Paul Fryer and Olga Usova: Lina Cavalieri: The Life of Opera’s Greatest Beauty, 1874–1944
Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, 2004 210 pages, $39.95
With only a few exceptions, a single biography or autobiography has satisfied the curiosity of several generations of operagoers or record collectors regarding a particular opera singer. For those exceptions—Callas, Caruso, Chaliapin, Melba, Patti—whose surnames alone may suffice to identify them, even to the public at large, there is a continuing and apparently insatiable appetite for the biographies or other studies that continue to appear at intervals. Pavarotti may be a future contender for inclusion in this category. While such attention may seem disproportionate when one considers how many notable singers remain undocumented, one might argue that for these luminaries there will always be a need for a biography in print, for every day someone hears them for the first time.
It is, then, distinctly curious that Lina (Natalina) Cavalieri, promoted by others—and by herself—as "the most beautiful woman in the world," has previously been the subject of only two dedicated books, both written by the soprano herself.1 The earlier, My Secrets of Beauty ... Including More Than 1,000 Valuable Recipes for Preparations Used and Recommended by Mme. Cavalieri Herself,2 running to 317 pages, has not been seen by this reviewer, but it seems unlikely to contain significant artistic insights. The second, Le mie verità [My Truths], edited by Paolo D’Arvanni, is a somewhat slimmer volume of 201 pages.3
Cavalieri led a sensational life, a veritable gift to the society columns and the scandal sheets alike. Born into poverty in a slum in Viterbo, she first sold flowers on the streets of Rome, then packed copies of one of the local newspapers. At the age of thirteen she made her first appearances in a café chantant in Rome’s Piazza Navona, where, after her performances, she took round a hat for donations. Thence, while taking vocal lessons, she progressed to the city’s grander establishments, adopting more fashionable dresses and replacing the cheapest of costume jewelry with more imaginative and expensive examples supplied, it is hypothesized, by one or other of the wealthy and influential patrons of the arts. Moving to Naples, then among the most fashionable centers for music and home of many of the songs that she sang onstage, she conquered the Salone Margherita, the Circo delle Varietà, the Eldorado, and the Eden before confronting Parisian audiences at the Folies Bergère. There, with outstanding speed, she achieved a remarkable success and came to rank with Cécile Sorel and Caroline Otero as one of the queens of the Belle Époque, and the management quickly renewed her contact. In 1897 she triumphed at London’s Empire Theatre. A café singer of world renown, she was also a graceful dancer who could make "the most suggestive movements and gestures with such innocence, child-like simplicity and charm that their pornographic nature was ignored."4 In 1897 she also made her Russian debut with a phenomenal success at St. Petersburg. It was only the first of many visits there: her success was constant, although not free from substantial whiffs of scandal, both artistic and personal.
Gabriele D’Annunzio’s claim that Cavalieri was "the most perfect personification of Venus on the Earth" and the tenor Leonid Sobinov’s description of her as "a marvellous flower, loving, fragrant with spring orchids" were only two of the many fulsome descriptions of her at this time. She became "the most beautiful singer ever to appear on the stage in the 19th century."5 Adoring audiences were enslaved by her face, figure, and elegance, natural attributes enhanced by sumptuous gowns and jewels, and brought, through untold numbers of photographs and picture postcards, before the eyes of thousands who would never see her in the theater (pp. 12–13).
Apparently it was in St. Petersburg, during a notorious relationship with Prince Alexander Bariatinsky (whom she claimed to have married), that Cavalieri began to attend Italian opera and to mingle with the operatic performers appearing there. The tenor Francesco ("Checco") Marconi and the soprano Luisa Tetrazzini are identified as those who, at around the turn of the century, advised Bariatinsky to finance Cavalieri’s vocal lessons with Maddalena Mariani-Masi (creator of the role of Gioconda in Ponchielli’s opera) before, on 29 January 1900, she made her operatic debut at Lisbon’s Teatro de São Carlos in Pagliacci with Garulli, De Luca, and Sammarco. It was a fiasco, public protest driving the entire company from the stage. However, matters soon improved, and over the next sixteen years she sang Adriana Lecouvreur, L’Ensoleillad (in Massenet’s Chérubin at its world premiere), Fedora, Gilda, Giulietta (Contes d’Hoffmann), Maddalena, both Massenet’s and Puccini’s Manon, Marguerite, Micaëla, Mimì, Nedda, Salomé (Hérodiade), Stephana (in Giordano’s Siberia), Thaïs, Tosca, Violetta, and Zazà. From 1914 onward she made eight silent films (a ninth seems never to have been completed).
Although Cavalieri became one of the most prominent stars of her era, it seems clear that her fame owed more to her appearance than to her art. The crowds who flocked to her performances came to see rather than to hear her. Sardou is said to have described her as "not an artist. She is only a beautiful woman."6 There is evidence that singers as established as Mattia Battistini—another law unto himself—resented her being given the latitude accorded by such as Massenet, who is reported as saying to her, after a performance of Thaïs, "Your beauty gives you the right to make mistakes sometimes."7
Yet beauty and art, whether vocal or dramatic, are not mutually exclusive. Although critics were divided on her abilities, as early as April 1900 the critic of the Neapolitan Il Pungolo wrote of her Mimì that "[she] has sincere aptitude for the stage, she possesses a spontaneous ease, she acts intelligently: her elegance is reflected in her dramatic acting. The small voice ... has a certain prettiness ... . She phrases with taste and coloration, normally and opportunely. Her intonation is well schooled but her phrasing has a slowness ... and it becomes monotonous when it is not appropriate to the music." The critic of Il Mattino wrote that "she behaves on the stage like a skilful artiste" (p. 34).
This book gives a fair picture of Cavalieri’s artistic and personal life, her scandals, her feuds with Mary Garden, and her failed marriages. It is especially welcome both for the strong coverage of her career in Russia—a facet that the language barrier has previously closed to most Westerners—and for the remarkable number of fine, well-reproduced photographs, many of Russian origin.
Pleasurable as this book is in making available, in readable form, so much new material on a most interesting historical figure, as a source of reference it leaves much to be desired. It is replete with errors: some are trivial but others are not, such as, for example, the statement that Mario Costa, not Luigi Denza, composed "Funiculì, funiculà." Another example is the claim that the tenor Fernando De Lucia, rather than the baritone Giuseppe De Luca, sang at Cavalieri’s operatic debut.8 Likewise, although 4 March 1900 is the correct date of the season premiere of La Bohème in Naples, Mimì was sung on that occasion by Amelia Karola, Cavalieri assuming the part later.9 Such material is easily verified in the many excellent or at least adequate theater chronologies now available: if her debut in a major theater is not worth double-checking, what is? Statements are sometimes contradictory; for example, the account of her first Warsaw season (pp. 35–36) is at variance with the chronology (p. 168). Regrettably, artists appearing in the chronology do not necessarily appear in the index. Regrettable also is the placement of the notes at the back of the book, obliging readers to keep their fingers or a bookmark in the notes section, rather than merely glance to the bottom of the page, in order to establish whether a note is a reference or something more substantial. In the days of manual typesetting such placement may have saved money, but computers have eliminated this benefit. If there were some clear purpose to the system one might tolerate its many disadvantages, but none is apparent.
Cavalieri left fewer than twenty acoustic recordings, made between 1910 and 1916, and it may be counted unfortunate that most were for the American arm of Columbia, whose products at that time did scant justice to the human voice (witness the recordings of Lillian Nordica). The book’s discography is very unsatisfactory, listing only eight of her eleven American Columbia (including two unpublished) and just two of at least seven (some unpublished) American Pathé titles.10 Again, a little research within the available literature could have yielded the data to complete the listing.
No explanation emerges for describing the singer as "positively rejuvenated" (p. 126) yet, apparently within days, to be in "poor health" (p. 127). Many other errors that irritate the punctilious could have been detected by a proofreader with even a superficial knowledge of opera singers of the period or the French language. Names, especially of singers, are misspelled: Cornuber (Cornubert), Dipple (Dippel), Eduard (Edoardo) Garbin, Harold (Harrold), Hofman (Hoffmann), Kashman (Kaschmann), Blanche Lescault (Lescaut), Maurizio (Maurice) Renaud, Sillikh (Sillich), Sottolano (Sottolana), Stacciari (Stracciari), Louisa (Luisa) Tetrazzini. Accents are applied almost at random, sometimes on the wrong letter (Thäis) or added where not required (Aïda, Habañera), but mostly are simply omitted (Athanaël, Dalmorès, Félia, Hérold, Mérimée, [Paris] Opéra, Prévost, São, to identify but a few). It is a pity that careless editing impairs what is otherwise a valuable edition to the literature.
NOTES
1. See Andrew Farkas, Opera and Concert Singers: An Annotated International Bibliography of Books and Pamphlets (New York: Garland, 1985). A 1955 film, starring Gina Lollobrigida as Cavalieri, was entitled La donna più bella del mondo. 
2. New York: The Circulation Syndicate, 1914.
3. Rome: S. A. Poligrafica Italiana, 1936.
4. Sergei Levik, The Levik Memoirs, trans. Edward Morgan (London: Symposium Records, 1995), pp. 115–16.
5. Arturo Lancellotti, Le voci d’oro (Rome: Fratelli Palombi Editori, 1953), p. 299.
7. Levik, Levik Memoirs, p. 116.
8. See Mario Moreau, O Teatro de S. Carlos: Dos Séculos de História, vol. 2 (Lisbon: Hugin Editores, 1999), pp. 1054, 1056.
9. Paologiovanni Maione and Francesca Seller, Teatro di San Carlo di Napoli: Cronologia degli Spettacoli (1851–1900), vol. 3 (Cava de’ Tirreni: Avagliano Editore, 1999), p. 853.
10. The reviewer is grateful to the editor of The Record Collector for data on Cavalieri’s unpublished recordings.
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