Un choc aussi renversant qu'à l'époque : Joan Baez des débuts

[JacquesL]

Un choc laissait pantelant : la voix de Joan Baez, mezzo-soprano toute jeune, dans son premier enregistrement de 1960.
Ça a été remastérisé chez Vanguard en 1997. Le prix est fort chez Amazon, un peu moins élevé chez Alapage (mais épuisé ?). Cela descend à 12 ou 13 $ en commerce interne aux USA.
Contenu :
1. SILVER DAGGER    
2. EAST VIRGINIA    
3. FARE THEE WELL (or Ten Thousand Miles)    
4. HOUSE OF THE RISING SUN    
5. ALL MY TRIALS    
6. WILDWOOD FLOWER    
7. DONNA DONNA    
8. JOHN RILEY    
9. RAKE AND RAMBLING BOY
10. LITTLE MOSES    
11. MARY HAMILTON    
12. HENRY MARTIN    
13. EL PRESO NUMERO NUEVE

Fare Thee Well

Oh fare thee well, I must be gone
And leave you for awhile
Wherever I go, I will return
If I go ten thousand miles
If I go, if I go, if I go ten thousand miles

Oh, ten thousand miles it is so far
To leave me here alone
Well, I may lie, lament and cry
And you'll, you'll not hear my mourn,
And you'll, no you'll, and you'll not hear my mourn

Oh, the crow that is so black, my love
Will change his color white
If ever I should prove false to thee
The day, day will turn to night
Yes, the day, oh the day, yes the day will turn to night

Oh, the rivers never will run dry
For the rocks melt with the sun
I'll never prove false to the boy I love
Till all, all these things be done
Till all, till all, till all these things be done

All My Trials

Hush little baby, don't you cry,
You know your mother was born to die
All my trials, Lord, soon be over
Too late my brothers, too late
But never mind
All my trials, Lord, soon be over

The river of Jordan is chilly and cold
It chills the body but it warms the soul,
All my trials, Lord, soon be over

I've got a little book with pages three,
And every page spells liberty,
All my trials Lord, soon be over
Too late my brothers, too late
But never mind
All my trials, Lord, soon be over

If living were a thing that money could buy,
You know the rich would live
and the poor would die,
All my trials, Lord, soon be over

There grows a tree in Paradise,
The Christians call it the tree of life,
All my trials Lord, soon be over
Too late my brothers, too late
But never mind
All my trials, Lord, soon be over

Plus encore que la voix, ce que les échantillons de trente secondes remettent en évidence, c'est la fluidité de l'expression, la générosité de l'émotion.

Je crois que c'est lorsque j'ai eu l'imprudence d'évoquer à haute voix le chant renversant de Joan Baez, entendu vers 1963, que Sa Seigneurie la Jalousie a formé définitivement le projet de veuvage par assassinat, qu'elle n'a manqué que de fort peu. Qu'on puisse admirer une autre voix que la sienne, voilà qui est pour mon épouse le crime inexpiable. Personnellement, je vois mal comment mettre en parallèle la fluidité et générosité de l'expression vocale de Joan Baez, avec la rigidité de la voix de la paranoïaque, continuellement obsédée de dissimuler sa haine et sa rage. Depuis son enfance, Gazonbleu est tendue par la haine : haine envers sa persécutrice intime, sa mère, haine et jalousie envers ses camarades de classes mieux favorisées. Jalousie envers quiconque a un don ou un bonheur qu'elle estime ne pas avoir, dont elle estime qu'il lui revient de droit.

Il semble bien aussi que ce fut à compter de ce jour d'automne 1996 que fut noué le pacte Pygmalion entre Sa Seigneurie la Jalousie, et sa professeure de chant particulière, Claude, professeure dans le même collège. Depuis ce temps là, Claude fait chanter Gazonbleu en soprano, comme pour recréer sa môman idéale. Mais Gazonbleu continue quand même de parler en mezzo, pas du tout en soprano, et sa voix est toujours tendue et rigide de haine...

Exploit du même genre : la première professeure de chant de Hugues Cuénod, une suissesse, le fit travailler en basse ! A ma connaissance, un tel niveau de déni de réalité, cela se classe dans les symptômes psychotiques. Du n'importe-quoi transféro-transférentiel, mais pleinement psychotique. Me gourre-je ?

Mais il reste le mystère pour moi : Claude a-t-elle réussi à faire chanter Gazonbleu juste ? Moi, j'avais renoncé depuis longtemps, terrifié par les dérapages de l'intonation. Pour Gazonbleu, toute phrase musicale est du verglas.

Dites ? Vous savez qu'on trouve Florence Foster-Jenkins en CD ? C'est elle "La cantatrice" des Frères Jacques. France-Musique nous l'a passée un matin : c'est terrifiant, il n'y a pas une seule note de juste dans ses ânonnements laborieux. Or elle s'attaquait ainsi aux airs les plus difficiles du répertoire : les airs de la Reine de la Nuit, l'air des clochettes de Lakmé... Et c'était à Carnegie Hall : après héritage, elle était assez riche pour se le payer.
Le refrain narquois des Frères Jacques
"Elle chantait mal, elle chantait faux !
Sa voix avait des tas d'défauts !"
est charitablement en dessous de la réalité.

[JacquesL]

Il faut aller voir l'interview du pianiste de Foster-Jenkins.
http://listproc.ucdavis.edu/archives/mlist/log0402/0004.html

Highlights :
And her mother died in 1928, and at that time she was left this additional fortune and completely free to pursue her own way, so that is when she decided to make her concert career. At that time she must have been about sixty years old.
...
She was encouraged to sing more and more, both by professionals and laymen. There were a great many singers from the Metropolitan in this club - I think Enrico Caruso was one of the founders - and all these people, to kid her along, told her that she was the most wonderful singer that ever lived, and encouraged her that way.
...
, I might say that every number was memorable, the way she performed it, because it was not only a performance of this sort that we hear on the records, but she added histrionics to every number, generally acting the action, if it were an aria, or other appropriate action if it were a descrïptive song, or else she would go into different dances during these numbers, which were extremely hilarious.
...
but the audience nearly always tried not to hurt her feelings by outright laughing, so they developed a convention that whenever she came to a particularly excruciating discord or something like that, where they had to laugh, they burst into these salvos of applause and whistles and the noise was so great that they could laugh at liberty.
...
So she really didn't hear the atrocious pitches in these things. She used to sit delightedly and listen for hours to her recordings."
...
Yes, her performance in Carnegie Hall was the most remarkable thing that has happened there, I think. I was supposed to play for her that night, and when I approached the hall I could hardly get near it, because the crowd stretched all the way to the Little Carnegie and around Seventh Avenue, and you hardly mill through them. You had to prove your identity to get in, and inside the house held a record audience. It seemed that the people were hanging on the rafters, besides taking up every inch of
available standing room. When she came out to sing an old English group, she came out in a sort of shepherdess's gown with a shepherd's crook, holding it, and the ruckus was so great that it lasted five minutes before there was enough quiet for her to begin. Then the concert went on with the
most noisy and abandoned applause that I have - I have never seen such a scene, either a bullfight or at the Yale Bowl after a winning touchdown.
When she sang Clavelitos, one famous actress had to be carried out of her box because she became hysterical.
...

[JacquesL]

Autre appréciation d'auditeur sur le phénomène Foster-Jenkins :
http://www.epinions.com/content_84551175812

Soprano Florence Foster Jenkins: Patron Saint of the Absurd
Dec 22 '02 (Updated Jan 04 '03)

Author's Product Rating
Product Rating: 4.0

Pros
This unintentionally hilarious singer will have you howling with laughter.

Cons
The shrillness can be overwhelming; you may need a break from it and your laughter.

The Bottom Line
This recording is marketed as a novelty, but the singer it highlights took herself in dread seriousness. The distance between self-perception and truth has never been greater. Utterly hilarious.

Full Review
The philosopher Thomas Nagel has written that a situation is absurd when it includes a "conspicuous discrepancy between pretension or aspiration and reality." There is no greater an instance of this discrepancy I know of than the career of the high coloratura soprano, Florence Foster Jenkins. Fully convinced in the beauty of her vocal prowess, she was probably the worst singer ever to hold a solo concert at Carnegie Hall (October 25th, 1944), or anywhere else, for that matter.

The Carnegie Hall concert, given only a month before her death at the age of 76, was the apotheosis of a bizarre career. Tickets were very hard to come by, because she seldom gave recitals, and had attained an almost cult status as a woman convinced of her greatness but wholly incapable of carrying a tune. She was apparently aware of the derision and ridicule she reaped from concert goers and critics, but would attribute the laughter that broke forth from crowds, as well as the desultory press, to the slovenly manners and tastes of heathens who could not appreciate her talent.

Jenkins possessed a number of quirks and idiosyncrasies that elevate the levels of absurdity that she inadvertently cultivated. Her recitals were accompanied by extravagant costumes, with no fewer than three changes per evening. A taxicab crash in 1943 made her believe that she could sing "a higher F than ever before," and rather than suing the company, she sent the driver a box of fine cigars. She doled out tickets to her own concerts from a hotel suite, and offered her customers a complimentary sherry.

Knowing this context (which is more fully fleshed out in this CD's liner notes) nevertheless can not prepare anyone for the shock of actually hearing her recorded voice; if anything, the knowledge that Jenkins is taking herself very seriously only can heighten the odd, excruciatingly funny experience of listening to this disc.

The CD has been remastered from original 78s recorded over separate sessions. Apparently, Jenkins had little patience for the recording studio or the tedium of perfection. She proclaimed "perfect" at most first takes, and moved on to the next.

How to describe her voice? Occasionally she hits the correct pitch, but only by accident. Completely tone deaf, she is otherwise well above and below her mark. She could be a Monty Python actor singing broad, comic strains in falsetto, but of course, she is attempting opera in all earnestness. Nevertheless her voice has that thin and strident quality of a man singing in his upper registers (notwithstanding the counter tenors and castratis of the world). She has little if any sense of timing, and erratically speeds up and slows down, certainly to the amazement and chagrin of her faithful accompanist. She moves in and out of a sour vibrato unexpectedly, and slides ungracefully through the scale to hit just the wrong pitch. Often, she simply squawks and wails like a dying bird or some other, as yet discovered animal. And yet—beneath this abyss of talent, this wayward and pathetically faltering warbling—there surges a joyous spirit, completely relaxed in its moment, full of delight and conviction. Hilarious as it is to listen to her vain attempts at music making, we are inexorably pulled along with her journey and somehow can't help but feel joyous with her, an emotion that mixes uncomfortably yet palpably with our derisive laughter. She inspires laughter, but also a curious admiration. As one contemporary critic of hers wrote: "She was exceedingly happy in her work. It is a pity so few artists are. And the happiness was communicated as if by magic to her hearers."

The selections on the disc are erratic in their musical taste. We find Mozart, Gounod, and Strauss on the one hand, but decidedly lesser talents like Liadoff, David, Biassy and Cosme McMoon (her intrepid accompanist) also represented. Not that the selection really matters, since she screws everything up indiscriminately, making all of the selections sound like a cross between the caterwauling of a cat in heat and a Victorian dilettante of the upper crust. Most famous of all—at least in my family—is her "Queen of the Night" aria from Mozart's Die Zauberflote. Notoriously difficult for any singer, this piece is the perfect vehicle to show off Jenkins' worst. On the first few listenings, it may be difficult to hear this, however, since you will be laughing so hard. Her forays into Romantic and "exotic" territories such a Mexican serenade and the "Bell Song" from Delibes' Lakme are so awful as to beggar belief.

The disc concludes with something extraordinary, indeed. If you thought that Jenkins was bad, wait until you hear the selections from Gounod's Faust as sung by Jenny Williams (soprano) and Thomas Burns (baritone). Having translated the French text into English (a dubious endeavor), they proceed to out-do Jenkins in their awfulness. Actually, Williams is merely mediocre (i.e. a few notches above Jenkins). But Thomas Burns is extravagantly bad. In all truth, he sounds uncannily like Elmer Fudd, with the same nasal voice and portentous, tragic vibrato. Hearing his litany of "O! Marguerita"s and "I love you!"s belted in earnest, throaty groans is to witness the airy heights of absurdity. The knowledge that the "Final Trio" from the opera is here sung as a duet only increases the ludicrousness of their efforts.

Note: Some background in classical music obviously helps appreciate the full travesty of these singers' achievements, but this disc can be appreciated by anyone. In other words, the inadvertent humor is not part of a musical in-joke only available to the cognoscenti.


If you want to listen to clips of the program, visit:
http://www.iclassics.com/iclassics/album.jsp?selectionId=12573
All tracks from the CD are selected; start with tracks 1, 4, 9 and 12 ...

[JacquesL]

Mon fils avait vingt-neuf ans hier.

Je lui ai déjà souhaité d'autres anniversaires en d'autres lieux.
Quoi de neuf ?

L'an dernier, je lui avais envoyé un "chef d'oeuvre" d'un genre un peu spécial :
Des extraits de récitals de Florence Foster-Jenkins. Elle fut le prototype de La Cantatrice des Frères Jacques. En fait, les célèbres humoristes avaient charitablement édulcoré la terrifiante réalité. J'ignorais qu'elle fut rééditée, avant que France-Musique n'en donnât des extraits, avec ce commentaire consterné : C'est terrifiant, il n'y a pas une note de juste ! Et elle s'attaquait ainsi aux airs les plus difficiles du répertoire, les deux airs de la Reine de la Nuit, les clochettes de Lakmé... les annonnant laborieusement... ".

Il faut aller voir l'interview du pianiste de Foster-Jenkins.
http://listproc.ucdavis.edu/archives/mlist/log0402/0004.html
Voir ci-dessus, message déjà repris ici.