The esteemed and ever-erudite Tako Oda wrote:
>To be fair, I'm sure there were more of these high flying tenors in the >age of bel canto. Height is inversely linked to vocal weight in most >cases. Since the advent of the Wagnerian tenor, there have probably been >fewer tenors who can soar to F5.
What is often not recognised is that this phenomenon does not confine itself to tenors.
I have recently been studying the lesser-known operas of the bel canto age - Halevy, Adam, Mercadente, Ricci, Lacerna, Meyerbeer. These operas give the lie to the notion, often expressed, that the high baritone (or, more accurately, the low baritone who sings awfully high at times) was the invention of Giuseppe Verdi. The extraordinary high notes that are so well known among the tenor parts - Puritani, Poliuto, Adelson e Salvini, Postillon de Jongjumeau - have their equivalents among the baritone parts.
It is perhaps useful to distinguish two types of high note in this repertoire: those which form part of a cadenza or fioriture, and those which form part of a plain melodic line. These second are considered part of the normal working compass of the voice, and therefore subject to the bel canto requirements of easy emission of the voice and a timbre in which neighbouring notes match in plain style. The first are for special occasions. The speed at which they are frequently required to be executed disguises the fact that they may not match their lower neighbours, and they are not considered part of the normal working compass of the voice. They are often not essential to the melodic line (unlike the second type), so may be replaced by the singer with notes he finds more comfortable or effective. Often they are higher than the second type, although there are exceptions, the terrifying sustained tenor F designed to peal out above the chorus and orchestra in the finale of Puritani is the most notorious example. For most of these exceptions we have Rubini to thank: remove him from the equation and the Bel Canto tenor is rarely required to sustain a line beyond Db or D (C or C# at today's pitch), although he may be called to take an Eb or F (Es, for some reason, are rare) in coloratura.
The poise and pliability of the vocal line is far more important in this Bel Canto style than anything we, from our twentieth century vantage-point, would consider dramatic or naturalistic in the singing. I have long suspected that this poise and pliablilty encouraged useful vocal habits. A voice that seldom has to give vehement expression, whose normal fare is melisma and whose repertoire encourages an easy flexibility, is more likely to be produced without any particular effort. This, I suspect, has changed more than any other element in 'best practice' vocal technique as our century has waxed old, we accept a certain roughness in our vocal production which formed no part in the art of Battistini, Marconi, Melba, Patti or Plancon. This 'roughness' can be exciting: but while written testimony shows that our great-grandparents found the vocalism of a Ruffo or a Destinn exciting, written testimony also shows that they found this exciting vocalism wanting when compared to the vocal art of a Battistini or Patti. The vocal paragons I was raised to admire, however, were Callas, Gobbi, Domingo, and Raimondi, and I think my experience is far from unique. These singers stand in the line of Titta Ruffo and Emmy Destinn, not that of Mattia Battistini and Adelina Patti; they have all, on occasion, approached the vocal poise of the Battistini camp, but it is not home ground to them, and they seem unable to sustain it, if indeed they want to. Developments in popular music have also encouraged this trend.
Now a voice produced without any particular effort is more likely to have a wide range (if you want to lose your high notes an effective approach is to use more pressure when singing them). The extreme high notes in Bel Canto tenor parts crop up every so often on this list, but has no-one noticed how low these parts go? The Rossini Rossini tenor may have to sustain a bottom Bb or A at the end of a run (have a look at 'Otello'), often against a pretty hefty accompaniament, and he and early Donizetti share a penchant for the occasional marcato low note as part of a cabaletta line. For me the defining characteristic of these parts is not so much that they are high, but that they are wide.
A voice produced without any particular effort is also likely to be able to stretch a little further at each end. Is it not at least worth entertaining the notion that in this ease of emission is to be found the answer to the question of the extreme high notes peculiar to this era? The nineteenth century seldom spoke of voice production, preferring to speak of emission, a usage which has descended to contemporary Italian, in which it is hard to find a synonym for voice-production, while 'una voce morbida' is highly desireable, and a fit object for study. 'Production' implies that one has to do something to create a voice, 'emission' that the voice is always there, but that anything which might impede its easy flow be banished from the singing. I repeat, this 'easy flow' was encouraged by the general musical style of the times.
Now, it is often said that tenors negotiated these high tessituras by employing a style of production which incorporated a degree of falsetto in the top register. This is variously described, but the broad prinicipal is as I have stated. So far as the tenor voice is concerned, this does sound plausible. The timbre of the tenor falsetto is close enough to the timbre of the tenor non-falsetto voice (call it what you will) singing high for any mismatch to go unremarked by a contemporary audience, if not by an audience of our great-grandparents, for whom evenness of scale was one of the chief criteria of good singing. Indeed, one suspects many tenors have sung in this way, and met with success.
But does it work for baritones? One does meet baritones who employ some form of falsetto for their high notes (there are several in the Garcia tradition), but in this case the timbre does not match. In the best cases (early Fischer-Dieskau on a good day with a following wind) there can be a reasonable match in piano, but above that dynamic the difference of timbre is noticeable, and often disturbing. This does not sit well with the Bel Canto principle that the scale be even over all dynamics. Some avoid this difficulty by saying that the high baritone is an invention of the later nineteenth century. In this they follow Bernard Shaw, who pointed out that almost anybody one encountered in daily life had enough notes at their command to sing the bass-clef parts in Mozart's Figaro and Don Giovanni, and who laid the blame for the ruin of the baritone voice at the feet of Giuseppe Verdi, who 'kept the baritone banging away in the top third of his range.' The argument runs something like: the early nineteeth century baritone cultivated the falsetto, but only employed it in his singing as a kind of vocal conditioner, or for special, piano, effect; and when later composers started to require high notes in full voice (the word 'stentorian' normally crops up about now), this type of production failed to deliver the necessary animal excitement, and so baritones to force their chest voices upwards, a solution that only works after a fashion, as a forced-up chest voice cannot be carried as high as a production which avails itself of the falsetto.
If this argument be valid, what must one make of much of Rossini's baritone writing? Look at the two aria's in 'La Scala di Seta', which combine the tessitura of Mozart's Figaro with an abundance of terrifying top As and an orchestration that gets busier and thicker as the voice approaches the top of its range. Are we really to believe that music such as this was negotiated through the agency of falsetto? That would have meant yodelling some of the enormous leaps of which Rossini is so fond. Nor is this writing confined to Rossini. In Adam's 'Si j'etais Roi' (rather a good opera, by the way) each verse of the baritone couplets feature a top Ab, sustained as part of the melodic line (it is difficult to escape the conclusion that one of these was to be taken forte, the other piano), which sits in the Eb to Eb octave, and Halevy's 'Les Mousquetiers de la Reine' contains an aria (in Bb and 6/8, but the score isn't with and I don't recall the title) which takes the voice to the tenor's top Bb in a cadenza. This last instance is particularly interesting as the part was written for Leon, who had an Escamillo voice and the tessitura is very low, almost that of a bass.
Despite their enormous difficulties, these arias are all perfectly singable if one keeps the voice completely calm and refuses to force, however great the temptation. If it is true that the training of the singers, the music on which they trained and public taste discouraged yielding to such temptation, there is no need resort to falsetto in order to reach the high notes.
A final thought. A tenor entering the conservatory now will find himself encouraged to develop the falsetto as a technical resource: two or three generations ago, this was unusual. Many of our very excellent contemporary countertenors have tenor chest voices. Could it be that these two factors are related?
Happy Singing,
Regards / vriendelijke groeten
Laurie Kubiak Commercial Analyst - Europe & Africa SMMS Sales and Contract Support, Shell Services International Shell Centre, London SE1 7NA Telephone: +44 171 934 3853; Fax: +44 171 934 6674 Mobile: 07771 971 921: E.mail: Laurence.l.Kubiak@i... Office: LON-SC 631
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