"Al pensar en el dueño" (Carceleras) from Chapi's LAS HIJAS DEL ZEBEDEO



Conchita Supervia, a magnetic personality as well as a great singer, was the kind of artist around whose name legends gather. For example, for a long while no one could believe that a singer who made her debut (admittedly, in a small part in Cesar Stiattesi's long forgotten Blanca de Beaulieu, but in the large and famous Colón Opera House of Buenos Aires) could possibly have done so two months before her fifteenth birthday; but it was true. That was on October 1st, 1910; and her Barcelona birth certificate records her birth in that city as having occurred on December 9th, 1895. Later in the month of her debut she appeared in small parts in Breton's zarzuela, Los amantes de Teruel, in Ruperto Chapí's Circe, and as Lola in Cavalleria rusticana.

Her South American success must have been immediate and rapid, for by late 1911 she was already singing Octavian in the Rome première of Der Rosenkavalier. She was therefore just under sixteen when she made this important appearance in one of Italy's leading opera houses. Now, Octavian is supposed to be just over seventeen ('seventeen years and two months' says the meticulous Sophie von Faninal, who has just looked him up in the Austrian peerage); and we may doubt whether there has ever been another occasion when the singer of this role was actually younger than the fictional character. Within another year or so Supervia was singing such decidedly mature roles as Carmen, Ortrud and Dalila; and on 10 April 1912 she made her debut at the Liceo in Barcelona as the heroine of Saint-Saëns' opera.

Of course it was neither in Strauss nor in Humperdinck that Supervia was to become internationally famous; it was in Rossini. This part of her career seems to have taken off in the 1920s in Turin, where she first sang her celebrated Cenerentola under Tullio Serafin at the Teatro Regio, following it a few years later with the Isabella of the long neglected Italiana in Algeri under Vittorio Gui at the inauguration of the Teatro di Torino. She used also, though less frequently, to sing the Barbiere in the original mezzo-soprano version, which was in those days rarely heard. These Cenerentola and For these Rossini operas Supervia had a formidable array of qualities. To begin with the voice itself, she had the necessary colour and range: a genuine mezzo-soprano of more than two octaves, from low G to high B. Then there was her remarkable agility: she could sing scales, arpeggios and the most elaborate roulades, without turning a hair. We should not claim too much for her florid technique. Her scales were by no means Melba-like; they were helped along by a few intrusive aspirates; and in much of her coloratura work there is a Spanish vehemence and roughness that would perhaps have dismayed Rossini and his contemporaries.

In his day, tonal beauty and perfect smoothness of emission were regarded as the prime vocal virtues (as indeed they are); and he might at first have dismissed some of Supervia's roulades as coarse and provincial. I say 'at first', because she possessed in abundance other qualities which he must soon have found irresistible. Himself the wittiest and most sociable of men, and eminently susceptible to feminine charm, he could hardly have failed to surrender to her beauty, her brimming vitality, her infectious sense of fun and mischief. Both on the opera stage and on the concert platform she displayed a communicative power which can hardly have been surpassed; and this warmth of temperament is evident in almost every one of the 200 or so recordings that she made.

She was incapable of dullness; even in the most trivial song there will come a phrase so personal and so completely genuine that the listener feels something akin to physical contact. In whatever language she sang - and she was a gifted linguist - she filled each word with meaning, and lent the utmost grace and point to the turn of every musical phrase. Her moods and the colour of her tone would change with lightning rapidity; her sense of rhythm often gave a fascinating outline and precision to passages that seem quite ordinary in the score. No singer has conveyed a more infectious enjoyment of the sheer act of singing.

An intensely Spanish element in her style that has given rise to much discussion is the passionate, rapidly beating vibrato that often (but by no means always) characterises her singing. But this vibrato is quite another thing from the usual tremolo or wobble caused by faulty breathing and physical insecurity. There is never anything insecure about Supervia. She has full control over her vocal resources, and, like a violinist, uses more or less vibrato at will; there are gentle songs from which she excludes it almost completely; and if she sometimes uses rather more than we care for, it is because she came from a country in which a calm and virginal purity of tone is not particularly admired for its own sake. If we wonder that such a background and style allowed her to excel in the essentially Italian and highly civilised music of Rossini, we should remember that Colbran and Malibran and Viardot-Garcia were also Spaniards, and were sometimes criticised for the roughness of their execution and the unevenness of their scale.

It was inevitable that a singer of these gifts should tackle Carmen; and this was to become Supervia's most famous role outside Rossini. It was much admired in Paris in 1930; and the recordings made in that year with the Opéra Comique cast are of superb quality. One of the French critics who most admired her suggested that she seemed almost too good-natured for the character: a flirtatious tease rather than a femme fatale; and it is true that five years later at Covent Garden, her Carmen made nothing like the impact that is conveyed on her records of the music. It is probable that on this occasion she did not do herself justice; the previous year there had been a battle royal between herself and the management over the order in which Carmen and During the first war Conchita Supervia fell in love with an Italian lawyer named Francesco Santamaria, by whom she had a son named Giorgio (the 'Giorgino' of a famous little set of recorded nursery songs recorded in 1929 with her own spoken introductions). In 1931 she married Ben Rubenstein and settled in London. Her death, in childbirth, on 30 March, 1936, struck her numerous admirers as a distressing and unnecessary accident.