozart has survived; just two arias, both obvious ones from The
Magic Flute and Don Giovanni; and this of an opera composer whose
music the tenor is on record as saying ‘suits me best’.
There is a discography of recordings cited in their CD incarnations-thus the
need for Henrysson which this book could hardly replicate in that respect,
in addition to the text. If you need to dip in, I suggest you bypass the big
swathes of operatic literature and content yourself with the passages on Hugo
Alfvén. There are only four surviving songs, one in multiple performances.
You will find Hastings’s writing judicious, clear, technically elucidatory,
and studded with relevant and apposite background material. You will, thus,
find your perceptions and appreciation widened and will go back to the recordings
inquisitive to see if your own view tallies with Hastings’s own. This,
surely, is the essence of great criticism.
Criticism is not something that is absent from the other book under review,
Yrsa Stenius’s The heart of Jussi Björling. By her account
his heart was in his liver. I have seldom read a book, short of biographies
of Dylan Thomas and Scott Fitzgerald, in which the subject’s alcoholic
intake is more addressed. Did Björling drink more than Malcolm Lowry:
is that possible?
This chatty, informal unedited version in English of a book first published
in Swedish in 2002 sits at the far side of Björling Studies from Hastings’s
magisterial work. It involves reported speech and journalistic speculations,
some naive circumlocutions and addresses to the reader. The florid style is
matched by imprecision. Her rather all-purpose comments on the tenor’s
Italian pronunciation are undone by Hastings’s specificities. Stylistically,
and this example is not wholly atypical, it’s surely impermissible to
write the following and to retain the confidence of a reader: ‘I’m
trying to get a sighting of him in the viewfinder of my psychological binoculars’.
So, yes, there are comments on his child born out of wedlock, as it’s
rather charmingly called. There is an interesting passage on the confluence
of language and confidence, on how tongue tied and insecure he was, on his
increasingly serious medical ailments, the arrhythmia and the depression.
The passages where he is scared to perform, scared to be the ‘Jussi
Björling’ he felt unworthy of being, may well be lucidly based
on truth. But there really is too much about his alcoholism, and too little
penetrating analysis. For a serious biography you need Farkas/Björling.
Jonathan Woolf
These two books approach Björling in widely divergent ways.
Support
us financially by purchasing this disc from: |
|
 |
 |