I don’t have the first idea about what makes for good and bad singing in opera. So what is it about Susan Alexander’s singing in Citizen Kane that’s so bad?
The only thing I can judge is whether it’s on pitch or not, and it seems to be on pitch to me. So whatever’s wrong it must have something to do with her tone, right?
Oh, I think it is OK, but far from the elite level that one would expect at the top of the opera world.
Also, her reviews indicate horrid acting, I believe.
She’s just way out of her league. Her coach can barely take it, if you recall.
Do you mean you, personally, think her singing is bad, or are you referring to Susan Alexander’s reception by the opera world in the movie? I can’t tell, myself, other than that she does a hell of a lot better job than I could! …I think in Citizen Kane, Susan Alexander was supposed to be a lady of middling talent who was pushed, promoted and otherwise foisted upon the opera world because her husband (or was it boyfriend) was powerful and wealthy. He WANTED her to have the great career in opera whether she was a good opera singer or not, so he pressured the appropriate people to hire her…As Chas. Kane was supposedly based on (the real) William Randolph Hearst, this mirrored Hearst’s desire that his girlfriend Marion Davies become The World’s Greatest Actress. Marion Davies had some talent as a light comedienne, but Hearst insisted she be cast in big, stuffy, overdone costume dramas that simply overwhelmed her to the point where people were scoffing at her.
Oh I understand she’s being portrayed as out of her league. I was just wondering what it is about the actual singing–the singing I hear as I watch the movie–that makes for a bad opera voice.
She said when she met Kane that she didn’t have a voice for opera. It certainly sounds like her voice is no where near as strong as it needs to be to tackle opera – little volume and also a tendency to crack just a bit. She would have been better served being a popular singer.
What’s wrong with it? It makes stagehands go “P.U.!”
My understanding is that the voice was dubbed by a classically trained alto singing soprano parts, to realistically portray a singer being pushed beyond her range. She’s not meant to be an awful singer in the Lucy Ricardo vein.
ETA: I’d heard stories of how unfair Citizen Kane was to Marian Davies and that she was actually a talented actress. Then I saw Going Hollywood. I guess I’d say she wasn’t embarrassingly bad, but I think revisionists go too far when they imply that Hearst’s mismanagement destroyed a great career.
Davies career was over by the time she started shacking up with Hearst (because Mrs. Hearst wouldn’t give a divorce) and she was good at the light comedy roles that she did. In short, she was retired, and extraordinarily wealthy. By no means was she a stinker like Susan Alexander was portrayed. (And no, I don’t know SA’s technical deficiencies.)
Davies and Hearst were very close for the rest of Hearst’s life. At the worst of the Great Depression Hearst was on the verge of losing everything because he could not make a multi-million dollar plus payment. This was a lot of money back then. Davies finally wormed it out of him and immediately came up with the money, presumably out of her own pocket and demanded he borrow it.
Herman Mankiewicz was a very close friend of Davies, probably one of her gay friends. He wrote the screen play for Kane. Supposedly Rosebud was Hearst’s secret name for her genitals. Hearst probably would have not been as hell bent on revenge against Welles had that one nasty bit not been included, but the movie was nasty to Davies, and that bit was, in the 1940s, beyond unforgivable. Davies didn’t deserve the SA comparison at all.
Hearst was an SOB, and he knew he was an SOB. Had the SA part of the film been left out, he would have raised a small ruckus and move on. As it was, Hearst did everything he could to ruin Welles after that, including arranging that Citizen Kane did not see general release when it was first made. He tried to buy every print and destroy it. Welles over the next decade and until Hearst’s death managed to find bad luck in just about everything he did, and compounded it by not overseeing the editing of The Magnificent Ambersons through to the end, which was edited and cut a lot by the studio while Welles went off to Brazil to film “It’s All True”. The edited footage was lost forever and supposedly the claim is that the film would have exceeded Kane. From what I’ve seen, I doubt it. Ambersons had Toland’s wonderful photography direction (methods he taught Welles and Welles used throughout his life) but the story was frankly stupid. Perhaps good bits were left on the floor, but we still have the book and at least one other attempt by another director and it is nothing like Kane, or Lady From Shanghai, or Touch of Evil. I consider Touch to be Welles’ best film despite its flaws.
I’m no expert (on opera singing) but I have listened to a lot of it, and I did take (non-opera) voice lessons for a while.
To my ear, Susan’s voice is thin and unsupported. When you are pushing a voice like that, it makes it very difficult to express emotions, because that requires the ability to modulate your tone and volume appropriately to the feeling of the moment. Without support, your voice tends to be a sort of “johnny one-note” as far as emotional coloration is concerned.
On the other hand, for popular singing aided by a microphone, a voice like that doesn’t need to push, and so it can be modulated as needed (provided the singer has that much acting ability).
Roddy
Welles also wrote the foreword to Marion Davies’ autobiography The Times We Had stressing how talented she was and how much he regretted the inference on her talent with the character of Susan Alexander. I believe him - he also spoke with a sense of great guilt about the subject in the interview he did for the BBC show Arena, near the end of his life. He seemed rather a haunted man and this was one of the subjects he seemed most so about.
Like several other posters here, I agree it’s not so much that she’s a bad singer but that she just, as RealityChuck points out, totally lacks the range and indeed the sheer vocal power to be a grand opera singer. I think it’s helpful to compare her singing to that of her coach when he gives the exasperated little demonstration of how the lesson should sound. Terrible technique for coaching anyone but it does show the audience something of the gulf between the quality of the singing voices.
Susan Alexander really was grossly unfair to Davies. I was unaware that Welles actually regretted the effect it had on her, that is a bit unlike someone with as big an ego as his, but he was young and I cannot imagine the even he really believed that he was going to make the most influential movie of the mid-century. But if anyone could have believed that as he made it, it was Welles.
I always thought that maybe there’s some connection to the legendarily talentless Florence Foster Jenkins, though there’s a sort of role reversal, as in her case it was she herself who was convinced of her operatic talents, though perhaps it’s just the name throwing me off (with Kane being Charles Foster Kane, and Florence Foster Jenkins’ father also being Charles (Dorrance) Foster). She was certainly at the height of her ‘popularity’ right about when the film came out.
So, I caught a clip on Google video, and I have to agree that she is pushing way too hard. Her voice is rather thin, and her vibrato sounds manufactured. You may not have noticed, but she does get off pitch at times, and uses the vibrato to mask it. The fact that she is off-pitch when she obviously has an ear for it is a another indication that she is pushing too hard. (Being flat means she can’t quite hit it, while being sharp means she’s overdoing it. I heard both.)
I wonder if, when the movie gets so much quieter when she begins to sing at the opera house, that was supposed to help indicate her lack of vocal prowess. When I tried to turn it up, I noticed the fairly sparse instrumentation easily overpowered her voice, and only got worse on the crescendos, especially as she barely got louder at all.
I also agree with the fact that she portrays absolutely no emotion but pain in her voice. In fact, that’s part of the point, as she doesn’t even really want to do this at this point, IIRC. She even forgets to act part of time, staring at Kane, hoping he approves, hoping she’s not as bad as she thinks she is. Towards the end of the song when she actually appears to be acting, you can’t hear anything changing in her voice (including the dynamics mentioned earlier).
BTW, I was shocked to find out I had actually already seen Citizen Kane. Everyone recommends it so highly around here, and I kept planning on getting a hold of it sometime to watch. I think the problem is that I tuned out after the last bit of dialog and missed the most important (and most talked about) part.
Here’s a quote from a Bernard Hermann biography (Hermann scored Citizen Kane and composed the aria sung by Susan Alexander):
“If Susan couldn’t sing at all, then we know she wouldn’t have found herself in this position. But she had something of a little voice. So I wrote this piece in a very high tessitura, so that a girl with a modest little voice would be completely hopeless in it. … We got a very charming singer [Jean Forward] to dub Susan’s voice, explaining to her the purpose of the effect. Notice–the reason Susan is struggling so hard is not that she cannot sing, but rather that the demands of the part are purposely greater than she can ever meet.”
Other online sources identify Jean Forward as a lyric soprano with the San Francisco Opera.
Susan is forever identified with Marion Davies because Kane is identified with Hearst (and they also shared some superficial characteristics, such as a penchant for jigsaw puzzles), but there are much more direct historical parallels to her opera “career.” Welles himself claimed that the character was based Ganna Walska, wife of tycoon Harold Fowler McCormick, who set her up in a lead role at the Chicago Opera despite a voice that only he could love. Also see Gladys Wallis, whose husband built the Chicago Civic Opera House for her.
From some accounts, it was Mankiewicz, not Welles, who had the idea of Susan Alexander Kane. His thinking was that everyone knew Marion Davies was a talented actress, so by making Susan untalented, people would realize that Kane wasn’t Hearst.
Alas, that didn’t happen and today people think Davies was untalented like Susan.
Marion Davies’ movie career started in 1917 and ended in 1937, she made a picture a year. How could she be retired when she started shacking up with Hearst, she met him even before she got into show biz.
She says in her own autobiography his (well-documented) interference in her career didn’t help it at all.
Well, compare Kiri te Kanawa’s version of the same aria to the Susan Alexander version from the film.
Dame Kiri is not one of my favourite singers, not by a long road, but listen for the quality of her singing tone throughout the register. I would describe her sound as well rounded - the high notes sound like they’re coming through woofers, mid-ranges and tweeters, to use loud speakers as a simile.
In contrast, in the Susan Alexander (or more accurately, whoever did the voice for the movie) recording, the voice sounds thin and pinched, as if every note is a strain. To use the speaker metaphor, it’s as though the woofers and mid-ranges aren’t working, and all you have is a reedy, squeaky sound. She bails early on the high E, but long before that, she has sounded ‘insecure’ at best.
Please, who is the author and what is the title of the song Susan Alexander sings at her voice lesson?
O.K., already found it: Rossini, Una voce poco fa. Don’t know Il barbiere di Seviglia that well, shame on me.
She’s not supposed to be that bad. She’s talented enough for the night club circuit. But she gets cast as the lead in the opera not because she earned on her own, but because Kane bought it for her, and so the press is particularly vicious to her.
What’s also critical here is that Kane genuinely doesn’t understand the difference between a night club singer, and a classically trained operatic singer. He doesn’t really understand opera, and thinks anyone can do it if you throw enough money at it. This presages the end of his life, when he’s sitting in his big brick pile, surrounded with millions and millions of dollars of great art, all stored in crates. He doesn’t know how to experience art, except through acquiring it, just like he tried to acquire a successful opera career for his young wife.