The acclaimed historian John Rosselli poignantly concluded the preface of his book on singers: ‘What I owe my late wife Eleanor Timbres Rosselli cannot be stated, though it might be sung.’Footnote ¹ The voicing of loss is indeed where opera began, with Monteverdi’s treatment of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. And one of the most memorable examples of recent times, where the artist herself came to symbolise an act of irreplaceable loss, is Kathleen Ferrier’s rendition of ‘Che farò senza Euridice’ from Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice (1762).

Gluck famously remarked that ‘Nothing but a change in the mode of expression is needed to turn my aria “Che farò senza Euridice” into a dance for marionettes.’Footnote ² This, then, is an aria in which the composer acknowledges that meaning is constructed almost entirely by the singer’s capacity to imbue the music with a lacerating emotional intensity. But why set a lament in a major key in the first place? It is a question that has exerted the attentions of various scholars from philosophical and musicological perspectives.Footnote ³ A different light might be offered by a composer who understood opera as theatre. A century after the premiere of Orfeo, Giuseppe Verdi (then composing Aida) sought to reveal the ‘heart of a desperate woman burning for love’ that lay beneath Amneris’s legalistic words as she attempted to negotiate a marriage with the reluctant Radames: ‘Music is splendidly able to succeed in depicting this state of mind and, in a certain way, in saying two things at once. It is a quality of this art hardly considered by critics and held in low esteem by composers.’Footnote ⁴ Might not Gluck have been attempting something similar? His librettist, Ranieri de’ Calzabigi, stated that at the outset of their collaboration he had declaimed the drama to Gluck, indicating the ‘nuances’ that he wanted included in the composition: ‘the pauses, the slowing down, the speeding up, the sound of the voice, now stronger, now weaker as in an aside’.Footnote ⁵ Are Orfeo’s grief-laden words deliberately set against music that in its major-key refrains encapsulates the joyous love he shared with Euridice? In both recitatives preceding and following the aria, references to Euridice are generally with major chords, while references to Orfeo’s own grief are in the minor key. Each line in the refrain is shared between Orfeo himself (‘Che farò? Dove andrò?’) and the object of his desire (‘senza Euridice’, ‘senza il mio ben’), thus capturing the tension created between present anguish and memories of happiness: indeed, the greater that love, the greater the pain. So, too, do music and text express both emotions together.Footnote ⁶ Much depends, of course, on the singer’s expressivity. Gluck wrote for Gaetano Guadagni;Footnote ⁷ Berlioz, for the French revision in 1859, benefitted from Pauline Viardot:Footnote ⁸ both artists were singing-actors of especial renown. For British audiences in the twentieth century, the aria became ineluctably associated with a singer from the concert platform: Kathleen Ferrier.

Ferrier made five recordings in total of ‘Che farò’, three of which are discussed here.Footnote ⁹ She first sang the aria (in English translation) at a recital in Crewe on 10 March 1943, just a few weeks after her professional career began in earnest.Footnote ¹⁰ It soon assumed a prominent place in her repertory and was first recorded by Decca in 1946. Roger Parker has described how dated that recording can seem in retrospect with Ferrier’s ‘plummy contralto’ and exaggerated diction.Footnote ¹¹ Yet given the wartime context of those early performances, it is not difficult to see why the aria forged a bond with her audiences, many of whom were in mourning for family and friends. And Ferrier’s interpretation was somehow profoundly English – not only in the language of the text, but also in its almost Dunkirk spirit of stoicism. This is not an Orfeo on the verge of suicide but rather a dignified acceptance of loss: a bowing of the head in quiet anguish.

Parker found himself reconciled to Ferrier’s unique artistry on learning of her final performance in the role at Covent Garden in 1953, when in the grip of metastatic breast cancer she sang the aria moments after shattering her femur on stage.Footnote ¹² It was her last public performance.Footnote ¹³ Yet although no recording exists of that ultimate encounter with Orfeo, it was undoubtedly very different to her earlier effort. The development of her interpretative powers in the role began with a production of Orfeo ed Euridice at Glyndebourne in 1947, conducted by Fritz Stiedry.Footnote ¹⁴ It seems plain from her letters that Ferrier, wholly untrained in dramatic art and in the midst of only her second opera production (the first was Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia at Glyndebourne in 1946),Footnote ¹⁵ struggled with Stiedry’s demands to relocate her noble but emotionally muted Orfeo within the more ardent sphere of Italian operatic traditions:

The tension between singer and conductor is apparent in the recording made by Decca. In his review for The New York Times, Howard Taubman contrasted the ‘loftiness and restraint’ of Ferrier’s performance with the ‘passion and intensity’ brought to the aria by Cloe Elmo, where ‘the music emerged with striking humanity and contemporaneous impact’.Footnote ¹⁷ Ferrier’s recording is certainly less convincing in some respects than her earlier version in English. Stiedry’s tempo is notably swifter, clearly aiming at a sense of urgency, but Ferrier often simply sounds rushed. Her tone is warmer but also thicker at times, without its usual sheen and clarity. The Italian pronunciation is marred by her English accent, such as the diphthongs on the closed ‘o’ sounds and the heavy emphasis on the second syllable of ‘mio’. The climactic notes on the high F are thin and strained.

Over the next years Ferrier sang the role in several productions – in Amsterdam in 1949, and subsequently in the USA. Her confidence was growing: in Amsterdam on 12 July 1949 she wrote: ‘Last Orfeo tonight! I think I’m very good now in it! Ben [Britten] and Peter [Pears] here – both poppets!’Footnote ¹⁸ Two years later, she reprised the role with the Netherlands Opera conducted by Charles Bruck. A letter to her sister on 11 January reveals both her greater ease onstage as well as the way in which she distinguished opera from concert performance:

Opera thus continued to pose a dilemma of authenticity for Ferrier: able to immerse herself fully in the moment when communing solely with the music in a recital, she obviously still felt that the trappings of theatricality (mise-en-scène, costume) hindered rather than released her inspiration.

Three months later, on 10 April 1951, Ferrier underwent a mastectomy for breast cancer, followed by six weeks of radiation treatment. She resumed her concert work on 19 June, and on 1 July flew to Amsterdam to sing at the Holland Festival in various works that included three performances of Orfeo ed Euridice, again conducted by Bruck. It was, she wrote to Bruno Walter, ‘such a poor production it hurts!!’Footnote ²⁰ But the last performance in Amsterdam’s Stadsschouwburg on 10 July was broadcast live on the radio, providing a valuable legacy of her maturing ideas. Here, Ferrier is transformed.

Her voice, dark-hued but radiant, is much more assured and centred; the Italian language no longer sounds ‘foreign’ to Ferrier, but idiomatic. The tempo is slower, more akin to the recording in English; Ferrier has time to shape her phrases and to make something special of certain words such as ‘il tuo fedele’. All the episodes are subtly shaded with colour and dynamic variation, and the portamento on ‘nè dal ciel’ is confident and impressive. The final refrain is impassioned from its beginning, building intensity that drives to the last high notes that are strong, clear and moving.

What brought about such a remarkable change? Although some aspects (such as the improved Italian) are audible in a studio recording of ‘Che farò’ with piano accompaniment set down after her January performances, this later version is by far more immediate and deeply felt.Footnote ²¹ Was it the brush with her own death – and the knowledge that the cancer had only been contained, not cured? Did this singer, who so much lived her life in ‘the major key’, as Walter put it, finally discover on stage the pathos and liberation the role required?Footnote ²² Her embodiment of Orfeo was surely no longer ‘play-acting’, but an event as intense and profoundly experienced as any of her admired concert performances in Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde or Brahms’s ‘Alto Rhapsody’. Here, Ferrier stands alongside Guadagni and Viardot as a worthy successor in the role. And it is this recording, I suggest, that presages more clearly what Ferrier brought to her fateful Covent Garden performance eighteen months later.Footnote ²³

Gluck’s Orfeo sang his way out of grief. The goddess Amore, moved by his eloquency, relented and united him once again with Euridice. Would that all lost loves might be thus restored…