mike writes some very good points, including:
> i've heard abigaille sung. you mean; you
> can't sing it, so far.
True, I'll never sing THAT one -- but I was referring
more to the role's reputation as a voice-killer.
Verdi wrote it for Strepponi and it finished her
voice, by all accounts from the historians discussing
the role on the newsgroup right now. Throughout
history there have only been a few sopranos who have
been able to do justice to that role, rather than
screaming their way through it -- I think Lehmann,
Ponselle, Cerquetti, Callas, and Caballe were the
names mentioned on the opera newsgroup -- and that's
pretty much it. And they all had some part of the
role they choked on (Caballe's trills, Ponselle's
tessitura, Cerquetti's coloratura, etc.).
So is Abigaille a role that is superbly written for
the soprano voice and only a few singers have managed
to gather the skills (a huge lower register, big, high
top notes, firey coloratura, large voice, trills,
dramatic flux, etc.), or is it okay that only a few
singers have been able to essay it successfully? If
you take into account that the soprano Verdi wrote it
for couldn't handle its demands, it seems to suggest
that the role is badly written for the voice.
Extrapolating, that's what I mean by "unsingable"
music. I'm not intimately familiar with the tenor
voice, obviously, but it does seem to me that more
tenors crash and burn singing Mozart than sopranos do.
Some have pointed out that tenors in Mozart's day sang
in falsetto, making the evolving singing esthetic the
culprit of an "unsingable" tenor tessitura in Mozart.
Others have argued that Mozart didn't really
understand the tenor voice and was writing what he
thought was singable music, making him the culprit.
No one's saying that Mozart isn't a musical genius,
but did he understand and write well for the tenor
voice?
In terms of Adams, perhaps he understood the male
voice better than the female, but have you heard Pat
Nixon's and Madame Mao's arias? I've heard singers
who do a good job with these -- the original cast
live, and Upshaw has a good recording of the first
aria -- but it doesn't sound singable; you never
forget that the singer is conquering a
difficultly-written piece of music (who writes leaps
like that in the lyric tessitura for Pat, for example,
and then expects her to step on the middle voice at
the end -- and doesn't lighten the voice in order to
accomplish these feats easily?), rather than allowing
the music and voice to carry a message and make you
forget that there is effort involved. Good ballet
doesn't look like heaving, sweaty work; they work very
hard to make it look like effortless art -- if you
choreograph a piece that they can't do without looking
like they're struggling, you're going against one of
the time-cherished principles of ballet. This is
assuming that you aren't making a statement through
either dance or music about the difficulty of the
piece itself -- that you are using the voice to
express an emotion apart from technicality, or using
dance to convey an emotion apart from the physical
movements.
Do I think that composers thus have to appeal to the
least common demononator in vocal music... good
question. I've heard that there is an atittude among
modern composers that they write difficult music on
purpose, because they want only the best to be able to
perform their work. I don't believe that "written
with an understanding of what the human voice is
capable of doing beautifully" means "easy, simple, or
boring." You should know what a well-trained voice is
capable of. That doesn't mean you have to write music
for the untrained voice.
There's more to understanding how the voice works than
knowing "the typical lyric soprano's voice goes from
here to here, and most of the notes should be written
from there to there." If you hammer away in the
passaggio without dipping down and up once in a while,
the singer will close up and choke. If you write a
leap from chest voice to a high C, it's not going to
sound great. Don't expect Turandot's volume and
Lucia's flexibility. Sopranos generally can't compete
with brass in the lower voice. Don't ask a lyric
soprano to gun through the middle voice without
understanding that that will compromise her top.
That's the type of understanding that composers should
have -- they should know that, for 99% of singers,
over-opening the middle voice (or, from a composer's
standpoint, demanding a very warm, rich, forte sound)
will close off the top, so demanding brilliant
coloratura fireworks right after that isn't going to
work. That's a typical hour-glass construction that
the vast majority of lyric voices fall into. If you
have one freak who can do it all (like Callas) that
doesn't justify an unsingable vocal line -- it may be
art, it may be great music, but it's still unsingable.
Good responses, you all.
Isabelle B.
=====
Isabelle Bracamonte
San Francisco, CA
ibracamonte@y...
ibracamonte@y...
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