The meteoric rise of Sylvia Sass’s career is the result of persistent and tenacious work. With the help of her parents, she acquired early on all the knowledge an opera singer might need in this profession. At the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music she entered the vocal department directly in the third year, and completed the fourth and fifth years combined in a single year. At the age of twenty she became a scholarship member of the Hungarian State Opera. Only a few minor roles were added to her repertoire – such as Frasquita (Georges Bizet: Carmen), Freia (Richard Wagner: Das Rheingold), Gutrune (Richard Wagner: Götterdämmerung), Girl (Zoltán Kodály: Székelyfonó) – when, in the summer of 1973, she virtually exploded onto the international opera scene at the Sofia Singing Competition. One of the defining early operatic experiences of her childhood was Giuseppe Verdi’s La traviata. By a peculiar twist of fate, it was precisely the role of Violetta that the jury assigned her as part of the Sofia competition. Before then she had sung only the fourth act, and that only in Hungarian. The conductor Pál Varga, teacher of foreign-language role practice at the Academy, was of great help in her preparation, teaching her Italian pronunciation, style and tradition. She sang the role of Violetta – without any stage rehearsal, and for the first time in her life – on the stage of the Sofia Opera. As the youngest competitor in the field, she “shaped Violetta’s complex and tragic character with captivating warmth and feeling”, and the audience was seized by “the enchanting lyricism of her voice” – wrote Naredna Mladezs even before the jury announced its decision. [1] The high standards of the event are shown by the fact that in the twelve-year history of the competition the grand prize had been awarded only once before – and now it went to the young Hungarian singer. “Sylvia Sass – a great discovery” proclaimed the headline of the Bulgarian daily Otecsesztven Front, foreshadowing the possibility of a brilliant career. [2] In October 1973 the Traviata success series continued at the Belgrade Opera. In the following season she appeared again as a guest in Sofia, followed by engagements in Moscow and Munich. Meanwhile the management of the Opera House also seized the opportunity, recognising they had a soprano “capable of bearing every burden of Violetta’s role, ranging from rainbow-coloured lyricism to burning drama”, and on 14 March 1976 they staged a revival of La traviata. Learning the role in Italian brought her good fortune not only in Sofia but also at the Erkel Theatre. Maestro Lamberto Gardelli, renowned for his artistic solutions, played a crucial role in refreshing the musical performance. Yet the “hero” of the evening was not the Italian guest conductor but the soprano with a “homogeneous, well-balanced, beautifully coloured, powerful and technically well-trained” voice, whose portrayal István Albert praised in Film, Színház, Muzsika. “The beautifully shaped melodic lines, the contrasts – soul-stirring pianissimos, fortissimos ringing out with enthralling dramatic force, the warmth, the intimate musicality of the entire role, its intensity and musical security – all attest to the exceptional talent of Sylvia Sass.” [3] Márta Pap, writing in the music journal Muzsika, discussed the authentic portrayal of the character’s individuality and tragedy: “Even in the first act, the role of the frivolous courtesan is merely a surface, a handhold, a mask for her Violetta, beneath which flashes emerge of the true face that unfolds in the great duet of Act II – that of the deeply feeling, deeply virtuous, self-sacrificing woman.” [4] During the Sofia competition, the director of the Aix-en-Provence Festival also noticed her performance and, with a bold decision, invited the then-unknown singer, who in the summer of 1977 sang the leading role of La traviata seven times in the French resort town. The French press, without exception, reported in superlatives on the birth of “a new star”. Le Figaro published her photograph on the front page and wrote, among other things: “She is the rarest phenomenon on the operatic stage, and to find a temperament similar to hers, one must go back to Callas. Sass has inherited from the diva of divas the flexibility of stage movement, the ability to fill the entire stage and capture the audience’s attention. She inhabits the character so completely that she becomes it. The tone of her voice is of astonishing beauty, and her vocal technique is refined, from the full unfolding of the sound to the most delicate, nuanced pianissimos.” [5] It is not very common for critics and audiences to fall into equal ecstasy, but according to the correspondent of France-Soir, that was exactly what happened. “The audience in Aix applauded with a warmth I have not witnessed for twenty years. Everyone felt they were witnessing an exceptional event.” [6] In Le Soir, the critic likewise celebrated the triumph of La traviata: “She is surrounded by a halo of glory, that privilege which is a gift of God. Beauty, sensitivity, and the security of her acting complete her endowments. Such an exceptional interpretation becomes, in truth, a creation.” [7] Most strikingly, the journalist of Quotidien de Paris drew the conclusion: “Sylvia Sass is genuine class. She is already the Sylvia Sass!” [8] After such accolades, only the opera houses regarded as citadels of the world classics could follow – such as the Hamburgische Staatsoper, the Opéra-Comique in Paris, or London’s Covent Garden.
Violetta’s overwhelming success was soon followed by further Verdi roles. The first major task of the 1973/74 season was the role of Desdemona in Otello at the Erkel Theatre. In 1975 she was the sensation of the opening performance of the Scottish Opera’s new home, the Theatre Royal in Glasgow, thanks to her “extraordinary voice”, which she controlled with “excellent musicality and sense of style”. Harold Rosenthal’s review also made clear that the best Desdemona of recent years had debuted in Great Britain. “Her top notes were occasionally strained, but with her radiant, soft singing and her performance of the Willow Song and the Ave Maria, no one has impressed me more since the young Tebaldi, when she first came to Covent Garden with the Scala company twenty-five years ago. Miss Sass is certainly heading for a major career.” [9] And indeed, in that same season, in May 1976, “Miss Sass” made her debut on the stage of Covent Garden – in a Hungarian production. I Lombardi was staged by András Mikó in April 1974 at the Erkel Theatre, and two years later Covent Garden invited the production for five performances. In both the Budapest and the London series, conducted by Gardelli, Sylvia Sass was indisputably the star. In the impressive London cast – alongside José Carreras (Oronte) and Nikola Gyuszelev (Pagano) – she proved herself fully as an actress in the role of Giselda, though “her strength lies in the purity of her lines and the liquid softness of her voice”, noted critic Charles Osborne. [10] Her success was elaborated by William Mann in The Times: “Her arias, with their gentle and virtuosic runs, captivate as much as their expressive power and vocal richness – a voice that seduces and attunes the audience to complete surrender.” [11] Lady Macbeth is known to be one of the most difficult roles in the operatic repertoire, which the young singer learned at the request of Lamberto Gardelli. The double debut took place at the Teatro Regio in Turin on 24 November 1977, since not only was the role new, but so was the venue: it was her first appearance in Italy. The critic of La Stampa highlighted that “the homogeneity of her voice is exceptional, sounding uniformly in all registers; the great discovery of the evening is the Hungarian soprano”. [12] She next appeared as Lady Macbeth in Berlin in 1980, then in Puerto Rico (1984), Santiago (1985), Toronto (1986), Brussels (1987), and Palermo (1988). In the 1978/79 season two further Verdi roles tied her to London’s Covent Garden: Amelia in Un ballo in maschera and Elisabeth in Don Carlos. In the former she debuted alongside José Carreras (Gustavus), and in the latter opposite Boris Christoff, who portrayed the “formidable” King Philip. At the Erkel Theatre in February 1979 audiences could see her in Il trovatore, in which her Leonora was characterised less by broad, sweeping vocal lines and more by “finely detailed phrasing” and “breath-like pianissimi”. Kertész Iván, critic of Magyar Nemzet, particularly praised her “atmosphere-creating ability” as well as her “formidable suggestiveness” in the Miserere and in the Leonora–Luna duet. Her Verdi repertoire concluded with a true rarity: the composer’s seldom-performed opera Il corsaro, in which she portrayed the captive Gulnara at the Nîmes Arena in 1986.
At the beginning of her career she also portrayed numerous Mozart and Wagner heroines; for example, under the baton of György Solti, excellent recordings preserve Donna Elvira’s arias from Don Giovanni, and even one of her dream roles – Richard Strauss’s Salome – was realised on the Hungarian stage. Even so, the Italian melodic world remained Sass Sylvia’s true domain. Parallel to the Verdi operas, the major Puccini roles also found her. After her victory in Sofia she first received an engagement in Bulgaria to sing Mimì in La Bohème in December 1973, followed only a few weeks later by her Hungarian debut under the direction of Ádám Medveczky. “Sass Sylvia again captivates with perfect vocal command, valuable musicality, and with the weight and strength of her voice, revealed especially in the dramatic moments,” wrote István Albert in Film, Színház, Muzsika. [13] In January 1975 she returned to Sofia for further guest appearances in La Bohème and La Traviata, when it turned out that the previously announced title-role singer of Tosca had fallen ill and the production needed to be saved. Sass Sylvia undertook the task, recalled the Hungarian text she had learned at the Academy of Music, and with two days of rehearsal sang the title role for the first time in her life. She had no idea that with this early, brilliant substitution she would set in motion a chain of successes that would make Tosca one of the emblematic roles of her career. Her Hungarian Tosca debut came on an illustrious occasion: the appearance of James King in the Erkel Theatre production on 14 May 1975. Domestic critics – including István Albert – noted with admiration that the distinguished guest had found a fully equal partner in Sass Sylvia, who sang Tosca magnificently. “The young singer is conquering the major soprano roles step by step. Yet this was perhaps the best and most consistent performance of her career to date. She not only provided a vivid portrayal of the character’s psychological transformations, but in several episodes added apt, new traits to the familiar Tosca profile. All this was illuminated by a beautifully balanced voice of unified basic colour, displaying extraordinary finesse in transitions of timbre and opening broadly in both lyrical and dramatic moments. Her particularly explosive success in the intensely dramatic build-up of the act II crescendo was fully justified. The applause rewarded the triumph of an impressively deliberate, grand-scale artistic achievement.” [14] She made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York at the age of twenty-six, partnered by Carreras as Cavaradossi. As the house was simultaneously preparing for another major premiere, there was no time for stage or orchestral rehearsal; yet, as Sass Sylvia recounts in her book Hangok és képek (Voices and pictures), despite all stage fright, the 1977 performance became a true triumph – crowned by the traditional confetti-shower of torn ticket stubs. [15] Every opera singer dreams of performing on the stage of La Scala in Milan. For this artist, that dream came true in the spring of 1978 in the title role of Manon Lescaut. The critic of Corriere della Sera reported on the performance as follows: “With first-rate vocal qualities, Sass Sylvia passed through – without any difficulty and indeed with much applause – the baptism by fire of a La Scala debut.” [16] On that evening her partner in the role of Chevalier des Grieux was Plácido Domingo. Five years later, in February 1983, she again appeared at La Scala, this time in two of the works from Puccini’s Il trittico. She first sang Giorgetta in Il tabarro, and only a few days later – with just a single stage and piano rehearsal – she was celebrated by the audience in the title role of Suor Angelica, alongside partners such as Piero Cappuccilli (Michele) and Nicola Martinucci (Luigi). According to the critic Géza Fodor, “for those singers who are capable of creating, for one and a half acts, the monumental figure of Turandot in full dimension, it is difficult to make the collapse and the tenderness believable.” Owing to her temperament and vocal qualities, Sass Sylvia did not choose that path, but rather a psychological approach to the cruel Chinese princess in her debut as Turandot at the Erkel Theatre in December 1983. “Despite the heavy demands, Sass shapes the vocal realisation at her extraordinarily high artistic level, and she very subtly indicates those points at which – as if in ‘slips of the mask’ – Turandot’s weaker, more vulnerable, more lyrical self begins to show already in the second act. Her art of character portrayal truly blossoms, however, in the third act, especially in the section after Liù’s death. The process through which the character’s collapse and the regaining of identity slowly becomes a rediscovery of self after the experience of defeat is here, for the first time, presented with complex, human authenticity and convincing truth. And here the voice no longer contradicts the role, but conveys the richness of its expression. Sass Sylvia’s Turandot once again demonstrates how singing is only one component of the extraordinarily complex art that is operatic performance, and how artistic intelligence and energy, paired with the suggestive power of interpretation, can become a palpable truth even without complete sensuous immediacy.” [17] A special feature of the Budapest Turandot production was that the performers sang the original, longer Franco Alfano ending – the same version Sass Sylvia had sung a year earlier with her partner Franco Bonisolli in the Barbican Hall concert in London.
During her short period as a member of the opera house, in addition to the classical repertoire she was also given the opportunity to appear in the world premieres of two contemporary Hungarian operas. In 1974 she again demonstrated “surprisingly mature artistry” with her sensual portrayal of Delilah in Sándor Szokolay’s opera Sámson és Delila (Samson and Delilah). Iván Kertész’s review in Muzsika also highlighted her “plastic shaping of melodic lines” and her “well-crafted acting”. On 15 May 1977 the Opera House premiered Zsolt Durkó’s music drama Mózes (Moses). “Sylvia Sass meets the musical-technical demands of this style with completely natural assurance, truly worthy of a professional singer” – noted Tibor Tallián, adding that she performed the demanding part of the Mother, both musically and dramatically, “with admirable textual fidelity and energy”. Her most memorable role interpretation, however, is linked to the Hungarian classic A kékszakállú herceg vára (Bluebeard’s Castle). She first sang Judit, the heroine of Béla Bartók’s opera, at the London Decca studio in 1978 under the baton of György Solti, with Kolos Kováts as her partner. This recording formed the basis of the 1980 film produced by Hungarian Television, directed by Miklós Szinetár. Memorable venues for her concert performances included the Royal Festival Hall (1979) and New York’s Carnegie Hall (1986). She received opportunities for staged performances comparatively late, at the Montpellier Radio Festival in 1989 and on the stage of the Opéra-Théâtre de Metz Métropole in 1994.
Perhaps one of the greatest recognitions of her art was that she was invited to perform the world premiere of a long-dormant work, Gian Francesco Malipiero’s opera Sogno di un tramonto d'autunno. One of the greatest challenges lay in the faithful interpretation of the libretto, since the composer had set a poem by Gabriele D’Annunzio to music. The premiere took place in Mantua in 1988. Sylvia Sass portrayed Gradeniga, the doge’s relentless widow. As the critic of La Repubblica noted: “Sylvia Sass possessed all the exceptional professional mastery required to embody D’Annunzio’s cruel heroine”, and “vocally as well as in intensity, she was captivating at every moment”.
Several theatre and television recordings preserved milestones in the career of the “little Callas” – as Lamberto Gardelli called her – until the circle closed and the former smuggler-girl Frasquita returned to the stage of the Opera House in 1995 as a proud Carmen, where the ovation after the Habanera was no longer for Bizet’s aria, but for the spell of a great artist and the triumph of twenty-four years.
[2016]
[1] 2 Károly Nagy: A legfiatalabb nagydíjas (The Youngest Grand Prize Winner), Esti Hírlap, 21 June 1973
3 István Albert: Olasz nyelvű előadás az Erkel Színházban (Italian language performance at the Erkel Theatre) - Traviata, Film, Theatre, Muzsika, 27 March 1976, 4.
[4] Márta Papp: A Traviata felújítása Gardellivel (Reviving Traviata with Gardelli), Muzsika, June 1976, 27.
[5] 6 7 8 N. N.: A francia sajtó Sass Sylviáról – Felsőfokok (The French press about Sylvia Sass - Top Degrees), Film, Színház, Muzsika, 4 September 1976.
9 N. N.: Harold Rosenthal: Scottish Opera's New Home, Opera, December 1975, 12.
10 Charles Osborne: I Lombardi - Royal Opera, Covent Garden, Opera, July 1976
11 János Kovács: A Lombardok – a londoni Covent Gardenben (The Lombards - at Covent Garden in London), Magyar Nemzet, 26 June 1976.
12 Massimo Mila: Il bellissimo Macbeth del Regio, La stampa, 26 November 1977.
[13] István Albert: A Bohémélet – fiatal szereplőkkel (La bohème - with young actors), Film, Színház, Muzsika, 19 January 1974, p. 11.
[14] István Albert: Nagysikerű Tosca-előadás az Erkel Színházban (Successful Tosca performance at the Erkel Theatre), Film, Színház, Muzsika, 24 May 1975.
[15] Krisztina Mentler: Sass Sylvia – Hangok és képek (Sass Sylvia - Voices and Images), Geopen Publishing House, 2004.
16 Duilio Courir, Il grido d'amore di Manon Lescaut, "Corriere della sera", 16 maggio 1978.
17 Géza Fodor: Turandot - Sass Sylvia, Muzsika, February 1984.
[18] Iván Kertész: Sámson – Új magyar opera bemutatója (Samson - Premiere of a New Hungarian Opera), Muzsika, January 1974
[19] Tibor Tallián: A Mózes előadóiról (On the Performers of Moses), Muzsika, August 1977, 7-9.
[20] Angelo Foletto: Un sogno fin de siècle. cent'anni dopo D'Annunzio debutta, La repubblica, 7 October 1988.