I was watching a Missy Elliott video on MTV the other day, wondering why her face always reminds me of someone. Then I watched the Ovation Channel on the new Optus/Foxtel mélange. It was showing an amazing program called ‘The Art of Singing, Golden Voices of the Century’. This was the second episode (the first one was lost to me in the quagmire plenitude of cable program guides), and it was about opera singers of the 1950s and ’60s performing on television. When Leontyne Price came on as Aida, singing the most sublime ‘O patria mia’ I have ever heard, it struck me finally that there was the resemblance: high cheekbones, almond eyes, generous mouth, and a fine nostril flare. But how things have changed now. Dulled and battered by too much bad music played by the young ’uns (though I have to admit parts of it are good) I was surprised to learn that as late as 1963, Joan Sutherland did a live TV performance of Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots. That was a rather unpatronising choice for the network-watching masses: certainly not as easygoing as the ubiquitous Butterfly or Carmen. I watched it all entranced, because these performances were, unlike Missy’s, completely live—no Pro Tools or LogicAudio to tidy up any blunders. There she was, Joan before she was anything like a dame, a big black ship in full sail, rippling the runs and nailing almost every high note bang on without safety nets. As did Fritz Wunderlich, Jussi Björling, Giuseppe di Stephano and Victoria de los Angeles. Such riches demanded attention and consideration, and it needs to be said again: once there used to be live-to-air opera on TV.
But if Sutherland was La Stupenda, there should have been a like term for Leontyne Price that conveyed the velvet gold, the tensile strength and warm sweetness of her tone, the lavish technical ability that took each note and spun it into silk. Sheerest beauty then contrasted with the acclaimed but vocally very flawed Tosca, the Covent Garden production that had Maria Callas teamed with Tito Gobbi’s matchless Scarpia. Seeing Callas doing ‘Vissi d’arte’ near the end of her voice’s tether, despite her artistry and musicality, and seeing Price in the heyday of hers, made me wonder what it was about Callas that kept, and keeps, us all listening and watching. She was more than a singer who could act and