Duet with a Ghost - Barcarolle with Emma Calvé

It felt like an unpardonable liberty to dare to duet with one of the greatest artists of all time, but it was done with great respect and I loved doing it. If you know of any other records like this one, with only half of a duet recorded, I’d love to do this again!

Footnotes:

The original record
Some time in 1919, Emma Calvé recorded the famous Barcarolle (Belle nuit, ô nuit d’amour) by Jacques Offenbach from his last opera, “Les Contes d’Hoffmann” for Pathé. Curiously, Calvé decided to sing this duet as a solo, swapping between the two lines, originally written for soprano and mezzo soprano. She also transposed it up a semitone from the original key, from D to Eb. She frequently transposed to suit how she was feeling in that moment, sometimes up and down.

The duet
I worked out which notes Calvé was singing, and filled in the other harmony myself. It was a very enjoyable challenge, matching my voice to hers, trying to blend, especially on the unison passage, and trying to keep in time with her slight alterations of the rhythm (tempo rubato) and subtle grace notes. If you want to see the score I was reading from, with all my preparatory notes and markings, it is visible to my Tier 2 & 3 patrons on Patreon [  / phantomsoftheopera  ]

My recording
This was recorded exactly as you see it here, with no editing. Just out of shot of the camera is a ribbon microphone which was set a few feet in front of the horn and me and captured us both together. I found I had to sing quite quietly so as not to drown Calvé out. Although the very large horn of the EMG gramophone (34 inches) produces a loud sound, it was still softer than my voice.
Thanks go to Paul Steinson for providing the record, Graham Rankin for the Pathé tone arm, and Ahmed Abdeldayem for the “soundbox saver”!

The artist
Emma Calvé (1858?-1942) was one of the great artists in the history of opera. She had it all: an exceptional voice, acting talent, and beauty. A review in the Sunday Times of her first performance at Covent Garden on 16th May 1892 said, ‘besides being a superb actress Mme Calvé is a remarkably fine singer. Her voice, still fresh and unimpaired by hard work, is one of those expressive organs that can convey a given emotion without the aid of language. Her command of tone-colour is extraordinary; there are moments when the power and intensity of her notes thrill one to the core. The timbre is wonderfully bright and resonant, the character of the voice essentially dramatic, and from top to bottom of the scale there is not a trace of vibrato.’
In her autobiography Calvé described the range of her voice around the time of her début circa 1881, ‘My voice had a very great range, going from low A in the deep chest tones to E above high C in the high head notes. In fact, my range was so great that I was able to sing both Hérodias and Salomé in “Hérodiade,” the first being a contralto and the second a soprano rôle.”* I don’t know if Calvé ever sang in “Les Contes d’Hoffmann”, but she may have been one of very few singers who probably could have sung all three soprano rôles as well as the mezzo soprano one!
She made many recordings between 1902 and 1920. This Barcarolle was one of her last records.

*Hermann Klein, Great Women-Singers of my Time, 1931, p.151
*Emma Calvé, My Life, trans. Rosamund Gilder, 1922, p.32