The Divine Claudia: The Life and Career of Claudia Muzio

By Dan H. Marek

“Muzio was a case apart: you cannot classify her, for in the end you have been so emotionally destroyed by her performance, you did not even know anymore what kind of instrument she had”. So spoke Lucrezia Bori, the beloved soprano of the Metropolitan Opera. Bori was echoing the opinion of many of Claudia Muzio’s contemporaries and successors such as Eva Turner, Rosa Ponselle, and Mafalda Favero who wrote:“Actually,” she [Favero] admitted with her total candor, “it took me a long time to find my own interpretation [La traviata], for I was haunted by Claudia Muzio in this role. When she sang it at the Coloń in Buenos Aires in 1933, I went to each rehearsal, worshiping her, and it took a superhuman effort for me to finally obtain my personal approach. … I recall a performance of Muzio’s in Refice’s Cecilia, an opera she created in Rome in 1934 which deals with the saint’s martyrdom. She was so sublime in it that I went backstage to express my admiration at the end and impulsively dropped to my knees. ‘Now, really, my child!’ she said with those sad eyes which haunted me. ‘What are you doing?’ Her Norma was also an unforgettable creation. She had the quality I consider so essential in an artist: to make the public suffer along with her.”
Sometimes we hear artists described as “She was born a hundred years too late”, but Claudia Muzio was born too soon. She was a great “singing actress” whose stage portrayals produced the hysterical kinds of responses cited above. Most reviews mention her stage work first, not failing to praise her singing. It is from her late recordings from 1934-35, when she was ill, that she is remembered today. Muzio had a distinctive vocal timbre, and an unparalleled command of dynamics and phrasing that, once heard, is never forgotten. Indeed, she was called “La Unica” in South America where she was the Teatro Colón’s brightest star for fifteen years. Muzio made her debut as the first Italian Tosca at the Metropolitan Opera in 1916 at the age of 26 with Enrico Caruso and Antonio Scotti. She went on to sing with all the great artists of her time in a world-wide career of over twenty-five-years. Claudia Muzio sang over a thousand performances of major dramatic operatic repertory, including 131 Aidas, 146 Traviatas, 81 Trovatores, and 129 Toscas. This figure does not include concerts and by all accounts, Claudia Muzio was also a great recitalist.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gatekeeper Press
• Release date: Dec 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9781662915536

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1. The Birth of a Diva

On Feb. 7, 1889, in the old capital of the Lombard kingdom, Pavia, Italy, a beautiful dark-eyed baby girl was born to Carlo Alberto Muzzio (1848-1917), a former basso-buffo singer turned stage manager and his fiancée, Giovanna Gavirati (b. 1860), a chorus singer. Both of the parents were employed by the La Scala Opera while living in Pavia. The pair, as members of the artistic community, were probably not overly concerned about the illegitimacy issue, although there was certainly some stigma attached in the Catholic community at large. The baby was christened Claudina Emilia Maria Muzzio³, whose parents were unknown. Little Claudina would grow up to become one of the brightest stars in the operatic firmament in a meteoric world-wide career that would span twenty-five years. Later, her parents were married and she was officially legitimized as Claudina Muzzio.

Fig. 1.1 Claudia Muzio’s Birth Certificate

The year 1889 was embedded in a nexus of evolution in the world of opera. Like most periods in history, change in opera does not really lend itself to be divided into neat segments but one can trace general trends which may be developing simultaneously. Grand opera could be said to stem from Daniel François Auber’s (1782-1871) La Muette de Portici (The Dumb Girl of Portici) in 1828 and Gioachino Rossini’s (1792-1868) Guillaume Tell in 1829. For us today, Giuseppe Verdi’s (1813-1901) Aida (1871) is the quintessential grand opera. Otello premiered in 1887, followed by Falstaff in 1893. These operas were the triumphant culmination of Verdi’s lonely battle against the Wagnerian tide which had been sweeping through Europe since the premiere of Tristan und Isolde on June 10, 1865 and the first complete performance of Der Ring des Nibelungen at Bayreuth in 1876. To be sure, most Italians were not really interested in such dark Teutonic musings nor in the idea that the drama was to be found in the orchestra with the voices floating along, in Wagner’s phrase, like a ship on the sea of orchestral harmony.⁴

For Verdi, even though he moved steadily away from the familiar number opera toward a more integrated dramatic scheme after Aida, the essential interest in his operas was still in the Italian love of the human voice and melody. The typical attitude of the Italian public could be summed up in a concert given by Franz Liszt at La Scala in 1837 when a man called out from the stalls, "Vengo al teatro per divertirmi e non per studiare!⁵ (I come to the theater to be entertained, not to study!)

Italians preferred librettos that were simple, vigorous, and direct, which led to the next development in Italian opera, namely verismo or realism. Verismo was most exemplified by two works – Cavalleria rusticana in 1890 by Pietro Mascagni (1863-1945) and I pagliacci in 1892 by Ruggerio Leoncavallo (1858-1919) – two short one-act operas that presented human passions through dramatic declamatory singing supported by pungent orchestral effects. Often overlooked, is the fact that the verismo singers were singing contemporary operas to satisfy the public’s thirst for something new. The fantastic success of the movement burned itself out in a few years but the effects can still be felt today. However, in my view, the much earlier La traviata (1853) had all the elements of verismo with its representation of the Paris demimonde based on the novel La Dame aux Camélias (1852) by Alexandre Dumas fils (1824-1895. Because of censorship, La traviata had to wait until the 1880s to be presented as it was conceived, namely as a contemporary opera and acted and sung with the true human emotions contained in the score. So, it is the fire of verismo wedded to the highest musical and vocal values of bel canto that formed one of the greatest Violettas of all time – Claudia Muzio. Now is the time for the reader to listen to Muzio’a most famous recording – Teneste la promessa … Addio del passato which is readily available online.

In tracing the elements that formed the artist Muzio would become, the first was that she was born with a vocal quality unlike that of any other singer that would lead the Latin American fans to call her La Única. It was a voice that the great tenor, Giacomo Lauri-Volpi (1892-1979) wrote was

a unique voice, made of tears and sighs, and restrained interior fire.⁶

The operative words here are unique and restrained because, unlike other singers of the verismo period, Muzio never screamed her way through a role, although her voice had plenty of power when she needed it. She was able to combine intense passion with bel canto elegance and a style that drew audiences in like moths to a flame. Later, another of her titles was the Duse of Song.⁷ Claudia was beloved by the public, especially in Chicago and South America, and generally lauded by the press, but there were critics then, as well as now who, when faced by a completely original artist and lacking other models for comparison, turn thumbs down on the upstart. This was what initially impeded the careers of the great Enrico Caruso (1873-1921) and Titta Ruffo (1877-1953) whose exuberant style of singing offended some more conservative critics like W. J. Henderson (1855-1937).

Fig. 1.2 Violetta in La traviata

A second element was a schooling that no other singer, with the exception of Maria Malibran (Garcia) (1808-1836), ever received. From the age of two, Claudia accompanied her father in his duties as stage manager for the San Carlo Naples, Covent Garden, Oscar Hammerstein’s (1846-1919) Manhattan Opera, and the Metropolitan, as well as a number of other companies in Europe, especially Italy, almost as soon as she could walk. The Metropolitan’s archives reveal only that Carlo was manager of the chorus in 1899, for which he was paid an extra $5 and Giovanna was a member of the Italian chorus there in 1903-04.

The title Stage Manager had a very different meaning in the late nineteenth century than it does today, when the Stage Director’s concepts have come to dominate operatic performances. Then, the star singers called the shots. The artists all had their own routine stagings and carried their own costumes. For example, Mattia Battistini (1856-1928) the great baritone, traveled with a set of over 30 initialed handmade leather trunks containing his own costumes. Artists very often distained to rehearse, unwilling to endure vocal fatigue, leaving lesser lights to fend for themselves. The stage manager then was probably more involved with setting out props and arranging stage furniture than in instructing the artists about their interpretation of their roles. He also often served as that indispensable assistant to Italian singers – the prompter.

But Claudina also had an unusual task for a youngster:

My intimate knowledge of score when I assisted my father in taking charge of operatic scores is always a great help to me. I used to take charge of all the scores for him, and knew all the cuts, changes and how they were to be used. The singers themselves often came to me for stage directions about their parts, knowing I had this experience.⁸

One could surmise that, deprived of playmates her own age most of the time, she was a lonely child. This would account for the fact that Muzio, unlike most of the inhabitants of the world of opera, was a moody loner.

How can I pass over Claudia Muzio, whom my mother called the Glorious Wop? – a fascinating artist whose masochistic temperament shortened her career and even her life. We never knew her, but friends who did painted a gruesome picture of rooms from which all daylight was excluded, full of jabbering relatives and cooking spaghetti, in the midst of which Claudia wearing a gorgeous robe-de-chambre, with her hair down her back, lay prone and weeping over the machinations of her rivals, sentimental or professional…⁹

This account, although second hand, seems to bear out Muzio’s anti-social reputation. However, we also have May Higgins’s (1888 -1980) enthusiastic account of traveling with Claudia, which paints an entirely different picture of a beloved artist - kindly, humble, charming, and considerate. Higgins was Muzio’s traveling secretary from 1929 to 1935 and president of the Muzio Fan Club. So, we must consider the life of Claudia Muzio to be complicated, mercurial, and maybe even bi-polar.

Little Claudina then, would have witnessed performances by all the great singers of the last Golden Age, especially sopranos – to name a few: Adelina Patti (1843-1919), Nellie Melba (1861-1931). Emma Eames (1865-1952), Lillian Nordica (1857-1914), Marcella Sembrich (1858-1935), Johanna Gadski (1872-1932), Emma Calvé (1858-1942), Milka Ternina (1863-1941), and Olive Fremstadt (1871-1951). She would also have heard Enrico Caruso and Antonio Scotti with whom she would sing Tosca at Covent Garden in 1914 and in her Metropolitan debut in 1916. She also learned how to behave like a prima donna at an early age.

A visitor to the London home of Carlo Muzio in the mid-1890s enthused over the dark comeliness of the gentleman’s young daughter. What a lovely child! she exclaimed. She’s going to be a beautiful woman when she grows up. But the young Claudia hid her head and sobbed, I don’t want to be beautiful! I want to be like la Melba!¹⁰

Carlo Muzio had long predicted a great career for her [Claudia] in opera ‘Since she began to toddle’ one journalist reported him as saying, ‘she has been in the wings watching my rehearsals. She knows all the dramatic roles, the lyric roles and the coloratura roles – nothing will come amiss to her.’ Certainly, the extraordinary range of parts which Muzio did subsequently undertake, from the coloratura of Gilda in Rigoletto to the unbridled dramatic outpourings of Turandot, bear witness to his prescience, and few, if any, of her roles could be said to ‘come amiss.’¹¹

There is another parallel with Malibran – both accompanied their fathers to London when they were a little older and both attended a Catholic school for girls in Hammersmith, England (Malibran in 1816). There they learned English with a healthy dose of discipline from the Benedictine nuns. Later, Claudia’s command of English caused some interviewers to believe her to be a native American.

A third influence was a gradual increase of emphasis on the words of the drama in opera. On Oct. 13, 1781, in a letter to his father, Mozart had written

In an opera, it is absolutely imperative that poetry should be the obedient daughter of the music.¹²

But some of the artists of the verismo era began to envision themselves as singing actors and frequently incorporated speech directly into the musical phrase. This can be clearly heard, especially in performances of the great basso Feodor Chaliapin (1873-1938). Muzio and Chaliapin performed together, were great friends and had frequent conversations about singing and acting. Chaliapin had a great impact upon his colleagues and I believe that some of Muzio’s later style was influenced by the great Russian.

As early as 1917, in an interview, the 28-year-old Claudia Muzio articulated her thoughtful approach to her art:

Miss Muzio, by the way, is a great vocal colorist. It is difficult to recall any artist on the operatic stage who has at her command such a large variety of colorings as Miss Muzio. The interviewer mentioned this.

I am glad you have noticed this, said Miss Muzio. Indeed, I am a thorough believer in what has been called coloring of the tones to fit the situation. Perhaps it is because I was first intended to be an actress that I am able to go farther than a good many other singers. Why not? The speaking voice of the actress is, of course, her principal organ for the expressions for the variance of emotion and the singing voice must serve the same purpose for the operatic actress, though its range is necessarily somewhat limited by the fact that the latter must sing while the former speaks: but I try to make my voice, especially in such emotional roles as Tosca, serve me exactly as it would, were I an actress instead of an opera singer.¹³

In his monumental and massive study Opera as Opera,¹⁴ in the section called Onstage III: Rhetorics, Conrad Osborn traces drama back, before the invention of printing, to oral history and story-telling by the bards. He connects oratory, acting principles of Konstantin Stanislavski (1863? -1938) and others, and the declamation of the great actors and orators in spoken drama and speeches of bye-gone eras that would have influenced Claudia Muzio, Chaliapin, and others. There are recordings of many of these rhetoricians such as Tommaso Salvini (1829-1915), Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923), and even Edwin Booth (1833-1893) available online. There are also recordings of Titta Ruffo, not as well known for acting, reciting Essere o non essere (To be or not to be) from Hamlet and an imaginary conversation with Chaliapin in which he takes both parts.

Listen to Claudia’s performances of L’altra notte in fondo al mare from Arrigo Boito’s (1842-1918) Mefistofele and again, her most famous recording," from La traviata cited earlier. Teneste la promessa … Addio del passato

A fourth influence was the invention of the phonograph by Thomas A. Edison (1847-1931) in 1877, which was not really commercially viable until Adelina Patti (1843-1919) made her first recordings in 1905. In 1911, only eighteen months after her debut, Claudia Muzio was contracted by the Gramophone company to record two arias in Milan.

These offerings, Si, mi chiamano Mimi from La bohème and Che gli diró…Amami, Alfredo from La traviata, would never have seen the light of day without Claudia’s subsequent glorious career, but they offer a fascinating account of the development of an immature girl whose rather shrill voce bianca developed into a voice of infinite colors and shadings driven by the intense feelings of a woman who had lived life.

There have always been questions about why Muzio did not record during the roughly ten years of the zenith of her career from 1925 to 1934. As strange as it may seem, there are many artists who cannot stand to listen to their own recordings! They carry an idealized version of their own sound in their heads and cannot bear to listen to reality. Claudia Muzio may have been one of that group. Moreover, the frequency range of the primitive recording equipment up to the advent of electrical recording was very limited. Sopranos were robbed of the natural resonance of the upper range of harmonics of their voices and sounded thin and pipe-like. Tenors were best served because the harmonic range of their voices lay comfortably within the frequency range of the early recordings. Caruso’s recordings sold like hot cakes and cost up to $3 for a single aria! I think that Claudia’s experience of growing up listening to the great artists up close and comparing the sound of her own recordings to her memories of them would naturally cause her disappointment and some aversion. Nevertheless, Muzio made a great number of recordings for the Pathé, HMV, and Edison companies up to 1925 and they provide an unparalleled amount of insight into her vocal, musical, and dramatic development. In those days there were ads of great singers’ recordings in daily newspapers and musical journals all over the land and I imagine that Muzio made a great deal of money from the recordings.

Fig. 1.3 Mimi in La bohème

I will be referring to three CD collections of all of Claudia Muzio’s output, the first two of which are wonderful restorations by Ward Marston on Romophone #81010-2 Claudia Muzio, The Complete HMV (1911) and Edison (1920-25) Recordings and Romophone #81005-2 Claudia Muzio, The Complete Pathé Recordings (1917-18). The third is Opera Fanatic #OF21 Claudia Muzio, The Complete Legendary Columbia Recordings (1934-35). Most of the selections are also available online.

At fifteen, Claudina was sent back to Italy to live with relatives. She enrolled in a music conservatory at Turin where she studied piano and harp. Then she was sent to Milan to continue her piano studies with Annetta Casaloni (1830-1911). One would imagine that the piano lessons would have been placed on the back burner, for Casaloni had been a well-known contralto who had created the part of Maddalena in Rigoletto in 1851. She is often credited with the discovery of Claudia’s vocal talent but we have already seen that Carlo had always believed that his daughter would become a great singer. Claudia subsequently went on to take lessons from Elettra Callery-Viviani (1861-1935), a respected teacher in Milan. Viviani had studied at the Instituto Musicale in Florence and sang many of the Verdi roles including Leonora, Amelia, and Violetta as well as Vincenzo Bellini’s (1801-1835) Norma. It was about then that Claudina Muzzio became Claudia Muzio.

* * *

2. Claudia’s Career Begins

Fig. 2.1 Manon in Manon Lescaut

La belle époque (the beautiful era) is a period in European history which roughly encompassed the beginning of Claudia Muzio’s career. It is usually counted from the end of the Franco-Prussian war in 1871 to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. It was so named in retrospect when Europeans looked back from the horrors of the worst war in history on a period of peace, prosperity, scientific innovation, and great creativity in the arts. It could be said that, after 1870, Europe was the center of the civilized world. However, the movement toward extreme specialization caused the arts to begin to be considered separate and not for common use.

It may have been from Elettra Callery-Viviani’s influence that secured Muzio’s début role of Massenet’s Manon on January 15, 1910 at the Teatro Petrarco in Arezzo, a town not far from Florence. Muzio never sang the Massenet Manon again, except for a truncated version at Ravinia in 1918, and I would think that her temperament would have rebelled against it. More to her liking was Puccini’s version of the story and she is subsequently credited with 76

Reviews for The Divine Claudia

[caterina secchi · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A well-researched and respectful biography of Claudia Muzio, one of the greatest and most charismatic operatic sopranos of all time. I’ve found very few, and very minor, omissions. Bravo. Finally, a published biography of La Divina Claudia!