“I belong to a group of singers who gave too much of themselves... it was a losing battle against myself to control and save my forces.” That was Maria Caniglia talking, with a remarkable degree of self-knowledge, to Lanfranco Rasponi in The Last Prima Donnas (Gollancz: 1984) a couple of years before she died. Her later comment that “I suffered a great deal in the theatre, for every time I sang I conferred all my heart and soul” is self-evident in all these performances, even in the 1930 Columbias recorded when she was 25 and on the brink of her long career at La Scala.
Her Gioconda, Madeleine, Manon Lescaut and Tosca are already beings of flesh and blood, their interpreter living every moment of their traumas in the generous-hearted manner that was to be a characteristic of all her recordings. Yet there’s another Caniglia here. She was popular in Wagner, and her Italian-language versions of Elsa’s two outpourings disclose a fine-grained mezza voce allied to a pure line not always apparent in her later work – though it is certainly present at a key moment in one of her rare Italian wartime HMVs. I have seldom heard the rising phrase beginning “O finisci di battere e muor” in Amelia’s Act 2 aria sung so quietly and inwardly: nor have there been many more equally phrased and rapt accounts of “Tacea la notte”, a recording from the same period.
Caniglia believed that her wartime Cetra discs were her best and that’s confirmed by the long duet between Leonora and Padre Guardiano (Pasero – excellent) from the ‘complete’ 1941 Forza, where she marries her famed ‘involvement’ with singing that has most of the classical virtues of a Verdian spinto. And don’t overlook another rarity, her 1936 reading of an aria from Giordano’s Siberia, a lovely piece of work.
The 1946 DBs of verismo arias, frowned on by the old Record Guide, certainly show a vocal decline, but the passionate intensity makes one overlook, almost, some uncomfortable moments: here are Santuzza, La Wally and Adriana as suffering women to the life. The familiar flame in Caniglia’s tone is still very much there and it’s something to be grateful for today in an era of all-purpose, safer singers.'