FACE TO FACE: Fedora Barbieri and Dolora Zajick.(Interview)

In 1950, the Metropolitan Opera's Azucena of choice was Fedora Barbieri. This season's new Met production of II Trovatore features the gypsy of Dolora Zajick. The two great dramatic mezzos met in Barbieri's apartment in Florence for a converation with STEPHEN HASTINGS.

Verdi's greatest mezzo roles, Azucena, Eboli and Amneris, have been performed by generation after generation of formidable women, and few have proved so formidable as Fedora Barbieri and Dolora Zajick. The former dominated this repertoire at the Met and elsewhere in the early 1950s, and the latter has had few rivals on the world's stages for more than a decade now. When they met last winter in Barbieri's panoramic Florence apartment, one could sense that neither of these powerful personalities was going to let the other upstage her. Yet as the afternoon progressed, one became aware of how similar in many ways their experiences and attitudes were. The emotional directness with which Barbieri employed her exceptional talent (vividly confirmed when we took a break to see her singing the Princess de Bouillon in a 1950s RAI video recording of Adriana Lecouvreur) has much in common with Zajick's uncompromisingly honest approach to singing and communication.

OPERA NEWS: Both of you have voices that now seem rare -- in size, as well as in their full development of the chest register.

FEDORA BARBIERI: You must never use the chest voice! It is an unsupported sound. [She demonstrates by producing an open, guttural sound in the low register.] The voice should be perfectly even from bottom to top and should be sustained by the breath alone.

DOLORA ZAJICK: I think the reason why the term is sometimes thought inappropriate is because the chest voice is often used improperly. There is an unfocused, raw sound that people think is chest voice, while in fact a properly produced chest voice allows you to go easily up and down the scale. It is a question of semantics, I think.

ON: Who taught you to equalize the registers?

FB: Luigi Toffolo, with whom I studied here in Florence. The first thing he taught me was to smile. This is the mask, he explained. [She demonstrates by vocalizing with a smile over an octave, starting in what most would call chest voice, then passing seamlessly into the middle register]. The sound should be as even as that produced by the bowing of a violinist, always sustained on the breath and kept constantly in the mask.