World of Opera Star Lingered After Biography

All she set out to do was write a book. She couldn’t foresee back then that the plot would tangle her up, too.

But it happened that way. In the seven years after her book came out, Eagle Rock writer Carol Russell Law has formed a musical society to honor her heroine and has become absorbed in a kind of historical fantasy, bringing back to life the work and milieu of a woman whose evanescent flame had faded a century ago.

When this began, Law already had a few children’s books to her credit, some short stories and vast quantities of advertising copy. She was just a little intimidated by the knots of plotting required for the novel she wanted to write next. So she turned to the historical romance for help.

If someone’s life had been dramatic enough, romantic enough, she mused, the plot would take care of itself; the peaks and valleys would be there.

To find the real person who would become her literary heroine, Law turned to music, the other thing as important to her as writing. She had studied voice. She knew of the passions that could stir with musical genius. And she remembered in particular, the genius and passion of one singer she had admired since high school, Maria Malibran.

In 1825, at the age of 17, Malibran became an operatic superstar in London and New York. Her life featured several varieties of passionate love including illicit, a colorful family complete with tyrannical father and heady success in her profession.

Rossini Enraptured

Years after her death, Rossini recalled: “Ah, that marvelous creature! She surpassed all her imitators by her truly disconcerting musical genius, and all the women I have ever known by the superiority of her knowledge and her flashing temperament.”

Ah, Law reflected in turn: a remarkably suitable subject for a book, someone obscure enough to be available, rich enough to be worthwhile.

“Well, of course I was wrong,” the author said with a wry smile. Not so much about her subject’s suitability, as in her notion that she was getting a story line for free.

“I still had to plot,” she said, speaking carefully, with the air of someone who has overcome shyness by dint of discipline.

And then she found an unexpected burden.

“The character grew on me a lot. . . . I wanted to know the music she was singing at the time.”

Gradually, Law collected it, as well as the music performed or written by Malibran’s relatives and friends or those associated with them--much of it largely overlooked for more than a century.

The novel “Overture to Love” was published in 1981.

“It didn’t do very well,” Law said, then added, as if in loyalty to her heroine, “Marilyn Horne wrote me and she said she liked it.”

But by then, its success or failure seemed less important.

Creative people are used to the feeling that their creations start creating them; the author recounts how she felt increasingly impelled to bring the music to a larger audience. “I thought, ‘I just don’t want to sit home and read it.”

Other people had to hear the music, she thought.

The next year, she started the Malibran Society, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the performance of 19th Century music.

She established a board of directors--”I called up my friends”--wrote the bylaws, and filed the official papers. Conductor and instrumentalist Walter Unterberg became the young society’s music director, and pianist John Danke its resident accompanist.

The Malibran Society’s first concert was in 1983. Since then, it has performed three or four concerts each year. Its next will be April 30 at the Philosophical Research Society, 3910 Los Feliz Ave., at 3 p.m.

At $8 a ticket, it’s an opportunity to hear a little Mozart and Rossini, and some arias from a few composers who aren’t so commonly known today. There’s Crescentini, for example, Benedict and Meyerbeer.

And there’s Michael Balfe, who wrote the opera “Maid of Artois” for Malibran in 1836; it was the Drury Lane theater’s biggest moneymaker.

Mezzo-soprano Elin Carlson will sing one of its arias Saturday. “It’s killer stuff, but it’s fun,” she says.

It was also the last role played by a prima donna whose music and life were both as brief as they were extravagant.

Malibran, a mezzo-soprano, developed her soprano register and achieved a range of three octaves, Law says. “She was famous for elaborate ornamentation, leaps of two octaves, and long trills on high C.”

Malibran also had lustrous black eyes and raven hair framing a lovely pale face that was a perfect oval, presumably designed to be cupped in the hands of a handsome man. Or two.

Her domineering father, Manuel Garcia, was a famous tenor--Rossini wrote the role of Count Almaviva in “Barber of Seville” with him in mind. Garcia also wrote numerous operas himself and, as an impresario, operatically conquered the New World by giving 79 performances at the Park and Bowery theaters in New York between Nov. 29, 1825, and Sept. 30, 1826.

And Malibran, who starred in many of these, made her own conquests.

She married New York merchant Eugene Malibran at 17, and at 19 left him and sailed for Paris toward the young prima donna’s most romantic and controversial number. There, she had a love affair with Charles de Beriot, considered the era’s leading violinist before he was over shadowed by Nicolo Paganini.

For years, an annulment of her marriage with Malibran was out of reach. Lafayette, the Revolutionary War general, was there--and tried to help. But the bill of divorce he sponsored for the young couple in the French Chamber of Deputies failed to pass. Malibran was not free to marry her Charles until 1836, when their baby was 3. And by this time, of course, the scandal attached to her name was as great as the acclaim.

‘Genius to Die Young’

A few months later, after a fall from a horse, “Maria Malibran had the genius to die young,” wrote novelist Theophile Gautier, “in the flower of her talent and of her beauty, and before one pearl had fallen from her diadem.” She was 28.

The singer’s short life provided more than enough events for a book. In fact, Law says, “At about Page 120 I said, ‘Oh-oh, I’ve got two books here.”’ She decided to end “Overture to Love” with Malibran’s bursting upon Paris at 19 and her new attachment to de Beriot. She plans to write a sequel someday.

Malibran’s work and that of her relatives and associates yielded ample material for a musical society based on it.

Donizetti composed “Maria Stuarda” for Malibran; Vincenzo Bellini revised “I Puritani” for her, although she never sang the role. Gounod, before he became famous, wrote the opera “Sapho” for her sister, opera singer Pauline Viardot.

Gounod’s Opera Obscure

“‘Sapho’ is, sadly, not well-known,” laments mezzo-soprano Georgetta Psaros, contacted in Florida during a tour of the Roger Wagner Chorale.

Psaros has performed excerpts from the opera for the Malibran Society, and says: “The last aria that Sapho sings, if performed often enough, would be come a pop.”

Viardot, incidentally, during most of her marriage, followed in her sister’s footsteps, not only rivaling her fame and beauty but also raising her own share of eyebrows through her lifelong friendship with Ivan Turgenev.

She even wrote music. Her work provided the Malibran Society’s biggest box office success in September, 1985, when it pulled in $1,143 for two performances of excerpts from her chamber opera “Cendrillon” (Cinderella) at the Roxbury Center in Beverly Hills.

The Malibran Society dabbles in better-known music. Its concerts have included arias, duets and songs by such masters as Handel, Haydn, Mozart and Schumann.

But, Law says, she feels especially satisfied in presenting the neglected music that she tracked down in the stacks of libraries in Los Angeles and New York and through an extensive correspondence with the library of the British Museum.

The Malibran Society has given some of these compositions their first known performance in Southern California, Law says. Among them are ensembles and arias from “Il Crociato in Egitto” (The Crusader in Egypt) by Giacomo Meyerbeer, a duet by Saverio Mercadante, songs by Manuel Garcia and by Malibran herself.

Music of the bel canto style, characterized by brilliant vocal display and purity of tone, declined in the middle of the 19th Century as orchestras became larger and voices were correspondingly trained to be heavier and more dramatic, Law said.

Much of the music was forgotten in its own time, said Bruce Brown, professor of music history at USC.

“An audience demanded novelty,” Brown said. “If it was last season’s opera, it wouldn’t be heard again.”

The idea of “saving it for posterity was foreign,” he said. “Music really could be used up as a commodity.”

Even now, said Larry Livingston, dean of the USC School of Music: “It is very possible that somewhere on a shelf are important pieces of music that will be of some interest to some percentage of the population. . . . The discovery of such music in recent years--that’s one of the niftiest kinds of trends.”

Not that all of it passes judgment.

Manuel Garcia reportedly wrote 97 operas. And “a lot of his operas bombed,” says USC musicologist Janet Johnson.

‘Not Great’

Mezzo-soprano Elin Carlson, who appeared in the society’s “Cendrillon,” appraises it as “fine, not great--it seemed to be a copy of other versions. And Maria, her songs are OK, not greatly impressive classical works.”

“The plots of those days were ridiculous, bombastic,” says Diane Modlin, a young Burbank singer who has performed with the Malibran Society. “The stories don’t swing today.”

Those interviewed agree that the taxing nature of early 19th Century music contributed to its fall from favor until Maria Callas in the late ‘40s sparked a mini-revival carried on by other singers such as Joan Sutherland and Marilyn Horne.

The best of the genre rates a sustained “A” from many of the singers who have worked for the Malibran Society because the music is so melodic, they say.

“I would say Rossini’s music is like drinking champagne,” Psaros croons.

And even among pieces by lesser composers, there are “incredible passages, like old carpets, beautiful woven things,” says soprano Mimi O’Neill of Altadena.

For the singers, there are other rewards, though modest ones.

Law, who draws no salary, pays the singers. “But not much, about $50.” She sighed. “It gives young singers the opportunity to perform, though.”

Because the music tends to be obscure, and difficult, it makes the singers ask, “can I use it again?” Modlin says. “That’s the thing we have to question. . . . It’s very difficult music, because of the embellishments, the cadenzas. It takes a lot of time. A lot of people don’t want to put in the rehearsal time.”

Yet, along with the others, she’s attracted by the pleasure of meeting the challenge and of sometimes improvising one’s own embellishments, the way Maria did.

“If you can do it, it’s fun,” Carlson said cheerfully. “It’s fun to show off. A lot of the stuff, they’re vocal showpieces, with all their little diddles.”