In 1968, Roland Barthes looked back on the famous events in France in May, to consider the ways in which the writing of history had taken on a new form:

Such use of the radio to lay claim to space and coordinate large-scale action led Barthes to conclude that ‘“Hot” history, history in the course of being made, is an auditive history’; its subjects were listeners, above all, their ears pricked for tremors in the political firmament.Footnote ² Yet Barthes’s description of protestors absorbed in ‘radiophonic speech’ on the streets of French cities could also be read in a markedly different way: in place of ‘a new human anatomy’, one might detect the traces of a by-then established convention of silent, concentrated listening, spreading from concert halls, opera houses and other bastions of elite musical culture to new spaces of collective, attentive audibility. After all, the actors of Barthes’s newly auditive history were not listening to their radios in a vacuum. Just as in ‘The Musée des Beaux-Arts’, W. H. Auden captured the mixed pathos and bathos of simultaneity – the fact that ‘For the miraculous birth, there always must be / Children who did not specially want it to happen’ – there were other sounds in the air in 1968: sounds less obviously politicised, perhaps, than those explored by Barthes; but whose reverberations have lasted at least as long.

The fact that the 1960s – as certain other decades of the twentieth century – are popularly understood to be characterised by a particular ‘sound’ is clear from any number of ‘Sounds of the Sixties’-themed playlists and greatest hits albums (not to mention the long-running BBC Radio 2 show of the same name). In operatic culture something similar is assumed, I think, if less often and less explicitly stated. Thus 1968 falls within the later career of Richard Tucker and at the height of Franco Corelli’s success; it marks the debut at New York’s Metropolitan Opera of a young Spanish tenor, Plácido Domingo, as Maurizio in Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur;Footnote ³ it was the year in which Michael Tippett’s The Midsummer Marriage was revived (for the first time since its 1955 premiere) by the Covent Garden Opera Company – and in which that company was granted a royal charter to become The Royal Opera. Less famously, 1968 was also the year in which the Monégasque tenor Alain Vanzo made one of several recordings of the ‘Aubade’ from Edouard Lalo’s 1888 opera, Le Roi d’Ys – an opera of which this sentimental romance is virtually the only trace still performed.Footnote ⁴

In more ways than one, Vanzo does not fit comfortably into the operatic 1968 that I have just outlined. To read reviews of performances by Tucker, Corelli or Domingo as ‘reception history’ (albeit one easily encompassed by living memory) is both uncanny and laden with small dramatic ironies. Half a century later, the same grandi voci still jostle for tenorial primacy on the blogs and YouTube channels of their devotees; but their greatness itself seems assured. An account of twentieth-century operatic singing that omits or sidelines them – paragons all of the modern, Italianate tenor – is virtually unthinkable. ‘But what’, as Michel Foucault asked in 1966, ‘is it impossible to think’?Footnote ⁵ And what, more to the point, are we failing to hear in listening to the past with such familiar voices as our guides?

Vanzo was a tenor whose timbre, technique and repertorial comfort zone placed him largely outside prevailing sensibilities even during his mid-century career. Obituaries following his death in 2002 pointed to two unfortunate coincidences that might have prevented Vanzo from becoming a bigger star: his New York debut was shared with that of Monserrat Caballé; and his first appearance in London was opposite Joan Sutherland’s Lucia.Footnote ⁶ But the counterfactuals are unnecessary. As in Auden’s poem, there would always have been something else going on, somewhere else to be. Vanzo ultimately sounded out of (his) time: his fans praised the delicacy of his voice – the word ‘exquisite’ is almost ubiquitous – and a sound that boasted what one critic called ‘the right kind of elegance’.Footnote ⁷ He was a light French lyric tenor, a singer, as John Potter puts it, ‘of the older French style’, rather than one that adhered to the internationalised Italian model.Footnote ⁸ Indeed, not only was his voice far removed from those of his most popular contemporaries, but it also recalled another age altogether, one apparently predating Gilbert Duprez and his famed ‘Ut de poitrine’ – so often given as the founding moment of the modern tenor.

Yet Vanzo nonetheless partook of the soundscape of 1968; and his recording from that year of Lalo’s ‘Aubade’ constitutes a powerful artefact of auditive history in its own right. The opening is, perhaps, unpromising: the cellos, rising across their full registral gamut, threaten to part ways, scattering their unison; Lalo’s introductory recitative (in 1888!) can hardly help but sound laboured, with Vanzo unable to generate enough momentum to counteract its heaviness; the featherweight opera comique orchestration of the opening bars of the couplets is ungainly, the recording technology at best unkind to the woodwind soloists. Something else emerges, however, in Vanzo’s sustained E on ‘émoi’ (turmoil): light pours into the sound, suspends it between head voice and falsetto, reconfigures the unfamiliar as a channel to another musical time. The tenor’s entrance proper is still more transformative. Vanzo’s tone has all the rotundity that the woodwinds lack, his phrasing all the delicacy that Lalo’s wonderfully long lines allow; but it is the minute details of his diction, married to tiny shifts in tone quality, which lie, I think, behind what is most moving in this recording. Thus the F sharp on ‘ma’ gleams and vanishes; the shift to the so-called silent ‘e’ in the final syllable of ‘aimée’ offers a faint hint of roughness on this polished surface; the breath taken before the next phrase is audible only as a negative image – much as Barthes would claim of Charles Panzéra that ‘you never heard him breathe but only divide up the phrase’.Footnote ⁹ (Like Barthes’s Panzéra, Vanzo’s art was undoubtedly ‘in the letters, not in the bellows’.) There is just a hint of portamento – a trace of Vanzo’s past in the music halls of Aix-les-bains? – in the descending major second on ‘veux’, an elision into ‘encor’ so neat as to leave no impression of sibilance, the final ‘r’ of ‘encor’ tucked immediately backwards as the voice settles once more into the middle register at the end of the first stanza.

With extraordinary clarity, in other words, we hear Vanzo ranging across what Katherine Bergeron calls ‘the mouth’s complex geography’.Footnote ¹⁰ His particular iteration of this territory (a territory being mapped out precisely at the time that Lalo’s opera first appeared, as Bergeron has shown) is no more or less unique than any other singer’s. In 1968, however, the co-habitees of his oral landscape were mostly long dead, his narrow-bore, vibrato-light voice best suited to a repertoire on the verge of obsolescence. Maybe it should come as little surprise, then, if today Vanzo’s recording of the ‘Aubade’ in some sense sounds far older than it is. Yet repertoires can (and do) come back from the dead, and music’s layered temporalities are always complex. So perhaps what is most moving – and most valuable – about Vanzo’s 1968 ‘Aubade’ is not that it is out of time, but rather that it reminds us that our own past, too, has a past; that all pasts were once present; and that our histories – woven from these now-simultaneous, persistent pasts – will always have alternatives: heard from elsewhere, sung by other voices.