“One of the most delicate, sighing, judiciously used women’s voices one might ever hear.”


“Licia Albanese,” he says, “would move on stage purposefully, with precision, painting her tones with careful control of her means and a clear perception of their end”

"Licia es muy inteligente y nunca fuerza su voz. Cuando la orquesta la cubre en el primer acto, ella lo deja pasar y no trata de superarla. Es una persona muy emocional, pero el rol no la destruye como lo hace con otras."

Licia Albanese's Micaela seemed to know her away around with the soldiers better than most Micaelas. She was given a long round of applause after her aria in the third act.

Licia Albanese is the best Micaela one has ever heard. Not only did she sing her long aria of the third act most beautifully, but here was a certain girlish lightness and humor in the way she sang and acted during the first scene.

Licia Albanese sang all of Micaela's music superbly, and made a fully believable character of the peasant girl.

por lo que estoy a la espera de ver qué nos hace en Butterfly...

A New Butterfly

After an absence of nearly three years from this stage, Puccini's "Madama Butterfly" returned to the Metropolitan Opera House last night, and Licia Albanese, in an appealing impersonation of the ill-fated Cio-Cio-San, won unusually vigorous applause from her first American audience.

The new soprano who, it was said, is a native of Bari, in southeastern Italy, came here with relatively little advance reclamé, although official advance information revealed that she began her career by winning the first prize over, more than 300 rivals in a national vocal competition, and has sung in major opera theaters in !Italy, France, England and elsewhere. The title role of "Madama Butterfly" was the vehicle of her debut in Parma, and her interpretation of it impressed as that of an artist who was devoted to the character and had studied it thoroughly from a musical and dramatic point of view.

In its first demonstration here her voice proved to be of unusually appealing quality, and maintained its best standards with laudable consistency. The prevailing steadiness of tone, noticeable during the solo which accompanies Butterfly's first entrance, at a time when debut nerves are most likely to militate against vocal firmness, suggested a well-schooled tone production, and her singing gave a communicative impression of emotional color. The volume of tone did not seem particularly large; there were moments when the quality was slightly veiled in the lower register in passages which, while artistically sung and calling for intimacy of expression, did not always carry through the orchestration. But Mme. Albanese can be expected to cope with this difficulty with the aid of increasing acquaintance with this theater. Her high notes carried well and, apart from a slight hardness of timbre at the outset, merited praise for their clarity and focus; dynamic shading was well employed to achieve a desired expressive result.
Her interpretation, pictorially convincing, was developed along individual lines with exceptional wealth of detail in pose, gesture, expression and points of stage business which generally contributed to a vivid realization of the character, even if some of this detail seemed likely to be most effective in a theater smaller than the Metropolitan. "Un bel di vedremo" was set forth as part of a continuous action rather than as a featured aria, and thus gained dramatically, if not without a certain sacrifice of the musical line. The impersonation, however, did not sacrifice expressive values as a whole to fine points, and the wide range of emotions inherent in the role, and the tragedy of Butterfly's fate, were persuasively and communicatively realized.

Mme. Albanese, who had apparently lost no time in winning the warmly expressed liking of her hearers, shared many curtain calls after each act with her colleagues.

A new Butterfly, in the person of Licia Albanese, who then made her Metropolitan debut, was seen last night in the title part of Puccini's opera. She quickly won the audience's approval by the freshness of feeling, the interest of detail in her performance and the prevailing, eloquence of her song.

It need not be claimed that the voice is a. great one, but it has beauty and sensuous color, and is employed with interpretive resource. It is true that the love scene fell short, where the soprano was concerned, because it, needed a broader line, more opulence of tone and intensity of feeling. On this occasion the passage was- decorative rather than convincing. It might have had greater effect with a singer of less sensibility and more sheer drive and lungpower, since, after all, the scene is not particularly subtle and looks for much of its result to the sheer "juice" of the melodies and the splendor of Puccini's orchestration with its unisons and richness of tone color.

The question was then whether Mme. Albanese could sound the greater emotional depths of the scenes to come. As it developed, she did this, and without resort, to the slightest exaggeration or mere theatricalism to make her point. She sounded the note of tragedy and made it the more poignant by the constant light and shade of her dramatic interpretation. There was a real simplicity and contagious emotion in it, and everything was so thoughtfully proportioned that climaxes had never to be forced or passion torn to tatters to make it carry across the footlights. Several times the audience interrupted Mme. Albanese with applause. Her performance. it should be added, was augmented in effect by an unusually good stage ensemble.

La voz de la Albanese no era nada bella. Más bien feota y un tanto árida.

Sus virtudes eran, efectivamente, la dicción, la sensibilidad, las intenciones, la intensidad dramática. Si bien con los oídos actuales a alguién le puede resultar un tanto "demodè" o con algunos tintes vulgares.

Miss Albanese, however, was miscast as Nannetta, despite her expert contribution to the ensembles. Singing full voice virtually all the time, she eradicated the wistfulness of Nannetta's exquisite, tiny threads of melody ; and in the forest scene she dispelled the mystery of the midsummer night by continuing to sing loudly in her invocation of the nymphs and elves, flouting Verdi's repeated markings of dolce, dolcissimo, and morendo.