By Conrad L. Osborne, High Fidelity Magazine, 1967 February
<aside> 🇮🇹 Clicca qui per la traduzione in italiano 🇮🇹
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Forty-five minutes before curtain time, when I arrived at the underground stage entrance of the new Metropolitan (certainly the only stage door in the world where singers can inhale concentrated carbon monoxide in preparation for their performances), I was informed by one of the MPs who man the post that the Corellis were already in the house. Armed with the necessary I.D. documents, I trudged down the long, locker-lined corridor that leads to the dressing room area, where another partisan indicated Signor Corelli's dressing room.
It was No. 8, the same one he had occupied the evening a few weeks before when I had first met him. That time, he had been perfectly polite but obviously preoccupied — it was the dress rehearsal of the new Gioconda production, and what with the double difficulties of new production and new opera house, everyone concerned had plenty to worry about. Each performer has his own way of responding to such pressure, from catatonic immobility to manic effusiveness, and Corelli's seems to be simple disengagement; he is with you in manner, but in substance he is off in the distance.
On this evening, he was more open and relaxed. Though the occasion was a performance instead of a mere rehearsal, the opera was Turandot, and all the elements of the production were familiar and tested. Besides, he and I had spent some time with each other since that Gioconda rehearsal, so that I was no longer a critico incognito. His wife, Loretta, spotted me first, and called me to her husband's attention. "Maestro!" he said, smiling and extending his hand. Then: "Mi dispiace…," the trouble being that he was only half-dressed. He went on to apologize for having secured me only a standing-room pass rather than a ticket — a circumstance which secretly pleased me, since my first fifteen years of operagoing had been almost exclusively from Family Circle standing room, and there's nothing like a mixture of discomfort and nostalgia for improving the quality of a performance.
There was a brief bustle of activity, with several people in and out. One of them informed Corelli that the Liù would be Anna Moffo, a last-minute replacement for Mirella Freni. "Ah, è Moffo?" Corelli asked. He was pleased that the production's original cast of principals (the others: Nilsson and Giaiotti) would be together for another performance. A voice came over the intercom: "Mezz'ora, ladies and gentlemen. Exactly one half hour."
Then Corelli returned to the matter of readying himself for the performance. He drank down an Alka-Seltzer ("acidity," he explained) and worked on his make-up — he does his own, which in the case of Calaf is not complicated: some base and powder, a bit of liner, alteration of the eyebrows, and extension of the sideburns, with pencil. Between touches on the make-up, he began his warm-up vocalise — first, a kind of reinforced hum (some Italian teachers call it "voce chiusa," "shut voice"), which he ultimately carried to the E flat above high C. He alternated short sallies at this with more touches on the make-up and many clearings of the throat; then bursts of "bra- bre- bri- bro -bru," on single tones in the middle part of the voice; then short descending figures on "a" and "o," which he carried into the upper-middle area at full voice. After this, he asked to be excused for ten minutes to complete his preparations, and I went out into the corridor to watch the last-minute traffic heading towards the stage: mandarins and peasants, and Moffo, crossing her eyes and faking a fainting spell. She had not sung Liù for three years. From the dressing room, longer arpeggios now, turning into the top tones, and finally several of Calaf's first lines, almost unique in their immediate demands on the top — "Ah, padre mio, ti ritrovo!- trovo!- trovo!," each "trovo!" a bit closer to the aimed-at-position. At length he emerged, fully costumed and as ready as a man ever is for this sort of thing. "Franco is ready now," said Signora Corelli, "and Mr. Osborne, you must hurry —they are ready to begin." I headed for the front of the house.
At the first intermission, I returned to the dressing room, offering the opinion that the performance was going well. Corelli agreed that all was in place — so far. "But you know, this opera," said Signora Corelli, "the first act is not so easy, then the second is harder, and the third!"
It was a quiet intermission, Corelli relaxing and doing as little talking as possible. Mariano Caruso, the veteran character tenor who was singing the role of the Emperor, dropped in to talk about nothing in particular. He and Corelli, jaws agape, compared throats in the mirror, Caruso assuring Corelli that it was supposed to look that way. Then, a brief discussion on the merit and perils of cortisone, which Caruso asserted had made him sing "come un cannone" one year in Chicago. Then, "Ciào, Franco." Someone else came in and sat for a while on the couch, discoursing with Corelli on one of his favorite subjects, the danger of singing dissimilar roles too closely in succession. Even the roles which Corelli was then alternating at the Met (Calaf and Enzo), could be nemici without proper rest and readjustment, since Calaf demands a great deal of declamatory singing, while Enzo calls for a more lyrical approach. "You can sing Calaf soon after Enzo, but not Enzo soon after Calaf," says Corelli. A rapid volata came from the direction of Moffo's dressing room, and Corelli jumped up to check the pitch on the piano. The top C.
When we were alone in the dressing room for a few minutes, Corelli seated himself at the piano and began to play, whistling along with the melody. "Tu?" he asked. "You play?" I shook my head. "L'ho studiato, quando ero fanciullo, ma... ," the "ma" summing up my present proficiency. He nodded and went on playing.
<aside> 🎧 As the context reveals, we know that this interview was conducted during the performance on October 15, 1966. The good news is that there is a recording of this wonderful night (most likely recorded by Loretta), which you can listen to here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gP5P5NJIoXc
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"È Chopin," he offered. I looked at him incredulously. The piece sounded to me suspiciously like an Italian popular song with a few weird progressions.
"Chopin? È vero?"
"Sì, è un'etiuda inedita," he said. "No one knows it." He played on, leaving me to ponder whether the thing might be 1) an Italian popular song, 2) an unpublished Chopin étude, or 3) an unpublished Chopin étude by Franco Corelli, which he offers for the consideration of visiting music critics —a possibility that I have come to regard as not inconsistent with the Corelli temperament and intelligence.
After the performance, I stood in a corner of the dressing room, in company with the Corellis' poodle, Romeo, to watch the passing parade. The personal fan syndrome is something I have never quite understood; not that I was not an unabashed hero worshipper myself when still of an age to be unabashed about things (from about seventeen on, one is increasingly abashed), and not that I did not give myself unreservedly to Preacher Roe, Leonard Warren, Henry A. Wallace, Captain Marvel, and a handful of others at one point or another. But the preservation of distance is absolutely essential to that condition, and while I understand that many may want to visit dressing rooms to shatter the illusion, grow up, or (like Mann's Felix Krull) learn a lesson in life, the business of trying to cultivate familiarity and illusion at one and the same time is beyond me.
The folk who filed through the dressing room that night — between seventy and eighty of them, I should guess — included a few of those obsessed, convoluted types who can be observed being rude to anyone ahead of them at any of the season's musical events, one or two record company executives, and one or two acquaintances ("Canta come un orchestra sta sera, Franco!"). For the rest, they seemed to be mostly young Ivy League or prep-school species, many of them allowing their dates a shot at one of the few operatic celebrities a girl can look at with a bit of a gleam. A few unaccompanied males, but almost no unaccompanied girls, and nary a representative of the swish-blade clique, which is not surprising — Corelli is not limp-wrist-elegant or tasteful, nor is he a gentle father-figure. He stood smiling, autographing programs and record album librettos (and, in one case, a tobacco pouch) and saying "Thank you very much" to all the repetitions of "fantastic-oh" and "Well, what can I say that hasn't been said already?" Loretta siphoned off a few of the more talkative ones, rather deftly I thought, and without the slightest condescension or impatience. I think she enjoys it.
When they had gone, I asked the Corellis if the scene had been a typical one. "Many more than usual," Loretta replied. "But this was a wonderful night — everyone sang well, everyone was in an excited mood. È vero, Franco?"
He nodded, and said he believed he had sung only one other Calaf as good as this one. "It was February 7, two years ago, I think."
"You know," said Loretta, "Gigli has said very nicely what you feel about a performance like tonight. Once a year, he says, you are in uno stato di grazia — a state of grace. That was tonight."
Corelli does not consider the stato di grazia his natural condition. He concedes that his voice was always long in range, and that the volume was always there. That means that certain basic problems of registration and resonance — problems which most other singers work hard and long to solve — were already taken care of, at least in elementary form, by the coordination which we would normally think of as his "natural voice." It does not mean, though, that all the notes of that long range were at his command in a practicable singing way, or that the volume could be graded with any evenness, or that the sound was necessarily attractive and exciting. And these attributes, together with all the others that go into finished singing, Corelli regards as acquired.