The great mezzo-soprano Teresa Berganza has died. David Patrick Stearns paid tribute to the Spanish mezzo, who enjoyed a long career and whose remarkable vocal qualities were rooted in a gift for deeply thought characterisation, in the May 2020 issue of Gramophone, which we reprint below.

Before our current era of star mezzo-sopranos, there was Teresa Berganza, who carved out a large, enterprising repertoire on stage, disc and film, defying nationalistic pigeonholes that trap even the biggest opera stars. Now 87, the Madrid-born Teresa Berganza Vargas was never a vocal powerhouse, not singing anything heavier than Massenet’s Charlotte (Werther). But from her early secondary-role appearance in the 1955 recording of Millán’s zarzuela La dogaresa (alongside Pilar Lorengar), she consistently distinguished herself over the decades with two particular strengths: language and legato, with one dictating the use of the other. Certain roles were inevitabilities for her: the title-role of Carmen, Rosina in Il barbiere di Siviglia, Cherubino in Le nozze di Figaro, Dulcinée in Don Quichotte and Salud in La vida breve. But beyond those, her language and legato allowed her to expand what a mezzo could be, and in ways that were so fully realised that nearly everything about her makes sense to 21st-century ears.

Teresa Berganza at the Teatro Real in 2013 (photo Javier del Real)

Her career began early enough (she was aged 22) for her to sing alongside large-personality singers such as Boris Christoff and Maria Callas, and yet she was already able to ‘shape-shift’ her voice in keeping with the needs of the music. For Mozart, her voice was clean and slim. And in an age when some singers still sang recitatives like an obligation, she mined them for their music, linguistic sense and character information in ways that are a model for modern singers. Her streamlined coloratura runs in Rossini are unhindered by the excessive aspirating of previous generations. Early Baroque composers such as Monteverdi and Barbara Strozzi were easily in reach, as were German Lieder, including those of Hugo Wolf.

Berganza’s distinctive legato – minimally disturbed by vibrato – gave her voice a kind of transparency that allowed her word colouring to be unusually clear and vivid. Thanks to her dramatic imagination, no two phrases in a Rossini vocal run were expressively alike, even when the music itself was spinning in a sequence of similar patterns. Repeated words in Carmen, such as ‘amour’ in the Habanera, became different facets of the same emotion, gently cooing in one iteration, forcefully invasive in another. Never did she indulge in vocal effects for their own sake. Many singers develop a ‘kid’ voice for Mussorgsky’s The Nursery (which was part of her recital repertoire, sung in credible Russian), but Berganza just lightened her voice a bit and probed the psychology of the song-cycle’s troublesome protagonist.

Her use of words was marked by fastidious enunciation, but her vocal sound was the primary vehicle of meaning and emotion. Quite revealing is her little-known Dido and Aeneas recording (live from Aix-en-Provence in 1960, on the Walhall label), which signalled an infrequent foray into the English language. The individual words aren’t always clear but their emotional content is explored and projected with a magnitude that is certainly suggested by Purcell’s music but rarely realised, at least with these kinds of colouristic resources.

For all of her versatility, Berganza respected her vocal limits – no doubt why she enjoyed a 40-year-plus career. She eventually pulled back from singing Charlotte in Werther, explaining that the role’s emotions demanded a kind of vocalism that wasn’t healthy for her. There was talk of her singing Violetta in La traviata, but this never came to fruition. Her Carmen is a great example of meeting a role on her own vocal terms. Berganza would never command the lower-range Goya-esque dark tones of Marilyn Horne, but that kind of colour isn’t necessary – at least for Berganza – in the face of death. In confronting Don José, Berganza’s Carmen stands her ground with devastating straightforwardness. Heat is definitely there, but she’s not out to convince anybody of anything. She simply states who she is with a disarming clarity that allows no negotiation.

By the 1980s, Berganza had recorded some recital discs for the Swiss label Claves. The first of these (released 1983) marked a return to the work that had featured in her early debut recital, Frauenliebe und -Leben (Claves 50 8204). She and pianist Ricardo Requejo avoided any semblance of the straight tempos observed by her German counterparts; their highly flexible approach allowed her to tell the song-cycle’s story by taking extra time to explore the emotions at hand.

In 1986, Berganza returned to the music that lies at the core of any Spanish recitalist’s heart – Falla’s Siete Canciones populares españolas (Claves 50 8405). Though she had at least 15 more years of singing ahead of her, this recording is a kind of summing-up. After years of pouring her vocal genie into small, stylish bottles for works such as Offenbach’s La Périchole, Berganza unleashed her full colour and passion potential in these folk-based pieces. The voice simply had never seemed more resplendent, with every phrase unfolding with a naturalness that suggested she was tapping into some elemental depths beyond her, spurred on by the bold pianism of Juan Antonio Álvarez Parejo. Berganza may always be best remembered for her Carmen, but the sum of her art is heard in Falla.