Legendary Spanish mezzo soprano Teresa Berganza passed away on Friday at the age of 89. Just as Maria Callas is inseparable from the role of Tosca, Berganza will be Carmen forever. Beyond that, its impact on musical interpretation has been broader and deeper.
It happens, approximately once every half-century, that a repertoire finds a voice, in the sense of deep and unavoidable incarnation, but also of advocate.
This can be said of Maria Callas, whose character fascinated so much that she was able, during a few rare years of glory, to revalorize a repertoire of beautiful cantofor example Donizetti, Bellini or the Medea by Cherubini.
There was Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, a born storyteller-singer, who promoted the art of song German, and melody in general, like no other before or after him. We trusted Fischer-Dieskau to tell us what Schubert had to tell us. And it made us want to broaden the range of our knowledge.
carmen forever
It is obvious that when we think of Teresa Berganza, we think of the famous Carmen by Claudio Abbado, who revolutionized the look at the character at the 1977 Edinburgh Festival and in the subsequent DG recording.
In this role, which she sang on all the stages of the world between 1977 and 1992, Teresa Berganza’s “revolution” is to have revalued the gypsy values of the character to the detriment of the simple man-eater. Freedom more than libido. “Carmen is a woman, not a whore,” she proclaimed. And everything was changing. Because beyond his own performance, the prism through which Berganza saw the character and the strength of his incarnation marked the following generations of performers. There is a before and after Carmen by Berganza, just as there is a before and after Tosca by Callas or a before and after Schubert by Fischer-Dieskau.
But it does not stop there. Because there is also a before and after Berganza in Rossini. Because Berganza accompanied the Rossini miracle, a musicological and interpretative renaissance, which refocused on mezzo voices and a musical outfit what was the subject of superficial cooing until the 1960s. Here too, Claudio Abbado is the accomplice for two historic recordings in 1971: The Barber of Seville and The Cenerentola. We talk about revolution: it is the exact starting point. Here Teresa Berganza will have many zealous and important heiresses, for example, Jennifer Larmore.
The strength of embodiment
If Teresa Berganza arrived at Rossini in 1971 it was through Mozart. The singer born in 1933 in Madrid is a Mozartian in the 1960s and she will resist all proposals to preserve this vocal adequacy, especially in the role of Cherubino of Marriage of Figaro. She had first marked the spirits at the Festival d’Aix in the legendary Così fan tutte by Hans Rosbaud in 1957, two years after his debut in Madrid.
Berganza was real on stage because she was inhabited by her incarnations. Evidenced by an interview on French television in 1989, where she agreed that the transvestite role of Cherubino spilled over into her life to the point where she ended up asking questions about her own sexual orientations.
The last component is obviously the Spanish repertoire. Teresa Berganza was the voice of the works and melodies of Manuel de Falla, Granados or Turina, but also of South Americans like the Argentinian Carlos Guastavino. She also defended the zarzuela (Spanish operetta) and did not hesitate, with her outspokenness, to dot the “i”: “Some of our zarzuelas are worth a thousand times better than an opera by Donizetti” she said to the Figaro in 2013. Thank you.
In a daily interview El Mundo for her 85th birthday, Teresa Berganza declared “I sang a fairly limited repertoire, but it was my repertoire. I made it mine and wanted to be the best at it. »
Berganza was right. These roles, she marked them in the history of lyrical art. His career spanned more than four decades, where others stop after ten years. His advice? “Keep your head straight so you don’t lose it: even if you see a theater standing there applauding after a show, don’t fall into the trap of ‘See, how awesome I am'”.
This is called common sense and intelligence, which ultimately lead to humanism and freedom.