Opera Rhapsodist James McCourt Talks With the Legendary Victoria de Los Angeles, Who Is Celebrating Her 50th Year Onstage : Duet With a Diva

Victoria de los Angeles has changed. The dark diva with the gloriously soulful eyes, whose image illuminated the closing ceremony of the 1992 Olympics, has just turned 71. The city of Barcelona turned out in force to celebrate De los Angeles’ 50th year on stage, one of the longest careers in the history of opera. In 1944, she made her professional debut at the Palau de la Musica, where, last May, the crowds covered her with carnations and swathed the stage in bouquets when she finished her recital. She is one of the most beloved of opera stars, the last surviving working diva of the golden age of the first LPs, the fabulous ‘50s, when technology was content to record the truth of voices without resort to electronic enhancement.

Filling a schedule of engagements that would break singers half her age, De los Angeles refuses to slow down. After giving master classes at a university in Santander, Spain, this summer, she took off for a series of recitals in Japan. But there have been few histrionics in this ornate career: no sensationally rich husbands, no wild temper tantrums (well, there was just that one fracas during a recording session of “Carmen”). She is not that kind of diva, hers is not that kind of life. She has always been discreet, the darling of European music. Perhaps having now achieved legendary status, she feels comfortable scoring the world of opera and some of the creatures that inhabit it.

For example:

The morning Barcelona’s great opera house, the Liceo, was gutted by fire, Spanish soprano Montserrat Caballe--nowadays as famous for blatant media gestures as she once was for engorged tone, hyper-attenuated phrasing, relentless pianissimi and eccentric professional demeanor--arrived with a television crew, stood in the smoking rubble and sang “The Song of the Birds,” the most popular of all Catalan folk songs and the very one with which Victoria de los Angeles had closed the 1992 Olympics. Reached for comment, De los Angeles snipped to the Times of London, “ ‘The Song of the Birds.’ Well, there lies the poor dead thing, and already the vultures are beginning to circle overhead.” Since then, Victoria repeatedly, as if she were learning a new song, expresses the hope that the new Liceo should be a theater “without cabals.”

And as for Sir Rudolf Bing, the former director of New York’s Metropolitan Opera House, more on him later.

SANTANDER, A DOUBLE CRESCENT BAY RINGED WITH MOUNTAINS IN CANTABRIA, in northern Spain, is a sort of Laguna Beach with tamarind trees instead of palms, made popular as a royal summer resort for Victoria Eugenia, a granddaughter of England’s queen, and featuring a palace called the Magdalena--a kind of San Simeon crossed with Balmoral--out on a promontory. There, in the main auditorium in what were once the palace stables, the De los Angeles master classes ran for a week, from 4 in the afternoon till 10 in the evening. It was for me a week of strange, masochistic nostalgia, sitting in an auditorium listening to work being done on the students’ chosen roles--the same roles Victoria had defined for a generation in the ‘50s: Mimi in Puccini’s “La Boheme,” the title role in Massenet’s “Manon,” Marguerite in Gounod’s “Faust” and the Countess in Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro.” Hearing in her demonstrations the identical tonality and coloration I’d experienced as a high school sophomore (to mistake the De los Angeles voice for another has never been possible: you either know exactly who that is or you have no idea) was more than a bit disconcerting. So it was good to sit up again, late into the evening, talking about opera, and much else, over supper.

“This must be strange for you as an American,” one of the university functionaries politely said to me, “eating at this hour?”

“Not really--not for a New Yorker who grew up going to the theater, the opera and Carnegie Hall and then to restaurants afterward. Then too, Victoria and I have always had what I call this pastrami relationship.”

“What kind of relationship?”

“A pastrami relationship--based on late-night performance post-mortems and delicatessen. We’d go out and get sandwiches and bring them back to Victoria’s hotel suite and--pastrami, you see, is--”

“Pastrami is wonderful,” Victoria declared.

“Who was it, Victoria,” I asked, “who first introduced you to pastrami? It wasn’t any of us; it must have been (impresario Sol) Hurok.”

“But what is this pastrami?” the functionary persisted. “Where does the name come from?”

“Nobody knows where the name comes from, but Jewish people--and by extension musical and theatrical New Yorkers--get very nostalgic around it. I had a friend who always joked, ‘Goldie, was that before or after Papa invented pastrami?’ ”

“That’s very good,” Victoria said, laughing. “That reminds me of my father. If you were talking about him, you might say something like that, and people would not question you. This makes me very nostalgic: makes me think of the world before so many changes. What was it we used to say at the end of the Met season, when we were all saying goodby?”

“See ya later, alligator.”

“Yes, and then, ‘After a while, crocodile!’ Good thing we don’t say that anymore.”

“You should worry. It’s us who are turning into old reptiles. Like the kids said tonight when you were working on the Faust, it looks like you made your own pact with the devil.”

(At Victoria’s Alice Tully Hall performance in March, I’d heard two veteran concert-goers-- echt yentas--stage-whispering behind me, between encores.

“I’m very gratified you gave into your impulse and got these tickets.”

“Well, I hadn’t heard her in over 20 years--and it is amazing.”

“The voice!”

“Of course, there is the voice--but I was down in front at the break with the photographer taking pictures, and I can assure you there is not a line on that face!”

“Well, it is very gratifying, longevity; it is.”)

VICTORIA DE LOS ANGELES LoPEZ Y GARCiA (BORN IN BARCELONA ON NOV. 1, 1923, TO victoria Garcia and Bernardo Lopez, the caretaker of the University of Barcelona) was given her mother’s name coupled with that of her maternal uncle, Angel Garcia.

“There was a big discussion about this name. There are for girls the names Victoria and Angeles, but they had never been put together to form Victoria de los Angeles, which the priest let my father know. Well, this is the first one, he said. My father was a man used to getting what he wanted. He provided for us very well--we lived in the tower of the chemistry faculty of the university--particularly when times became so hard, and he was very greatly respected by students of all the faculties, who would come back to see him more than their professors.”

“He was what they call here a factotum.”

“Exactly. And do you know who he took as model? Tom Mix. ‘Ah, los Americanos !’ he would cry out in the cinema. I couldn’t wait to come (to America). Our kitchen in the tower was the center of every kind of political and cultural discussion until the (Spanish) civil war broke out. Then we went down into the underground--the subway stations--and kept talking, and I was by then singing, to cheer people up a little--and myself also--while the bombs fell on the city. I sang in Red Cross concerts and during the raids, underground. I do not like to go into the subway today.”

“But you did take it to the Met, from 57th Street--when you were late for rehearsal.”

“I am very sleepy in the morning still.”

“When did you start to sing?”

“I always sang--imitating my mother, who had a lot of success in amateur zarzuela (a peculiarly Spanish form of operetta). And I would strum my Uncle Angel’s guitar and go va-va-va-va. But also, in the progressive Mila y Fontanals school--a kind of Montessori school--I was skipping pottery making and recess and all that, to look at the music for ‘ Ah, vous dirai-je maman ‘ (to the tune of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”). I knew the melody in advance, of course, and matching it with these notes, I made a third new thing--voila--which fascinated me so much, because it was between the abstract and the real, and I decided to make every song I liked my own in this way . . . and very soon the notes became the key to the songs I did not already know the melodies of. I was very serious.”

“And the opera?”

“Opera was not part of the entertainment of working-class people the way it is in Italy. My introduction to it was very strange and occurred in that time you have referred to, when our world was turned upside down. I will tell you two stories. This was a terrible time. I remember so well that I had a big crush on a boy called Ferrer, a student who lived with his family just on the other side of the university wall. He was a few years older--and this was, you understand, completely one-sided. Well, he went out in the street one day and was shot, and they carried him into my mother’s kitchen, and I can still see him there as he died. I know this is the kind of thing that happens in this city every day, but back then it did not happen.”

“That can sound suspiciously like the Myth of the Golden Age.”

“Yes, but those things did not--and now they do. It is as if the more politics meant to find solutions, the more--”

“Like the Catalan proverb of the cat and the mice.”

“Ah, you like that? The more cats we get, still the more mice we have.”

“And the longer you’re going to have to keep singing for peace. And the second story?”

“Yes. It was after the boy died. One day my brother Pepe and I came upon a pile left over from the looting by the Reds--the things they didn’t want from the rich people’s houses--and in there were recordings by Caruso and Tetrazzini. I took the Tetrazzini records, and my father went out and found a machine, because until then we made our own music at home, with Uncle Angel’s guitar, and the first opera sounds I heard were Tetrazzini singing ‘Je Suis Titania’ (from Ambroise Thomas’ “Mignon”). I started to listen--I was I think about 13--and right away I began to love the Italian vowels.”

The rest of the story--exclusive of the downside--can be read in outline on any program of a Victoria de los Angeles recital or on the back on any of her records. The conservatory where she charged through a six-year course in exactly half that time, winning every prize. The debut at age 20 at the Liceo as the Countess in Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro.” Her jury-unanimous first prize at the 1947 Geneva Competition, her “discovery” on a BBC broadcast soon after, singing Salud in Falla’s “La Vida Breve,” and what the British like to refer to as her “hat trick”--three debuts within the space of a little over a year at La Scala (singing the Milan premiere of Richard Strauss’ “Ariadne auf Naxos”), Covent Garden (Mimi in “La Boheme,” the role she came to virtually own in the ‘50s and which she recorded with Jussi Bjorling in what is still the best-selling opera recording of all time) and, on March 17, 1951, at New York’s Metropolitan (as Marguerite in “Faust”), on which occasion preeminent music critic, the often acerbic Virgil Thomson, wrote the essential De los Angeles evaluation, one that has stood for 43 years:

“She projected the text as clearly as she did the musical line, and she acted the role with a delicate intensity all unusual to that stage. . . . Her vocalism, beautifully schooled, and in every way secure, was marked by a similar concentration on excellence and an abstention from broad effects. . . . She does not sing off pitch, or tremble, or make ugly sounds, or lack precision in scale passages. . . . I think she has the makings of a great star--voice, schooling, musicianship, sincerity and a stage personality that is strong and warm.”

VICTORIA DE LOS ANGELES SANG AT THE METROPOLITAN OPERA FOR 10 SEASONS until 1961, when circumstances at the Met, along with happy and unhappy events at home (the birth of two children, Juan Enrique in 1963 and Alejandro--born with Down’s syndrome--in 1968) began to restrict her appearances to recitals, in which metier she had already succeeded to a degree far surpassing all but a small handful of opera singers in this century.

“Did you actually tire of Italian opera or did you hear danger signals early?”

“Both. I was always determined to sing opera musically, with the same technique as in recital, only with more sound, of course. And to learn about theatricality myself--not hard to do, after all, in a city like Barcelona. You only have to look around. And remember, I began with Mozart, with the Countess, and keeping my eye, for when I got older, on Donna Anna. Of course, I was naive at first. What did I know about betrayal and possessiveness and cruelty at 20? That is to say, on a personal level--from people who are supposed to be on your side, so to speak. About all that in politics, I knew already very well from the civil war. So I expressed the music, according to the rules--because the rules are very exact, and it’s no use imagining you can learn them and then say, ‘Well, I put them away and do as I like.’ I began to learn from the rules, and of course, within 15 years or so, I found out that what Mozart and Da Ponte were writing of, treachery, was absolutely true.”

“The hard way,” I said. The capricious general manager of the Met, Sir Rudolf Bing, at first her champion, became entirely neglectful toward her, exploiting her drawing power by casting her in a series of popular roles that increased the Met’s box office but that no longer suited her voice.

“Claro --the only way. Also the conflict. The Countess is all-forgiving, and Donna Anna is not so. Although Donna Anna is like that woman in that Bette Davis picture I love--what is that?”

“I think you mean ‘The Letter.’ ‘With all my heart I still love the man I killed.’ ”

“That’s it. Ah, she was something, Bette Davis! The best ever. Everybody in every language understands her. But in the meantime, besides Mozart and the French composers, I had sung a lot of verismo and a lot of Verdi, truly loving both. But to sing those roles, you must always spill a little Chianti, you know.”

I said I thought I did.

“All right,” she said. “So, in Italian opera, you have the glass of Chianti.” She puts down the pastrami sandwich and takes up the glass, which is half full of Coca-Cola. “Then you must do this--swirl it around, faster and faster, until a little of the Chianti spills over. This is Italian opera. How much you are willing--or able--to spill is what marks you as the temperament you are.”

“This is a little like the famous injunction, ‘Always sing on your vocal interest, never on your vocal capital’?”

“It is a little different, because that injunction is particularly significant for singing Wagner. But it is similar to the Chianti. Anyway, I suppose, not actually being Italian, and preferring in many instances French music--and particularly in order to keep singing Faure and Duparc as well as Schubert and Schumann--I was led away from opera--and anyway, I was 40. Even so, I took my time. I was 56 when I last sang an operatic role.” (Melisande in “Pelleas and Melisande,” in Madrid, 1980.)

“By the time I was around 40, I’d been married for 15 years (to her manager, Enrique Magrina), I was having the children and all that, and it was the songs, mostly settings of quite superior poetry, that had the most to teach me. After we found out about Alejandro, then I realized that never again was I going to be anything else but a fighter. Because, you know, this is not a tragedy, having one of these children. It is absolutely incorrect to me, this term for that. These children give you the opportunity to discover what is essential in human life. That is not what you sing about, for the most part, in opera--what is essential, what is the necessity.”

“If I had to sum up the predicament--and every career worth talking about is a predicament--I would say that the voice mirrors your nature exactly,” I said. “You are reclusive, but you are very far from being a recluse. But getting back to the curtailment of the voice, and the drawing away from opera, it wasn’t just the birth of Alejandro.”

“No, it wasn’t,” she replied. “For many years I had the voice and the career--it was very pleasant, particularly in that Metropolitan company. Such stars--so many! Four, five, six different singers in a single major role in a season--and all of them first class. You can’t imagine!”

“But I was there, instead of doing my homework.”

“I remember. Well, it was, what do they say--too much. And then one morning, you wake up to find that instead of giving you everything because you are--what? Entertaining?”

“Life enhancing is the way I would put it--and for many among us, life sustaining.”

“Well, in any case, you wake up to find out they are trying to take it all away--personally, professionally, all at once. You either fight or you die. I’ve been fighting.”

“I know,” I said, recalling the Metropolitan Opera ordeals. “Remember the night, back in the ‘80s, I said I was going to have to start calling you Rocky? Thank God you laughed, broke out into those peals of laughter--very Marguerite, in ‘The Jewel Song’ (from “Faust). “

“Yes, and you were holding up the mirror. You have always made me laugh--you are New York to me in that.”

“But you are a temperament. I long ago defined stardom in my own mind, deciding it was always the product of a temperament in collision with a tradition. You are a temperament, if not a spitfire. Your relationship to music is more like the tango than the boxing ring.”

“Well, you must give in to the music most of the time. But you must not lie down and be passive. The young singer must be defended against the ingenuity of stage directors. I remember you telling me about the effect in ‘Un Bel Di’ (from ‘Madame Butterfly’)--”

“Turning a back projection into the atomic bomb.”

“Yes--that is very interesting, and you see, from the singer’s point of view, only a little disconcerting: It would effect the aria very well, because it is a static patch that. But, for instance, when you tell me they are sometimes portraying Mimi now as a --”

“Slut.”

“Yes, a slut. Well, that, if you are a lyric soprano, could be dangerous. Mimi may be deluded in the romantic way, but I think it is better to leave her alone, and let Musetta be a little . . . common , and also warm and generous. But you must remember, I first sang Mimi when I was myself 17, and I recorded it with Jussi Bjorling--and opposite a voice like that, the most beautiful tenor voice there ever was, you are only going to be an enraptured girl. In any case, they weren’t (portraying Mimi as a slut) in the ‘50s--and if they are doing it today, I say only ‘be careful.’ ”

“Could we now cut to the chase?”

“What is that thing--what does it mean, cut to--what?”

“The chase. The end of the picture. Have you kept many souvenirs?”

“My husband kept it all in his office--and when he died 10 years ago it all went into boxes. I never look at it. I have my prizes of course, in another room in the house--and a baton somebody made for me, with a different color ribbon for each of the roles I sang in the opera; it’s my favorite prize.”

“You don’t throw things away, then.”

“Once I did--and now I regret it. It was after my mother died. I threw away all the letters I wrote to her from my early career, from all over the world--my impressions of cities, of countries, of people. I wish I had not done that.”

“I think you did the right thing. You had to alight after your mother’s death and all the other troubles, and destroying the letters probably helped you. Have you seen the old man in your dream again? The one I said was King Arkel, from ‘Pelleas’?”

“Ah, yes. And this time I did not ask him where do I go. Or what is going to happen.” She seems to gaze out over the Atlantic.

“But didn’t he tell you that he does not answer questions?”

“Yes, but I am very persistent--like my father; I do not jump up on the table, true, but I am very persistent, and I asked him, ‘Please, can you tell me, what is the nature of affection?’ ”