CHAN 3093 BOOK.qxd - Chandos

CHAN 3093 BOOK.qxd 11/4/07 3:30 pm Page 10
Although Dorabella in Così fan tutte is a
very different kind of character from
Cherubino, the voice range for the two is
much the same and, in the same way, it has
been cast over the years with both sopranos
and mezzos. In any case in Mozart’s times,
these stark differences between types hardly
existed. Once again, Montague’s voice seems
the ideal answer, poised between the two.
We hear her first in the mock-heroics of
‘Torture and agony’ (track
8
) in which
Mozart makes one of his impressionable
heroines rail against the fate that has
supposedly taken her loved one from her.
Indeed this outburst of seemingly sincere
passion is almost Gluckian in its force.
Next we catch Dorabella, with her sister
Fiordiligi, singing the matchless trio of farewell
in the company of cynical old Don Alfonso,
‘Blow gently, you breezes’ (track
7
). As is
Mozart’s way, especially in this work, he makes
a moment of repose and thought timelessly
beautiful, even though a character, such as
Alfonso here, may be having very different
thoughts.
In Act II, Fiordiligi, the more steadfast of
the sisters, and Dorabella – having decided to
have a fling with their ‘new’ men – sing a
delightful duet in which each makes her
choice, ‘I will take the handsome, dark one’
(track
9
). Its intertwining of the two voices is
truly sisterly in character.
In the duet, ‘My heart here I give you’
(track
12
), as in the trio above, Dorabella’s
fresh love is genuinely expressed, yet we also
feel that Guglielmo, in spite of himself, is
falling in love with the ‘wrong’ woman, the
music is so seductively beguiling. That is
Mozart’s genius. Alan Opie, who has sung
both Guglielmo and Alfonso for English
National Opera, easily encompasses both roles
in these excerpts and Orla Boylan has just the
right voice for Fiordiligi.
In his final opera, The Clemency of Titus,
Mozart again wrote, as I have already inferred,
a role for a castrato, the part of Sextus, where
the vulnerable young man is entirely in thrall
to Vitellia. Peaked that Emperor Titus has not
chosen her as his Empress, she persuades
Sextus to go and murder his best friend, Titus.
All Sextus’s contrary feelings are expounded in
the extended, two-part aria, ‘Send me, but, my
beloved, never reject me in anger’ (track
2
).
In it Mozart gives us the character of the
upright, perplexed young man. Again this is
a role that can be distributed to either a
soprano or mezzo, its tessitura lying between
the two.
In addition to his operas, Mozart wrote
extensively for the solo voice in arias with
orchestra of which we have two excellent
examples here. They are particularly
appropriate to Montague as both were written
for Louise Villeneuve, the first Dorabella, for
insertion in Vicente Martin’s Il burbero di buon
cuore, an opera to a text by Da Ponte, based
on a Goldoni play. They stand side by side in
the Köchel catalogue as K. 582 and 583. The
latter and much more substantial is ‘Banished,
rejected’ (track
10
), written in Mozart’s most
high-flown, deeply felt manner. The other,
‘Who knows what feeling’ (track
11
), is a
slight but charming piece.
A hundred years or so later we find
ourselves in an entirely different world, that of
native Russian opera as represented by
Borodin’s Prince Igor. In the opening scene of
Act II, a group of Polovtsian maidens sings a
langourous song, ‘Tender flower, starved of
water’ (track
14
), before their mistress,
Konchakovna, daughter of Khan Konchak, the
benevolent ruler who has taken Igor prisoner.
The music, with its quasi-Oriental colour and
feeling, provides a moment of repose in a tense
drama. Borodin was skilled in marrying what
he had learnt from Western music with more
local influences. Faust, a work from the same
era, is much more urbane and Western in its
musical character, as is shown in Siébel’s
charming song ‘When happy days’ (track
16
).
Faust’s rival for Marguerite’s hand, he is
doomed to failure.
Meanwhile in Vienna much had changed in
terms of ethos and musical character since
Mozart’s time. Operetta was now all the rage.
In his highly successful 1874 operetta, Die
Fledermaus (The Bat), Johann Strauss was
not-so-gently mocking the bourgeois society of
the day in the Austrian capital. At the heart of
the piece is the party given at the palace of
Prince Orlofsky, a blasé youth who is bored
with life and seeking to be amused. In his
couplets near the start of Act II he declares his
philosophy -- he wants everyone to drink with
him and entertain him (‘Chacun à son goût’,
track
15
). Strauss caught his character
perfectly in a song that marries nonchalance
and cynicism with a degree of gaucherie.
Written for a mezzo it isn’t easy to sing. Much
of it lies in a low register, but it also has
repeated A flats. The kind of voice possessed
by Montague is ideal for overcoming its
difficulties.
Richard Heuberger proved one of Strauss’s
more successful followers with his Opera Ball
first given in Vienna in 1898. Far and away
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