Autre appréciation d'auditeur sur le phénomène Foster-Jenkins :
http://www.epinions.com/content_84551175812Soprano Florence Foster Jenkins: Patron Saint of the Absurd
Dec 22 '02 (Updated Jan 04 '03)
Author's Product Rating
Product Rating: 4.0
Pros
This unintentionally hilarious singer will have you howling with laughter.
Cons
The shrillness can be overwhelming; you may need a break from it and your laughter.
The Bottom Line
This recording is marketed as a novelty, but the singer it highlights took herself in dread seriousness. The distance between self-perception and truth has never been greater. Utterly hilarious.
Full Review
The philosopher Thomas Nagel has written that a situation is absurd when it includes a “conspicuous discrepancy between pretension or aspiration and reality.” There is no greater an instance of this discrepancy I know of than the career of the high coloratura soprano, Florence Foster Jenkins. Fully convinced in the beauty of her vocal prowess, she was probably the worst singer ever to hold a solo concert at Carnegie Hall (October 25th, 1944), or anywhere else, for that matter.
The Carnegie Hall concert, given only a month before her death at the age of 76, was the apotheosis of a bizarre career. Tickets were very hard to come by, because she seldom gave recitals, and had attained an almost cult status as a woman convinced of her greatness but wholly incapable of carrying a tune. She was apparently aware of the derision and ridicule she reaped from concert goers and critics, but would attribute the laughter that broke forth from crowds, as well as the desultory press, to the slovenly manners and tastes of heathens who could not appreciate her talent.
Jenkins possessed a number of quirks and idiosyncrasies that elevate the levels of absurdity that she inadvertently cultivated. Her recitals were accompanied by extravagant costumes, with no fewer than three changes per evening. A taxicab crash in 1943 made her believe that she could sing “a higher F than ever before,” and rather than suing the company, she sent the driver a box of fine cigars. She doled out tickets to her own concerts from a hotel suite, and offered her customers a complimentary sherry.
Knowing this context (which is more fully fleshed out in this CD’s liner notes) nevertheless can not prepare anyone for the shock of actually hearing her recorded voice; if anything, the knowledge that Jenkins is taking herself very seriously only can heighten the odd, excruciatingly funny experience of listening to this disc.
The CD has been remastered from original 78s recorded over separate sessions. Apparently, Jenkins had little patience for the recording studio or the tedium of perfection. She proclaimed “perfect” at most first takes, and moved on to the next.
How to describe her voice? Occasionally she hits the correct pitch, but only by accident. Completely tone deaf, she is otherwise well above and below her mark. She could be a Monty Python actor singing broad, comic strains in falsetto, but of course, she is attempting opera in all earnestness. Nevertheless her voice has that thin and strident quality of a man singing in his upper registers (notwithstanding the counter tenors and castratis of the world). She has little if any sense of timing, and erratically speeds up and slows down, certainly to the amazement and chagrin of her faithful accompanist. She moves in and out of a sour vibrato unexpectedly, and slides ungracefully through the scale to hit just the wrong pitch. Often, she simply squawks and wails like a dying bird or some other, as yet discovered animal. And yet—beneath this abyss of talent, this wayward and pathetically faltering warbling—there surges a joyous spirit, completely relaxed in its moment, full of delight and conviction. Hilarious as it is to listen to her vain attempts at music making, we are inexorably pulled along with her journey and somehow can’t help but feel joyous with her, an emotion that mixes uncomfortably yet palpably with our derisive laughter. She inspires laughter, but also a curious admiration. As one contemporary critic of hers wrote: “She was exceedingly happy in her work. It is a pity so few artists are. And the happiness was communicated as if by magic to her hearers.”
The selections on the disc are erratic in their musical taste. We find Mozart, Gounod, and Strauss on the one hand, but decidedly lesser talents like Liadoff, David, Biassy and Cosme McMoon (her intrepid accompanist) also represented. Not that the selection really matters, since she screws everything up indiscriminately, making all of the selections sound like a cross between the caterwauling of a cat in heat and a Victorian dilettante of the upper crust. Most famous of all—at least in my family—is her “Queen of the Night” aria from Mozart’s Die Zauberflote. Notoriously difficult for any singer, this piece is the perfect vehicle to show off Jenkins’ worst. On the first few listenings, it may be difficult to hear this, however, since you will be laughing so hard. Her forays into Romantic and “exotic” territories such a Mexican serenade and the “Bell Song” from Delibes’ Lakme are so awful as to beggar belief.
The disc concludes with something extraordinary, indeed. If you thought that Jenkins was bad, wait until you hear the selections from Gounod’s Faust as sung by Jenny Williams (soprano) and Thomas Burns (baritone). Having translated the French text into English (a dubious endeavor), they proceed to out-do Jenkins in their awfulness. Actually, Williams is merely mediocre (i.e. a few notches above Jenkins). But Thomas Burns is extravagantly bad. In all truth, he sounds uncannily like Elmer Fudd, with the same nasal voice and portentous, tragic vibrato. Hearing his litany of “O! Marguerita”s and “I love you!”s belted in earnest, throaty groans is to witness the airy heights of absurdity. The knowledge that the “Final Trio” from the opera is here sung as a duet only increases the ludicrousness of their efforts.
Note: Some background in classical music obviously helps appreciate the full travesty of these singers’ achievements, but this disc can be appreciated by anyone. In other words, the inadvertent humor is not part of a musical in-joke only available to the cognoscenti.
If you want to listen to clips of the program, visit:
http://www.iclassics.com/iclassics/album.jsp?selectionId=12573All tracks from the CD are selected; start with tracks 1, 4, 9 and 12 ...