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How many tenors have made their first recordings at nineteen? In fact how many male singers can claim to have impressed so thoroughly so young as Jussi Björling? Born in 1911, and a youthful member of his father’s Björling Male Quartet, he’d already had considerable experience of performance before entering the Stockholm Conservatory to study with the well-known baritone John Forsell. It was under Forsell’s guidance – he was also the Opera House manager – that Björling made his operatic debut as Don Ottavio; a recital at Tivoli the following year, in 1931, cemented his promise. The first recordings were made for Swedish HMV and – as with all the items on this disc – were sung in his native tongue. Forsell had encouraged Björling to sign the contract when the tenor was still only eighteen and as Harald Henrysson’s notes rightly maintain Björling was a remarkably mature artist at such a young age; in fact his voice was almost preternaturally formed, possessing great beauty of tone and richness, flexibility and range. Occasionally it sounds covered and there are, clearly, still some immaturities of phrasing and legato, quite understandably so in one who had barely trod the operatic stage. It’s true that in some of these canonical arias he lacks the elasticity and subtleties of line inflection that elevate a beautiful voice to an inspired artist, but these gifts were soon to come. It is, seen from the vantage point of over seventy years on, astounding that a nineteen year old could sing so magnificently.

A mixture of operatic arias and operetta: a few impressions should suffice. Questa o quella is beautifully sung but expressively it’s rather undernourished, with occasionally forced tone. The Laparra – a now forgotten zarzuela – is sung in agile, lyric fashion though occasionally the voice does sound covered and in Recondita armonia some inexperience does show. Atterberg’s I manner however is romantic and passionately interpreted and quite outstanding. His elegance in Kálmán’s Das Veilchen von Montmartre is treasurable and shows what an ardent and unforced lyricism he already possessed. True he can’t compete with Tauber or with Joseph Schmidt in Dein ist mein ganzes Herz – but who could? And maybe competing with the Hawaiian guitar in Abraham’s Die Blume von Hawaii is a forlorn cause, even if it’s a charming one. But the duets with Hjördis Schymberg in Strauss and Millöcker are very appealing and in the latter’s Ich hab kein Geld made in 1938 when Björling was twenty-seven we can hear how the voice has developed in the intervening eight years – maturity, increased flexibility, both of voice production and phrasing, an increased ease of execution, an instinct for stage lyricism in vocalism and an ever more resonantly beautiful tone.

No complaints about either packaging or transfer quality; those Swedish HMVs were of good quality. Here is Björling in all his youthful glory on the threshold of international fame.

Jonathan Woolf

 

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