As I think I've mentioned before, in the winter of 1934 I discovered the Metropolitan Opera Broadcasts and was directly and forever hooked on the communicatory powers of the trained human voice. Shortly afterward I bought a windup Victrola and became a dedicated hunter of old vocal recordings. Lotte Lehmann called the phonograph record ''the bridge to immortality." I still, after all these years, listen in wondering disbelief to voices long silent--some of them stilled nearly twenty years before I was born. So it is that I welcome a recording of Maria Cebotari and hope that it may provide others with an initiation into a fascinating source of pleasure.
Maria Cebotari (Chay-bo-TAH-ree) never, alas! sang here, but there are those of us who remember with pleasure some of her films from the late 1930s in which she impressed as a beautiful woman, a sensitive actress, and a fine singer. She was born in Bessarabia in 1910, became a member of an expatriate Russian theater company at sixteen, and eventually wound up in Berlin where her voice was discovered by Fritz Busch, chief conductor and general manager of the Dresden State Opera. She made her debut there as Mimi in "La Boheme" at twenty-one and was an immediate star. Later she divided her time between the Dresden and Berlin opera houses. At Bruno Walter's invitation she became a regular at the Salzburg Festival. She created leading roles in Richard Strauss's "Die schweigsame Frau" and in operas by Einem, Eugen d' Albert, Schoeck, and Sutermeister. She was extremely popular in musical films; all those in which she appeared were created for her, and in three of them she played opposite the great Beniamino Gigli. In one of the earliest she met the Viennese matinee idol Gustav Diessel, and divorced her estranged husband to marry him.
The War put an end to any immediate hopes of an international career, and, with the bombing of Dresden and Berlin, eventually of any career at all. In 1946, however, Cebotari sang in the first postwar Salzburg Festival and joined the Vienna State Opera. Only then, with overwhelmingly successful appearances in London, did the great career seem about to begin. But a malign fate once again intervened: Diessel was dying of cancer, and shortly before his passing in 1948, Cebotari discovered that she too was doomed. She continued to sing until March 31, 1949, and succumbed at thirty-nine, a little over two months later. Her two orphaned sons were adopted by the pianist Clifford Curzon and his wife.
Cebotari did not make her reputation either on her looks or her tragedy. She was an extraordinarily intelligent and sensitive artist who was regarded as a phenomenon in her day--a forerunner of Maria Callas, if you will--for she sang coloratura, lyric, and dramatic roles with equal ease. She did virtually all of the Mozart, Richard Strauss, and Puccini heroines, and was noted also for her Violetta in "Traviata," Tatiana in "Eugene Onegin," and the four heroines in "The Tales of Hoffmann." She was equally at home in operetta.
As is now well known, the Germans pioneered high-quality tape recording in the 1930s. Presumably the recordings offered here are from the many German radio tapes that have recently shaken off the bonds of international bureaucracy. Heard with Cebotari is the Danish tenor Helge Rosvaenge who for decades was the finest dramatic tenor in Germany.
