Passion and Purity

"All English sopranos are virgins," a noted Broadway composer once moaned after an afternoon spent listening to British recordings. Chastity aside, there is a definite odor of sanctity in the tones of most English sopranos. At their best in church music by Bach, Handel and Mozart, they tend to frost the edges of more hot-blooded music. An exception who can deal both with purity and passion is British Mezzo-Soprano Janet Baker. Recently at Aldeburgh, England, she proved it with the English Opera Group by singing the tricky title role in Benjamin Britten's The Rape of Lucretia.

When he composed the opera in 1946, Britten must have had in mind a voice like Janet Baker's. He gave an unusual twist to the tale of violated-honor-and-suicide-from-shame. After the rape that precipitates the Roman Revolution of 510 B.C., Lucretia's husband consoles her by saying, "If spirit's not given, there is no need of shame." Alas, Lucretia, who found herself secretly and pleasurably stirred by the rape, promptly stabs herself in remorse.

Few singers have managed to suggest a Lucretia whose internal temperature is drastically higher than her cool exterior. Though she came on looking as wholesome as an English garden, Baker did just that. She seemed aquiver with passion, then overwhelmed with shame at her own suddenly revealed sexuality. Her voice, which can sound as pure as any singer's, took on a smoldering quality that reinforced Librettist Ronald Duncan's words:

How cruel men are . . . They wake us from The sleep of youth Into the dream of passion Then ride away While we still yearn.

For Janet Baker, Britten's Lucretia is one more success in a recent series of remarkable operatic portraits: the giggling, compliant Dorabella in Mozart's Cosi fan tutte, and twin Didos (Purcell's Dido and Aeneas and Berlioz's Les Troy ens). Still, she is a relative newcomer to opera. Her main work so far has been done in oratorios and lieder.

Janet Baker was born 37 years ago in York. She revealed musical taste early. After hearing a local Gilbert and Sullivan production, she was asked if she had liked it. "No," said the youngster. "It isn't good music and it wasn't well done."

In her teens she worked as a bank clerk to pay for voice lessons. When she was 20, she finally found a suitable teacher. "Her theory," explains Baker, "was that if it isn't easy, it's wrong. Singing is a natural function. You clear away the debris to let what's there come through." The Baker career began seriously in 1965, when Conductor Anthony Lewis asked her to sing Dido for a new recording of the Purcell opera. Soon she was singing for Giulini, Barbirolli, Szell and Klemperer. "If you can't develop with help from gigantic personalities like those," she says, "you should pack up and go home."

Developed, polished and ready for anything (except Wagner, which she resolutely refuses to try), she rapidly established herself as one of the most versatile singers of her generation. Accompanist Gerald Moore, who has heard and accompanied the best voices in the musical world for the past 40 years, says: "My idea of a great singer is one who can do everything: baroque, modern, Italian, German, opera, oratorio. Janet can do all that with absolute ease and conviction. She and Baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau are the two greatest singers in the world today."

Janet Baker has a superb natural voice, medium-sized but with a liquid, floating quality and a vast spectrum of vocal color. Her Yorkshire accent, she says, keeps her voice placed properly. And she has developed a technique that allows her to negotiate everything from strenuous Berliozian outbursts to limpid Rossinian coloratura.

In a profession where voices are sustained almost as much by egotism as by breath, she seems to take praise coolly. "There's always somebody as good as you or better," she says. "I try not to bother myself about it. I know I'll never satisfy the masses the way Sutherland does or Callas did. I could never do that sort of thing." Baker's growing number of admirers are not so sure.

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