The Baritone as Democrat

Lawrence Tibbett: The Complete Victor Recordings & Selected Broadcasts; 10 CDs; Marston Records, $120

Of the opening of a new Italian opera house in 1833, the prominent New York City diarist Philip Hone reported: “The performance occupied four hours—much too long, according to my notion, to listen to a language which one does not understand. … Will this splendid and refined amusement be supported in New York? I am doubtful.” Hone also wrote, “To entertain an audience without reducing it to the necessity of thinking is doubtless a first-rate merit, and it is easier to produce music without sense than with it; but the real charm of opera is this—it is an exclusive and extravagant recreation, and above all, it is the fashion.”

In his seminal 1908 history Chapters of Opera, Henry Krehbiel, long the dean of New York music critics, commented on Hone: “The people of New York were not quite so sophisticated as they are to-day, and possibly were dowered with a larger degree of sincerity.” Krehbiel reckoned that opera in America would remain “experimental” until “the vernacular becomes the language of the performances and native talent provides both works and interpreters. The day is far distant, but it will come.”

It never did. Krehbiel himself witnessed the touring American Opera Company (1886–1887), enormous in ambition and deluded expectation. Before that, Yankee prima donnas such as Emma Abbott and Clara Louise Kellogg barnstormed the United States with opera in English. A notably visionary Rochester [New York] American Opera Company was begun in 1924 at the Eastman Theatre by the tenor Vladimir Rosing and the director Rouben Mamoulian; it had begun touring when the Depression hit. After World War II, the New York City Opera often performed in English. But—unlike the kindred English National Opera in London—it rejected doing the European canon in translation. Even the Metropolitan Opera sometimes gave Mozart, Mussorgsky, and Tchaikovsky in English before supertitles came along to finish off the prospect of presenting operas in the language best known to American singers and audiences.

Krehbiel’s prophecy was wrong, but his logic was not. He well appreciated that sophisticated French, German, Italian, and Russian audiences embraced opera translated into their native tongues. National schools of performance and repertoire emerged. Countries with more limited national operatic schools—Hungary, Bohemia, Finland—even more insisted on opera in the vernacular. As late as the 1960s, a major German house—Berlin’s Deutsche Oper—continued to present everything in German. In the United States, exceptionally, there evolved no native style of performance and composition, no native canon, no sustained tradition of opera as theater, sung in the language of the audience.

In a recent New York Times guest essay, Peter Gelb, the Metropolitan Opera’s embattled general manager, expresses the naïve hope that “new operas by living composers” can make opera “new again.” And he blames critics for being “negative or at times dismissive.” In fact, recent Met seasons have highlighted operas in English composed by Americans. But they’re all recent (the company still ignores Marc Blitzstein’s Regina [1948], arguably the grandest American opera after Porgy and Bess) and debatable in merit. Works like Terence Blanchard’s Champion and The Fire Shut Up in My Bones, however touted today, will not endure: their craftmanship is makeshift; there is no lineage at hand. And the standard repertoire is increasingly hard to cast with singers capable of projecting musical drama into a 3,850-seat house. In fact, the vast Met auditorium is today an albatross, an emblem of financial duress and artistic crisis.

Of all the many might-have-beens, among the most tantalizing involves Lawrence Tibbett, who seemed a candidate to take over the Met in 1950—the year an Austrian, Rudolf Bing, was appointed general manager. Though retired from the stage, Tibbett was still widely famous, arguably the foremost singing actor the United States ever produced. As a Verdi baritone, he had more than held his own with preeminent Italians. He had starred in Hollywood and on commercial radio, had sung many dozens of recitals annually in cities of every size. American-born, American-made, he embodied a pioneer archetype.

And, no less than Krehbiel, Tibbett was prophetic. He declared opera in America “in grave danger,” entrapped by a “star system” enforced by a social elite. He advocated American opera and opera in English. He urged the substitution of smaller auditoriums, shedding the glamour of opera houses in New York, Chicago, and San Franciso that far exceeded in scale European norms. He resisted touring abroad or Italianizing his name. He called for financial incentives for American opera composers. He wrote that “the whole structure of opera must by Americanized if Americans are to support it in the long run.” Ignoring a critical consensus marginalizing George Gershwin as a dilettante, he claimed that Rhapsody in Blue surpassed “in real emotional musical quality half of the arias of standard operatic composers whose works are the backbone of every Metropolitan season.” Singing Gershwin and Cole Porter, Sigmund Romberg and Jerome Kern, he embodied a democratic range of style and repertoire decades ahead of the game. A voluble public advocate, he thundered: “Be yourself! Stop posing! Appreciate the things that lie at your doorstep!”

Though Tibbett recorded prolifically for RCA in a variety of genres, nothing tops hearing him in live performance in the Met broadcasts of the ’30s, at least two of which (both readily accessible on YouTube) may be called “legendary”: Verdi’s La traviata, opposite Rosa Ponselle on January 5, 1935, and Verdi’s Otello, partnered by Giovanni Martinelli and Elisabeth Rethberg on February 12, 1938. The conductor on both occasions was Ettore Panizza, who as head of the company’s Italian wing triggered a powder-keg orchestral response the likes of which you cannot hear today. Cradling “Di Provenza”—the quintessential lyric baritone aria—in the Traviata performance, the seamless legato of Tibbett’s dark baritone and its freedom of phrase and of cadential punctuation are galvanizing. But so is the role in its entirety: as the elderly Germont, he inhabits a series of interactions plotting in harrowing detail a life journey toward self-knowledge and humility.

All that has long been cherished by a lingering generation of diehards. But Ward Marston’s 10-CD Tibbett tribute, released earlier this spring, offers something new: hours of Tibbett performances on commercial radio, from 1933 to 1943, accompanied by superb studio orchestras in the activating presence of live studio audiences. Here is Tibbett performing, in English, excerpts from Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov—roles he had hoped to sing in English on stage. The same Lawrence Tibbett was preferred to Bing Crosby among radio listeners queried by the Chicago Daily News in 1934. Eleven years later, Tibbett replaced Frank Sinatra for six months as host of Lucky Strike’s Your Hit Parade. If “On the Road to Mandalay” was one of his most requested selections, so were “Di Provenza” and the Prologue to Leoncavallo’s I Pagliacci.

In the Marston set, we can audition (for the first time in decades) Tibbett singing Cole Porter’s “In the Still of the Night” on the December 29, 1937 episode of the Chesterfield Hour. In this great reading, at the slowest possible tempo, the night’s romantic stasis hypnotically immobilizes the lover’s declaration:

As I gaze from my window

At the moon in its flight

My thoughts all stray to you …

In 1937, “In the Still of the Night” was new; Tibbett is pitching it. Singing “Begin the Beguine” two years later on Kellogg’s The Circle, he is the rare vocalist to equally convey the swagger and remorse of one of Porter’s longest, most searing love songs, in which a rapturous moment is painfully preserved: a fire become an ember. Singing Jerome Kern’s “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” on The Chesterfield Hour in 1938, Tibbett—again—is not a big voice on vacation. With his mastery of diction and inflection, he compels us to listen anew to Otto Harbach’s “When a lovely flame dies / Smoke gets in your eyes.” But for startling veracity, nothing tops Tibbett’s 1931 RCA rendition of “Wanting You,” from the Sigmund Romberg operetta The New Moon. In Nelson Eddy’s familiar cardboard rendition, opposite Jeannette Macdonald, this song inhabits a synthetic genre; its artifice is accepted and assumed. But when Tibbett, in melting mezza voce, confides, “Wanting you / Nothing else in this world will do,” Oscar Hammerstein’s couplet aches. Thomas Hampson, today’s most famous American baritone, has said of this recording: “Quite frankly, it may be some of the most perfect singing I’ve ever heard in my life. It’s just breathtaking. I know the song, I’ve sung it,

Bakersfield, California, where Lawrence Tibbett was born in 1896, was a booming oil and railroad town. His uncle ran a saloon. His father, a deputy sheriff, was killed in a shootout with a notorious outlaw when Larry was six. From an early age, he sang in churches and at funerals. He also worked as a farmer and a cowboy. In the Navy during World War I, he traveled to Russia, Japan, and China. In a Vladivostok storeroom, he witnessed scores of frozen corpses “piled up like cord wood waiting the time when the granite ice would permit the digging of graves.” In decades to come, he would insist on the musical pertinence of “a wide and varied life.”

Though he flirted with becoming an actor, Tibbett wound up studying voice in Los Angeles with Basil Ruysdael, who had sung secondary roles at the Metropolitan Opera, then in New York with Frank La Forge, whose studio produced vocalists of consequence. He signed a contract with the Met in 1923 and appeared unnoticed in minor roles until January 2, 1925, when he substituted for an indisposed baritone in Verdi’s Falstaff. He decided to risk his career on Ford’s second act jealousy aria—“I tore my heart out,” he would testify. “I went through the scene with terrific desperation.” He returned to his upstairs dressing room only to learn that the company’s general manager, Giulio Gatti-Casazza, wanted him at once. Descending the iron staircase, he heard a roar of applause and presumed it was for Antonio Scotti, the evening’s Falstaff. Gatti pointed to the stage—and Tibbett discovered himself the object of a 16-minute ovation. His subsequent ascent was brisk and sure. He deferred visiting Europe until 1932—a delayed wedding trip during which he did not perform—and insisted to journalists there that American singers were as good as Europeans. Returning home, he confided “feeling that I would retain my individuality more effectively here.” He cited American propensities for “greater directness and simplicity,” “honesty and sincerity of purpose.” Eventually, in 1937, he sang opera in London, Paris, Prague, and Vienna. But Europe was not for him.

The American memory is short. Think today of a widely popular male opera star, and Luciano Pavarotti comes to mind—or Pavarotti’s role model, Enrico Caruso. Tibbett was more widely known than Pavarotti. He also inhabited a different species. Tenors are exotic: Italian and chubby. As a baritone, Tibbett the onetime cowhand could seem an American Everyman. He was tall—6’2”—and muscularly athletic. He took his rowing machine on the road. Pavarotti dabbled with the movies; Tibbett became a romantic Hollywood lead. His initial film, The Rogue Song (1930, directed by Lionel Barrymore) was the first Hollywood musical in color. His biggest film success (he was nominated for an Oscar), it does not survive. New Moon (1930, opposite Grace Moore) adapted the Romberg operetta of the same name. In Cuban Love Song (1931), he was cast opposite “The “Mexican Spitfire,” Lupe Velez. Metropolitan (1935) was a flimsy framework for a series of elaborate production numbers sampling The Barber of Seville, Carmen, and I Pagliacci. Tibbett took the discipline of acting seriously; on the opera stage, he famously inhabited the raging Iago, the desperate Rigoletto, the regal Simon Boccanegra. He credited Hollywood with honing his gift. He also drew inspiration from the supreme singing actor of his time: Fyodor Chaliapin, whose keenest admirers included Konstantin Stanislavski, and with whom Tibbett shared the Met stage in Faust and Boris Godunov. (Espousing opera in English, Tibbett early on reported that, while singing, Chaliapin once instructed his valet in the wings to “go home and get a change of underwear”—a flourish of Russian bravado undetected by the audience.)

Tibbett was hardly immune to glamour. His fees were steep. In addition to a Connecticut farmstead, he owned homes in Beverly Hills and New York’s Upper East Side. But he was equally a driven worker. In addition to his operatic, film, and radio work, he averaged 12 concerts per month. He would log 25,000 miles a year. His concert repertoire exceeded 500 songs and arias. A Tibbett recital could last three hours or more, including up to 10 encores. He relished the post-concert dinners that other singers shunned. He sang for Presidents Coolidge, Hoover, Roosevelt, and Truman. His work ethic reinforced his famously self-made success.

Tibbett insisted that he sounded American. And in fact, the warm timbre of the Tibbett baritone was not succulently Mediterranean. In a 223-page booklet enclosed in the Marston Tibbett box, Conrad L. Osborne, America’s preeminent authority on opera in performance, writes:

There’s not much doubt about the erotic appeal of the Tibbett tone, virile and commanding, yet capable of turning tender or romantically nostalgic in an instant. [Its] “call” also has a “Lonesome Cowboy” element, a sound we might imagine hearing from a distance on the Western plains, rock-steady and manly, but with a plaintive tint. I can’t think of a European voice that has quite that sound.

Though Tibbett sang eloquently in Italian, German, and French, he spoke no foreign languages. Outside the exotic precincts of opera, he made a point of singing lieder in English. His grand, slow-motion rendition of Brahms’ “Feldeinsamkeit” (as “In Summer Fields”), on a 1938 Ford Sunday Hour broadcast, features an orchestral accompaniment (versus Brahms’s piano) played by the Detroit Symphony under Eugene Ormandy. We can envision the “sunlit heaven” that “wondrously unfolds” us. But Brahms’s intended nature ecstasy is intimate, innig—and the Tibbett temperament was outward, empathetic, democratic. When in the 1931 film The Prodigal he delivers Vincent Youmans’s “Without a Song,” and tells us that otherwise there “ain’t no love at all,” we believe him. The patriotic splendor of Tibbett’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic” (a 1939 Victor recording) transcends cliché.

What finally stamps this singer’s versatility— his range of genre and expression, his intimacy with the American experience—is a feat Osborne calls “chameleon-like”: a bewildering mastery of dialect. He seizes the Cockney swagger of Oley Speaks’s setting of Rudyard Kipling’s “On the Road to Mandalay,” and the thick Scots brogue of Carl Loewe’s gory ballad “Edward” (as rendered in English). But Tibbett’s crowning specialty, in this department, was “singing Black.” He even titled his midlife memoir The Glory Road – referencing a flamboyant, much-requested five-minute Clement Wood-Jacques Wolfe monodrama beginning:

I lay on mah bed untell one erclock

An’ de Lawd come callin’ all his faithful flock.

An’ He call “Whoo-ee!” an’ He call “Whoo-ee!”

An’ I knowed dat de Sabior wuz ercallin’ me.

And ending:

O come, ma breddren, won’t yuh drap yuh load,

An’ ride ter Hebben up de Glory Road,

Glory Road, Glory Road, Glory Road!

In the film Metropolitan (excerpted on YouTube), you can see and hear what Tibbett’s performance looked and sounded like: a tour de force of gesture and voice. He is quite simply at home in this heavenward yarn, with its yelling devil and caroling angels. His pertinent enthusiasms included Duke Ellington’s “Mood Indigo” and the tap dancing of Bill Robinson (“whose instinctive sense of rhythm,” Tibbett wrote, “is not surpassed even by that of Toscanini”). He once testified that he was never “so shaken emotionally” as when he heard 1,500 African-American youngsters sing spirituals in a Birmingham high school auditorium. The social critic and linguist John McWhorter, who happens to be Black, has testified: “He sounds authentic to me. If we told modern skeptical Black critics to listen to one of those Tibbett cuts, and we told them it was a Black person, I doubt if one out of one hundred would be able to smoke out that they were actually listening to a white man. He was that good.”

But of course, any performance of “The Glory Road” would be unthinkable today. Equally unthinkable would be the performance many considered Tibbett’s peak achievement at the Met: playing Brutus Jones in Louis Gruenberg’s The Emperor Jones, an operatic adaptation of the Eugene O’Neill play about a Pullman porter become a brutal West Indies dictator. This was no stunt, but a studied rendering of a role Tibbett clearly judged an irresistible artistic challenge. Though he also darkened his skin to sing Jonny in Ernst Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf, the necessary context here is not “singing Black,” but a project dearer to his heart: making the Metropolitan Opera a home for American opera. The Emperor Jones was one of six American operas premiered at the Met with and for Lawrence Tibbett. Of the others—by Deems Taylor, Howard Hanson, John Seymour, and Richard Hageman—Taylor’s Peter Ibbetson was judged the most durable. But it was Gruenberg’s opera that most realized Tibbett’s gifts (and landed him on the cover of Time magazine). In flight from his rebellious subjects, Jones collapses in a jungle to sing “Standin’ in the Need of Prayer”—a performance immortalized on a 1934 Victor disc. His torso and feet bare and black, Jones—wrote Lawrence Gilman in the Herald-Tribune—became

abject and ghost-ridden … praying, pleading, whimpering and hysterical, shorn of his caking of sophistication. … One hesitates to apply to the achievement of a gifted and serious artist the cheap word “triumph”—a word debased by facile and irresponsible employment. But one need not hesitate to use the word concerning Mr. Tibbett and his Emperor Jones as enacted at yesterday’s performance.

Among the admirers of Tibbett’s impersonation was Harry Burleigh, the Black baritone most responsible for turning spirituals into art songs. Tibbett wrote in response: “Of all the letters of praise I received, yours means most to me, you who stand so high in the esteem of the Colored race, as well as in the esteem of my own race.”

The Tibbett trajectory led inescapably to the one great baritone role in American opera—that of Porgy in Porgy and Bess. And in fact, it is Tibbett who made the first recordings of Porgy’s songs for Victor in 1935, overseen by George Gershwin. Gershwin, however, wanted Broadway and an all-Black cast (he called Todd Duncan, his Broadway Porgy, “the black Tibbett”). Conrad L. Osborne, in his booklet essay, states the obvious: “Tibbett remains the greatest singer to sing this music, and these sides unquestionably represent the artistic highwater mark of his work in an African-American identity.” To which McWhorter has added: “You could say that the role of Porgy was virtually written for him.” Both McWhorter and George Shirley, who in 1961 became the first Black tenor to sing at the Met, discover in Tibbett’s deployment of dialect not exaggeration or caricature, but dignity and truth.

Tibbett’s Victor recordings of “I got plenty o’ nuttin’” and “Oh Bess, oh where’s my Bess” set a gold standard. But the Marston box confers the privilege of hearing him perform these songs for a live audience. “I got plenty o’ nuttin’,” as recorded in 1936 at the Worcester (Massachusetts) Festival—you can “hear” Tibbett moving laterally across the stage—is lighter and quicker than the studio version, yet crowned by a fortissimo high G. The performance to know, however, is “Oh Bess” on the Chesterfield Hour of January 12, 1938, with an orchestra led by Andre Kostelanetz. The ending of Porgy and Bess poses a novel challenge. There are in fact two endings: one created by DuBose Heyward in his novel Porgy, the other by Rouben Mamoulian when he staged Heyward’s novel in 1927 and, eight years later, Gershwin’s opera. Heyward has Porgy sink into obscurity. Mamoulian has Porgy arise, cry “Bring my goat!” (the linchpin line, written by Mamoulian), and undertake a redemptive journey “to a heav’nly land.” No Porgy I have ever witnessed has credibly negotiated this transformation. Tibbett, in 1938, makes it happen in three minutes. His despair—“My Bess, I want her now / Without her I can’t go on”—is absolute; no other singer so shades and softens the words “I counted the days that I was gone / Till I got home to see her face.” And then he just pours it on: “Oh Lord, in your big Heaven / Please show me where I mus’ go / Oh give me de strength, show me de way!” And he is already there.

Otto Kahn, the company’s progressive Maecenas, lobbied for Porgy and Bess at the Met. He could only have been thinking: Lawrence Tibbett. The same Deems Taylor who composed a pair of operas for Tibbett often hosted The Chesterfield Hour (and is today most remembered as the down-to-earth host of Fantasia). As we learn from Osborne’s essay, when introducing Tibbett’s radio performance of “A woman is a sometime thing” on January 26, 1938, “he plumps for a Porgy revival with Tibbett.” And Tibbett continued to crave the role. He knew better than anyone what could be done with it.

During his busiest musical decades, Lawrence Tibbett was also a busy arts advocate. Most notably, he played a central role in the founding of the American Guild of Musical Artists and was its president from 1936 to 1953. Also during the Depression, he lobbied for a cabinet-level Department of Science, Art, and Literature, and contested the termination of the WPA Federal Theatre Project. In 1939, he joined the protest against the Daughters of the American Revolution when it denied Marian Anderson Constitution Hall. But by the time he was entertaining American troops during World War II, his professional and personal life were in steep decline. The cause of his vocal crisis, beginning in 1940, has long been debated. Osborne identifies spastic dysphonia. Other factors were obvious: too much singing, too much drinking. His accelerating alcoholism was both cause and effect of everything else.

Tibbett last sang at the Met in 1950. His subsequent career, such as it was, included some summer stock and Broadway. He died in 1960, age 63, following a fall that fractured his skull. His late years were scattered with abortive projects, including the lead role in Frank Loesser’s quasi-operatic musical The Most Happy Fella. The cruelest disappointment was his inability, in 1953, to fulfill a contract to sing Porgy abroad in the much-traveled Robert Breen production. Though, then as now, the Gershwin estate insisted on Black casts for Porgy and Bess in the United States, foreign productions had long employed white artists—and still do. (McWhorter, for one, has opined that it’s time American productions followed suit.) So the talk of Tibbett taking over the Metropolitan Opera in 1950 was always a pipe dream. And his farsighted advocacy of smaller opera houses, opera in English, and American opera found no takers comparable in stature and potential influence.

A final Tibbett topic: those 10 years of radio performances that Marston Records has recaptured. Beyond doubt, Tibbett’s mass appeal cannot be attributed to the casual pleasure of a good tune grandly sung. What magnetized listeners was a concentration of sentiment: the compassion and heartache conveyed by the “call” of his distinctive baritone. That a vocalist so emotionally fraught could be so widely popular tells us something about yesterday versus today.

Tibbett’s radio stardom was a peak manifestation of the democratization of the arts after World War I. On their new NBC and CBS networks, David Sarnoff and William Paley implemented a bold slate of cultural and educational programing. If in part this was an effort to stave off an “American BBC,” Sarnoff and Paley were bona fide visionaries. The half dozen musical entertainments broadcasting Lawrence Tibbett (including weekly Metropolitan Opera performances) kept company with the NBC Symphony on Saturdays and the New York Philharmonic on Sundays, plus a weekday schedule of more than a dozen live broadcasts of hinterlands orchestras, studio orchestras, and studio recitals. CBS’s cultural flagships included The American School of the Air and Norman Corwin’s Columbia Workshop. NBC hosted The University of Chicago Round Table.

The subject is complex—the democratized “circle of readers” prophesied by de Alexis de Tocqueville partly disclosed an enlarged but shallow circle, a kind of arts veneer. Active musical engagement—via the living room piano, via communal choral societies—plummeted. And what Dwight Macdonald would dub “midcult” was born: a susceptibility to snob appeal pedigreed many a newcomer. In interwar American classical music, this took the form of antipathy to jazz, indifference toward American works, and veneration, as “vicar of the immortals,” of an Italian conductor—Arturo Toscanini—for whom only “the greatest music” was worthy. Tibbett, too, revered Beethoven and Wagner; he called Die Meistersinger his favorite opera. He equally deplored highbrow bias. “I should love a role in something like [Jerome Kern’s] Show Boat,” he complained in 1933. “It is finer and more interesting than many of the operas I know. But my managers, knowing the temper and the feelings of the public, say ‘No.’” No irritant more obsessed him than “the people in an audience who feel they have been classically cheated unless they have been given something they do not understand. They are the folks who believe that sulphur and molasses must be very good for you because it tastes so bad.”

It would be hard to name a higher 20th-century exemplar of the self-made democratic performing artist.

The author regularly produces 50-minute “More than Music” documentaries for National Public Radio, including “Wanting You: The Art of Lawrence Tibbett,” which includes excerpts from the Marston box set.

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