Marilyn at the Met

The essence of bel canto is making the vocally difficult sound delectable. Long, lung-stretching phrases, rococo trills, breathtaking leaps of voice slide into the air and ear with soft, summery ease and grace. The quintessential bel canto role is Norma, the most taxing female part in all opera. Giuditta Pasta, the first singer to try the part after Bellini created it in 1831, found it so difficult that the violins had to play out of tune deliberately to disguise her failures.

Last week New York's Metropolitan Opera offered a new Norma production with Joan Sutherland in the title role. Hardly had she finished her first duet with Mezzo-Soprano Marilyn Horne (as Adalgisa) than the audience began to cheer and occasionally stamp and yell. The enthusiasm was fully justified. Sutherland's voice warmed toward a soaring, languorous tenderness. Horne, making one of the greatest Met debuts, showed a vocal reach and richness that exceeded nearly anybody's gasp. In Mira, O Norma, closing Act III, the two together floated along like two strings of a violin being stroked by the same bow. The way their voices blended and interwove produced moments of sheer delight--moments to justify opera and fleetingly suggest that the shaky conspiracy called civilization may actually be worth all the trouble.

Horne's triumph at age 36 raised an inevitable question: why had it taken her so long to get to the Met? The often suggested answer is Rudolf Sing's well-known preference for European singers. But the truth is that Home was not interested in making her debut in such customary mezzo roles as the bitch (Amneris) in Aida or the witch (Azucena) in Trovatore. What she wanted and got was a role demanding enough to show off a voice already broader in stylistic range than that of any soprano singing opera today.

Lyric Triumphs. Like Beverly Sills, who also has never sung at the Met --and should--Marilyn Horne has been hailed in concerts and operas everywhere else. She also put in three years singing in provincial opera houses in Germany, an apprenticeship that left her able to cope with anything--including an orchestra pit so low that she lost a few bars because she could not see the conductor's baton. Subsequent triumphs at the San Francisco and Chicago Lyric Operas, Covent Garden and La Scala were proof of her versatility. In 1960, back in the U.S., she married Henry Lewis, a young Negro who now is conductor of the New Jersey Symphony. Though her white friends warned her against it, black-white hostilities have been little problem. What caused a strain, Marilyn admits, was not an interracial marriage but an interartistic marriage. "We stay away from each other before concert time," she says. "Until we learned that, it nearly ruined us."

She has been singing with Joan Sutherland since 1961. "It's like a fairy tale," Marilyn explains their collaboration. "We never have to work to sing together. We just learn our parts and come together, and it's been there all along." Her next new role will be as Fides in Meyerbeer's Le Prophete, which she will sing this summer both in Turin and London. "Fides is Norma for contraltos," she explains. "I'm looking forward to it." Meanwhile Rudolf Bing, the Met and its followers can look forward to 18 more performances of Norma before the season closes.

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