100Singers's video: 100 Singers - JEAN DE RESZKE

Jean de Reszke, Tenor (1850-1925) Giacomo Meyerbeer: L'AFRICAINE "Ô Paradis" (incomplete, twice playing) Conducted by Philippe Flon / Recorded March 15, 1901. Metropolitan Opera House My personal opinion: Once again, a new year is here. But for a start let us go back in time to the origins of tenors in opera, long before Enrico Caruso and the invention of the gramophone. Maybe you should pause the video first to get not irritated by the noisy sound of the bizarre audio fragment we have of Jean de Reske's voice. Our journey begins with the first prominent tenor in history, Jacopo Peri (1561-1633, nick-named "Il zazzerino", the "blond one"), who was also the composer of the very first operas: DAFNE (1597, only six surviving fragments) and EURIDICE (1600). As an organist and music director, he was engaged at the Medici court. In the following decades, tenors lost their importance with the rise of the castrato voice. It was not until Gluck and Mozart (and the decline of the "evirati"), that tenors returned to more popularity, even if by now the sopranos held the scepter in their hands. After all, Domenico Donzelli (1790-1873) brought with an astonishing high A from the chest the honor back to tenors. Soon he was overshadowed by Gilbert-Louis Duprez's (1806-1896) high C. But that's not all: Giovanni-Battista Rubini (1794-1854) sang in I PURITANI a high F in voix mixte, whereas Enrico Tamberlik (1820-1889) was the one, who added the high C's to "Di quella pira" in Verdi's IL TROVATORE. Adolphe Nourrit (1802-1839), who took his life at the age of only 37, was Rossini's first dramatic tenor, while Joseph Tichatschek (1807-1886) created Wagner's RIENZI and TANNHÄUSER. The above-mentioned Enrico Tamberlik finished his career already in 1882, seven years before the very first operatic recording was made by the Danish bass-baritone Peter Schram (1819-1895). This explains, why we have no sound documents from famous tenors of the penultimate century. Tamberlik's great rival was Giovanni Matteo de Candia (1810-1883) aka Mario, who was able (according to music historian William J. Henderson) to "console a lost soul in the purgatory" with his voice. Mario (the second husband of soprano Giulia Grisi) retired from stage at the age of 63 after a USA concert tour. He died ten years later in 1883, two months after the opening of the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. Mario's heir was Jean de Reszke (1850-1925), forty years his junior. First a baritone, the Polish singer became then in the late 19th century the most acclaimed tenor in the era before Caruso, who was born in 1873, twenty-three years after de Reszke. From 1891 to 1901, de Reszke appeared in every season at the Met, starting with LOHENGRIN and ending with a performance of the second act of Wagner's TRISTAN UND ISOLDE. The Met debut of Caruso took place on November 23, 1903 as the Duke in RIGOLETTO - two years after de Reszke's departure. In contrast to the casual Neapolitan Caruso, de Reszke was so much a creature of his time: Elegant in manner and song, he was a romantic figure, the ideal Romeo and Faust. He was also the first tenor of the Italian and French repertoire to sing Wagner in German. In the years of his vocal prime, the Polish singer performed a wide range of different roles and requirements: From the French Grand Opéra (Meyerbeer) to Bizet, Gounod and Massenet; from Verdi's Riccardo in UN BALLO IN MASCHERA to Radamès in AIDA; from Wagner's Lohengrin to Stolzing in DIE MEISTERSINGER VON NÜRNBERG - and, finally, to Tristan and the Siegfrieds. It was an unparalleled venture that took him for sure some years of his vocal life. He was negligent in choosing his roles, but he was very suspicious about the new invention of sound recording. Although he made in 1905 in Paris two commercial gramophone records with scenes from Gounod's ROMEO ET JULIETTE ("Salut! Tombeau") and Massenet's LE CID ("O souverain"), he was disappointed with the results and insisted on destroying the matrices. All the rumours of the survival of these two records turned out to be false. Unlike Caruso, de Reszke did not believe in the gramophone ... But in 1901, the Metropolitan Opera librarian Lionel Mapleson (1865-1937) made secretly some primitive cylinder recordings during actual performances of de Reszke. These are the only known sound documents of his voice. It's like listen to someone singing behind the Niagara Falls. The background noise is overwhelming. But if you listen very carefully, you can indeed notice a regular legato and noble expression. Surely it's not enough to evaluate his voice at large. And so the name of the famous Polish singer remains only an entry in the history books. The long way of tenor singing from Jacopo Peri to Jean de Reszke is still surrounded by the unfathomable mists of the past ...