| From: buzzcen@a... buzzcen@a... Date: Wed Oct 11, 2000 11:55 am Subject: opera and speech
| Obviously art is not meant to be an exact representation of reality. The word (art) itself is derived from the word artifice. However it is a heightened reflection of life and does need to reflect it accurately while illuminating the underlying truths.
To me the form of opera is very artistic in that nature but its execution is not at times. The libretto in opera is one of the chief elements in conveying to dramatic line of the story. If the words cannot be understood, the story is not being told in a sense.
The production of Streetcar Named Desire was a great example of this. Renee Flemming's delivery of the text was so distorted by her preoccupation with tone that subtitles had to be used. Other cast members in the production did not have this problem. Their singing was of a high caliber yet you could understand the text (or most of it). I really fail to see the point of a vocal technique that renders the text unintelligible. This does not produce a clear vowel line in the voice by any stretch of the imagination. In fact it obliterates it by rendering the vowels indistinguishable.
This sort of vocal production found with many opera singers reduces the art form to complete artifice that requires a very high level of knowledge and education to appreciate. This artifice does not reflect the underlying truth of the story at this point but the underlying truth of certain vocal techniques found in opera in which style rules and dramatic integrity suffers at its hand.
Randy Buescher
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