Teresa
Berganza, canto as expression of a style
She’s got black eyes and a white simile. Her calling is music
and she was born to sing.
She has forever marked Dorabella, Zerlina and Cherubino; Rosina, Angelina
and Isabella, Perichole; Dulcinea; Charlotte, Carmen… with archetype
characters.
| “Teresa
is inwardness, musical delicacy, sensuality and fantasy made
poetry.” |
Her voice, the subduing voice of Teresa Berganza is
something like the invocation of a mystery made accomplice to the
shinning of her gaze; a voice full of magic, that isn’t an
intention of itself but natural meaning to the service of a sentiment.
She insufflates on a song both the ideal lyric purity of a melody
and the taking of an existentialist dramatic passion; a voice to
and for every vowel; a voice for musical words, which she melts
in a prodigious way.
Teresa Berganza enriches the sounds through inexorable
phraseology; managing to send forth nitid words through a melody,
her “legato” fuses rhythms and cadencies like a goldsmith.
In Teresa Berganza everything previously said gives
an abundant argumentation to deduct an aesthetic synthesis, over
which a sound personality lays a style. One sings as one is; and
Teresa Berganza is inwardness, musical delicacy, sensuality and
fantasy made poetry. That is Berganza’s style. A style minted
from that day in Aix-en-Provence, in which French critics announced
the birth of an epoch-making mezzo-soprano; confirmed in Salzburg,
to reach its peak in Edinburgh; when Teresa assumes the difficult
and transcendental commitment of facing Carmen, a woman-character
of soul and body that places freedom and love before her own life…
 |
Berganza’s style bewitched the Paris Opera House,
Vienna, Scala, Covent Garden, the Rome Opera House, the Buenos Aires’s
Colon, the New York Metropolitan, Dallas Opera, Chicago, San Francisco,
the Hamburg Opera, Stockholm, etc., under the conducting of Giulini,
Rescigno, von Karajan, Solti, Metha, Abbado, Baremboim, Muti, Adler…
an the scenic precision of Zeffirelli, Rennert Ponelle, Strehler,
Faggioni…
| “Teresa is a way of feeling and being,
a vibrating style full of charisma and the majesty of a goddess” |
Teresa is de only female member of academic rank in
the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando.
Undoubtedly Mozart, Händel, Purcell, Offenbach, Bizet and Massenet
in the immense space of their glory, would tremble in pleasure if
they heard this outstanding Madrid citizen unravel the mystery they
left for us in their arias.
After all Teresa Berganza is more than a mezzo-soprano.
Teresa is a way of feeling and being, a vibrating style full of
charisma and the majesty of a goddess..
- Alfonso Saiz Valdivielso
|