Dear Dre and Vocalisters:
You make some very important points especially regarding the vowel usage in singing. Wunderlich tends to choose more closed forms of vowels when singing in his passaggio. Thus his /I/ tends frequently to be /i/, his /e/ closes to /I/, his/E/ becomes /e/. He even does this with the back vowels wherein we hear the /awe/ become /o/ and the /o/ tends to drift toward /u/. Most of these vowel changes may be the result of his "Pfälzisches dialect" as you mention but I would be willing to bet that a substantial portion of these changes were taught and carefully learned. You can hear him do it not only in opera but in his Lieder recordings, especially in Schubert's "Die Schöne Müllerin". The effect of these vowel changes is to move the primary passaggio points slightly up or down and thus avoid having to land on difficult passaggio notes. It is a technique that is also apparent in the singing of Björling and others from northern Europe.
If vowels are kept "speaking quality" pure, the singer is required to find other means to transcend the passaggio and avoid the audible changes that must occur in vocal fold function in area of vocal change. The concept of "cover" is one method commonly used because it darkens a vowel and, in so doing, moves the passaggio points. "Cover" also give the false idea that one is continuing to sing the same "speaking quality" pure vowel but this is not so. If one isolates a "covered" vowel (via a tape loop or its digital equivalent) one will find that the vowel so sung is, in reality, a more closed form of the attempted " "speaking quality" pure vowel. The difficulty with "covering" a vowel is one of deciding how cover is necessary and duplicating that exact amount of cover each time. I have found that vowel modification is a more accurate method of achieving the effect of cover and is more reliably duplicated .
Any composer writing for any voice type must have a deep feeling for the functions of that type of voice. It has nothing to do with deliberately making a work difficult. It has to do with how a voice type can best realize the intent of the composer. If a composer does not understand the potential or the function of a voice type it is likely that he/she will write music that is less likely to achieve his/her goals. If a composer writes music that is consistently in the passaggio of the singer and if the composer also sets text such that the most open vowels are required in this passaggio, then the composer has given the singer little, if any, opportunity to solve the problems of negotiating the passaggio smoothly and the singer must resort to excessive cover or an extremely light production or use of head voice below its intended area or, as some wise singers have chosen, to change the placement of which words are sung on which notes. When Mozart writes for the tenor voice he frequently places the tenor in this difficult position. It is not surprising that a singer requested of him more use of the /i/ and /e/ vowels.
The raising of the pitch of music since Mozart's time can add to this difficulty, of course, but it is more a matter of making different vowel modification adjustments now than had to be made in Mozart's era. The adjustments many not be more difficult, just different.
-- Lloyd W. Hanson Professor of Voice, Vocal Pedagogy Northern Arizona University Flagstaff, AZ 86001
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