Adams, Berg, Previn, Tibbet... totally unsingable.
Written all wrong for the voice.
I love Adams' Nixon in China; I love to listen to it.
But the leaps are written totally wrong for the human
voice. Good vocal writing will propel an emotion
forward while exploiting the beauty of the voice,
rather than making it hard as all heck to simply get
through it without creating an ugly tone. It's part
of the skill to convey emotion through music; it's
also part of the required genius to be able to draw
out the beauty of the human voice (or else why compose
for the voice?).
To mike, who believes that calling a composer
"unsingable" is just an excuse not to work hard and
that great art is allowed to demand only the greatest
singers, I would say that understanding the
limitations of an instrument does not degrade the
quality of the art. I could write a smashing piece
for piano that would, unfortunately, require three
hands to play. Waiting until someone with three hands
is born and saying, "Well, the rest of you nincompoops
just aren't good enought to breathe life into my Art"
isn't a very intelligent stance, nor does it make me a
very intelligent composer. You work within the
limitations of the art form and you make it look good
(a la Michaelangelo working with marble, for
instance), or else it is your fault, not the stone's,
for asking something it cannot give. Understanding
how an instrument works is part of your responsibility
if you compose for that instrument. Simply throwing
up your hands because the stone won't bend is your
failing as a sub-par artist.
Yes, Abigaille is also unsingable, unfortunately.
What can I say -- maybe Verdi hadn't gotten the hang
of it yet.
I agree that different singers' voices will fit
different composers (I like Verdi; another might find
that Mozart fits but Verdi is a bear), but to a point.
I find singers who say that Puccini fits them like a
glove above all other composers almost always have
shoddy technique, as Puccini is an easy composer to
slack off in. You can get away with some really bad
vocal habits and still sound decent in Puccini --
unlike Mozart, where every tiny technical flaw is
exposed to the audience on a silver platter.
There are singers who say that Wagner is "medicine for
the voice," while others call him a voice-wrecker. So
I see the point, certainly. I still believe that any
well-focused voice will find Verdi a pleasure (whether
or not you have the weight to carry it off on a
stage).
Isabelle B.
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Isabelle Bracamonte
San Francisco, CA
ibracamonte@y...
ibracamonte@y...
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