By Will Crutchfield

There is a type of pleasure that comes from a great piece of singing and from nothing else, and it ranks pretty high in the catalogue of life’s pleasures. One of the earliest memories I associate with the name of Marilyn Horne is of sitting by the stereo as a teenager, putting the needle back again and again to hear a phrase like “tutto e imperfetto, tutto detesto”  from La donna del lago. It was just so good! The burnished quality of the chest voice, the utter certainty of intonation and rhythm, the timing and weighing, and the fabulous circumstance that the deepest note would lose nothing in timbre or volume. Once heard, never forgotten—and that accolade applies to Marilyn Horne as often as to any singer since Maria Callas.

Before anything else, this Musician of the Year is a great singer. And however narrowly, exactingly, selectively one wants to define that term, she stays on the list. She has a sound that is all her own (you don’t say that Marilyn Horne sounds like so-and-so; you might say that someone else, on selected notes, manages to sound like Marilyn Horne). She has put her stamp on certain pieces of music so that hers will always be the preferred interpretation for thousands of listeners. She has influenced a generation or more and created a point of reference and a standard. And she has given the special pleasure that accounts for the persistent appeal of classical singing itself and for the existence of voice buffs.

One of the more thoughtless ruts into which we let musical talk fall is the division between technique (as in “mere” technique) and spirit. Neyer mind that the two are inextricably linked; there is also such a thing as the spirit of technique. A part of Horne’s contribution is sheer musical zest and confidence: Here comes this unsingable thing, and she can sing it, and she knows she can sing it, and what’s more she makes music out of it. The act of surmounting tremendous difficulties with poise and élan—of executing maneuvers beyond the capacity of one’s fellow experts—has always been received as a kind of poetry. There are feats in ballet that would not be understood as “beautiful” if they were not inhumanly difficult (to see them depicted in animation would not be interesting). It is no disservice to either ballet or music to mention in the same breath the most spellbinding moments of Olympic competition. Technical mastery can be a state of grace.

In that same aria from La donna del lago there is another specimen, a long, fleet ornament leading to the reprise of “O quante lagrime.” The voice flies up to top A and down again in a spiraling roulade that lands unexpectedly, light as a hummingbird and with no preparatory deceleration, on the first syllable of “lagrime.” No number of repetitions dulls the pleasure of this effect. I’ve heard it imitated, in this aria and elsewhere, never with success: Others can sing the fast roulade, but the secret is in the unruffled pronunciation and voicing of the “la.”This calm in the athletic moment must be something like the magic people described in Nijinsky’s leaps.

One of the things Marilyn Horne has clone these past 30 years or so is to teach the modern world what a Rossini cabaletta is—how it works, what it’s worth. It’s a form that the composer himself repeated endlessly and that had all Europe in shivers of delight for a generation, but it puzzled posterity. No longer; George Bernard Shaw’s strictures against Rossini on this score still make entertaining reading, but thanks to one singer they now have to be counted among his endearing fallacies.

Other examples of how Horne effected this particular resurrection: the smooth, clear passagework in the coda of Cenerentola’s final rondo—a voice audibly having fun; the click and smack of the rhythm in “O come da quel di” from Semiramide; the easy, unemphatic swing into sexy contralto tones at “tutti la bramano” in L‘Italiana in Algeri. And then the many specimens of Horne’s patented tour de force at the final cadence, the leap from way up there to all the way down there.

(It had been suggested with some plausibility that this way of ending a cabaletta lacked authentic historical precedent, so I enjoyed a private smile on Marilyn Horne’s behalf when the identical formula was found in Donizetti’s hand writing—half-notes, high B-flat to low, marked “long”—in a lost opera of his that turned up in London ten years ago. But in any case, the most authentic facet of bel canto performance is the right of a truly great singer to invent a new ornamental trait which then enters the general vocabulary.)

Meanwhile, her merits in Rossini extend beyond this joyous athleticism (and, as we shall see, her contributions extend far beyond Rossini. Elsewhere in every one of the operas just mentioned, and in all the others by the maestro of Pesaro who she has helped revive, she gives aristocratic demonstrations of the art of true legato, the old beautiful sustained style of singing in lyrical passages: the voice even from note to note, controlled, generous, smooth in portamento, full of dynamic perspective.

Nobody else in her generation has given the operatic stage such a demonstration of the way finely calculated dynamics create musical meaning. Her Metropolitan Opera debut, as Adalgisa in Norma, was notable for beginning with a display not of vocal force, but of patrician elegance and poise in a feelingly shaded recitativo. (This was in 1970—and it came late, as her star quality was already more than clear on records and in other theaters.) Such things as crescendo, decrescendo, echo, and sforzando are part of the basic dynamic language of music, but on the stage—though we may hear some lovely floated high pianissimos from sopranos who have them—we very rarely hear these tools at work, phrase in and phrase out, over the course of an evening.

And least of all in the middle of the female voice, which we have grown accustomed to thinking of as a weak region. For Marilyn Horne it is not: partly through natural endowment, but even more through the acquisition of a disciplined and classic method. She can speak with the authority of achievement on such contested topics as breath support and the development and blending of vocal registers. She has been outspoken (it’s one of her virtues) on the misguidedness of most current voice teaching, and she’s right.

Among the benefits of this is the way she can handle the heroic recitatives of Rossini, Gluck, Handel, and Vivaldi. Many a page of their works goes by drearily, almost impotently, in other performances (even with native Italian singers), but springs to life and purpose when Marilyn Horne voices the notes.

Horne has been embraced by Italy in those works, and by the German-speaking countries in her Lieder recitals. One of the unintentionally funny lines in a tribute to the singer on 60 Minutes was the assertion that “the French applaud her like one of their own”—precisely which one of their own is so favored, I’d like to know! Her command of idiom is wide, from the pop-song “covers” she recorded in youth through the Berg and Stravinsky she sang around the world in the 1960s through the variety of her song recitals. In all of this, she represents at their very best the attributes the world ascribes to The American Singer. Versatility, unbeatable preparation, hard work, reliability, musicianship an instrumentalist can respect, and a chameleon-like knack for absorbing multiple styles: This is our great operatic export. When she started her career in the mid-1950s and took it to Germany around the end of the Eisenhower administration, she had successes in practically every sphere of activity, not excluding Early Music in its embryonic stages (Gesualdo madrigals with Robert Craft). Her Covent Garden debut was in Wozzeck, and recorded excerpts show her to have been an extraordinarily musical, accurate, singing Marie and an affectingly dramatic one.

Well before that she had recorded the superb combination of mimicry and independent artistry to be heard on the soundtrack of Carmen Jones. All through her career she has given quite serious and wide-ranging recitals; several in the list of her unforgettable phrases have come in the Lieder of Schubert and Schumann (for instance, the lingering summer-love for a spring memory in the former’s “Im Frühling”). She fills her Spanish song repertoire with brio and color. It was only gradually that the bel canto repertory, especially in her memorable partnership with Joan Sutherland, came to dominate the mix. She had proven herself already in the way that the best American singers aspire to.

But the liabilities of colorlessness and artistic malleability that sometimes go with the American assets do not apply to Horne. She has never been too flexible: Battles on principle with conductors and directors clot the narrative of her career, and temperamental confrontations have not been lacking either. This is a singer who sticks to her guns and knows how to fire them when necessary. In the 1960s, when she was reclaiming the singer’s prerogative of collaborating with the composer through ornamentation, she often had to do her most delicate vocal work under the pressure of opposition and outright hostility. It was a tough battle, which had to be fought not just through musical persuasion but also through tactics like sitting out rehearsals in her hotel room. Nerve she does not lack. In most of the world this is a war long since won, and the victories have been not only celebrated but refined, elaborated, and explored by a whole generation of singers in Horne’s debt.

And then this is, after all is said and done about virtuosity, a singer of character. She has left us a real gallery. Her Isabella and Rosina, all moxie, are familiar to every great opera house. Fewer have seen her Orfeo, but that is a special creation, deeply passionate within the most classical restraint, utterly concentrated in the desperate purpose of persuading the Furies, and then transfixed with the most serene wonder at the sight of Elysium. Fides, in Le Prophète, brought a glimpse of what Meyerbeer must once have been about: every aspect of an elaborate range of vocal effects brought to bear on the inner conflict of a mother distressed and then cruelly denied by her beloved son. Her Carmen with Leonard Bernstein was notably simple and reminded us of the inherent sex appeal of the melodies. Verdi’s Azucena is a role she didn’t sing often; I know her interpretation of it only from the records, but in her veiled tones I hear a creature hauntingly enveloped in memories, less than half-present to the actuality around her; the old gypsy’s terrible infanticide seems possible from such a damaged, hallucinating being. And to come back to Rossini, her Arsace found a chilling note of psychological truth in the unforgettable phrase “sei mia madre ognor”—the son’s acknowledgement of a mother who has, as he now knows, committed the crime he has sworn to avenge, the murder of his father. Horne’s deep, far-inward-looking notes blend with Rossini’s shuddering violin phrases in a way that makes the old opera seria much more than nominally serious.

It is not surprising that there is depth of character in the person as well. Her friends know it in the story of her life and her relationship with her daughter. Many beyond her friends have been touched by it in her lively and intelligently specific involvement in political events around the nation. Civil rights and women’s issues are important to her, and the money a superstar singer is able to put into Senate and House campaigns can make a considerable difference on those issues. Politics is in her heritage: Marilyn Horne’s parents were liberal, laborite, voter-registration activists in coal-and-steel Pennsylvania, and the singer’s public debut, at an even tenderer age than that of the child star Adelina Patti, was actually at a campaign rally for Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Some of this largesse is also to be directed toward the profession: Many of her appearances nowadays are benefits for the Marilyn Horne Foundation, which is dedicated to the rescue of the song recital. For all her fame as a star of bel canto, Horne has for many years devoted at least half her time to recital engagements. Her repertoire is wide and non-obvious; she is a serious participant in this specialized world as well as in the broader one represented by Barbiere and Carmen. And while Rossini and Bizet are in relative good health with the audiences of the world, Hugo Wolf and Henri Duparc are in guarded condition. So is the forum in which a singer and an audience get to know one another most intimately and freely, the solo recital, the Liederabend.

In the days of the concert tour—when culture came to the smaller cities not through regional opera companies or television but through violinists, pianists, and singers who went from train to hotel to stage door—the recital was a strong artistic and commercial proposition. If its values are to survive into a new generation, it needs help, and here too Marilyn Horne proposes to put her money where her mouth has already been for years. (A related pet project: Horne wants to reclaim Town Hall, New York’s best but nowadays neglected recital hall, for classical artists and audiences.)

She is also making a tremendously practical contribution by advising, helping, and more recently actively teaching, young singers in whose potential she believes. Her master classes at Carnegie Hall last season were praised on all sides and only confirmed what her colleagues have long known: This is a singer who knows how she does what she does. When Horne eventually retires—no time soon, to judge by her recent singing—the loss will be softened by anticipation of what sort of students she might produce when she is able to teach full time.

Even if she were to retire today, she would look back on a remarkably complete career, a career with very few things left undone. What missed roles might one regret? Wagner, some have said; Horne made some experiments in that direction, but I doubt the soprano roles would ever have lain right for her voice. And any season she wants, she could today make a star contribution to a Ring cycle by taking on Erda. Some more Handel, perhaps (she had done a memorable Orlando and Rinaldo, but there are many roles just right for her). But in this instance—just as Callas pointed to possibilities in Rossini but left them for Sutherland and Horne to fulfill—she has given an example that the younger generation is already carrying out. Mozart, I would say: Especially, with their sense of merriment and fantastic skill in precision-duetting, I wish she and Sutherland had done Così fan tutte in their heyday. Horne’s Dame Quickly in Falstaff was long anticipated and did not disappoint when it finally arrived; perhaps someday she can be tempted into an all-star American Mikado and reveal something of the humanity and musical beauty that is usually covered with mugging in the role of Katisha. If she hasn’t done as much as one might have thought for contemporary music, meanwhile, contemporary music until recently wasn’t doing a heck of a lot for classical voices. Now that things are changing, Horne has commissioned and championed new works from William Bolcom and done a very helpful star turn in the Met’s Ghosts of Versailles. More is very likely to be expected.

Dare we expect a successor? There are already many in the sense that possibilities opened by Horne are being pursued. Today it’s easy to find a good coloratura mezzo-soprano, and there is even one, Cecilia Bartoli, who has captured the public imagination as a unique artist. She is utterly, utterly unlike Horne, and that is in its own way a tribute: If the trails she blazed led only to imitation, they would be revealed as dead ends, which is clearly not the case. Anyway, the real greats—the Fischer-Dieskaus and Callases and Galli-Curcis and Ponselles and Chaliapins—can count as successors only new uniquenesses, new greats. Marilyn Horne stands in that line for sure.

Will Crutchfield was a music critic for the New York Times from 1984 to 1989. Since 1991, he has conducted opera with companies including Wolf Trap, Caramoor, Sarasota, the Mark Morris Dance Group, the Connecticut Early Music Festival, and the Teatro Colón de Bogotá. He continues to write occasionally for the Times, The New Yorker, and Opera News.