> > often sung today in a half-baked manner with a > > tone quality that is excessively light > > and without any kind of basic male heft.
> We've all heard ad nauseum about the famous William > Tell High C... if tenors were singing with a much > lighter High A, B, C before William Tell, then > it stands to reason they were singing much more > lightly in the notes leading up to that range to > satisfy the bel canto ideal of a unified voice.
Lloyd says that excessive lightening of tone sounds half-baked in Mozart, while Tako points out that Mozart's intention was undoubtably a light sound, and it is only our current perceptions that lead us to call it "half-baked."
So, by the accounts of history, Mozart was quite a good composer for the tenor of his day -- what we would call a tenorino today, one who switches to a very heady type of resonance early in the passaggio and sings a high B and C in falsetto. Thus tenors who sing Mozart full-voiced are distorting his intentions.
This tenorino approach isn't desired today -- full-voiced high Cs are the norm. Imagine a Rodolfo singing falsetto in "Che gelida manina" -- the audience would feel cheated. Tomatoes would be thrown. Today's esthetic demands a full, open, Pavarotti-type B and C from an operatic tenor, no matter if he is singing Handel or Mozart or Verdi or Puccini.
It reminds me of the recent reviews of Dessay's Amina in Sonambula at La Scala. A small percentage of critics praised her for her technical skill and lovely voice. A larger percentage criticized the choice of a tweety-bird coloratura, when Maria Callas had forever changed the perception of Amina and made it unacceptable for a lyric coloratura to sing it. Bellini (like Mozart) intended the lighter voice to be cast; these days, people prefer a different sound.
This makes me wonder if all the opera fans who moan and groan about the loss of dramatic voices today (we've all heard them do it) simply have heightened and unrealistic expectations. Did Puccini write the role of Turandot for Nilsson? Did the coloratura Mozart composed Queen of the Night for have the kind of big, brilliant sound (of a Cristina Deutekom, for instance) that we expect from the role, when sopranos like Sumi Jo are bashed for recording arias (like the Queen's) she wouldn't be well-received in on stage? Likely Mozart's original queen was the "tweety bird" of today, one who would be laughed off of the world's stages as inaudible and "just another canary."
Who remembers that Opera News article from some years back about the changing tastes in vocal art? I'll find it, hang on.
It's called "The Slow Fade of Style" by Eric Myers, in 1995 or 1996. I quote:
"When Harold Prince's revival of _Show Boat_ opened on Broadway, one of its most highly-praised stars was Lonette McKee. When McKee sang her two classic numbers, 'Can't Help Lovin' Dad Man,' and 'Bill,' she raised the roof. Her husky alto sounded like a mix of Gladys Knight, Lena Horne and Aretha Franklin, and she tore into the phrasing like Whitney Houston. Was the effect thrilling? Absolutely. It is what Kern and Hammerstein intended us to hear? Not on your life.
"Back in 1927, the original Julie, Helen Morgan, posessed a plaintive, quavery soprano. Hers was the devastated sound of a woman trampled by life but struggling to carry on."
The article goes on to talk about tenors who "distort" older music by bringing the chest voice into the upper regions of the voice, as in the post-Puccini era.
If the current push toward more dramatic/fuller-voiced sounds continues, will it someday be acceptable to hear women belting their way through opera? If Mozart heard Wunderlich singing Ottavio's arias, would his reaction be the same as ours if a soprano were to belt her way through "Un bel di"?
I'm just as guilty as the next person -- I prefer Deutekom's Queen to the pipsqueak coloraturas -- I'd much rather hear a full-voiced lyric sing Ottavio than a light and reedy tenorino -- I prefer the kind of Gilda who can sail easily over the storm scene to the kind who can twitter prettily through the aria. Bigger really *is* better -- the dramatic impact is heightened, the balance of singer to orchestra is better, and larger voices just sound more satisfying than the lighter/thinner ones. Am I, too, contributing to the demise of the "dramatic voice," as our tastes slowly push the envelope of expectation into more and more unrealistic waters?
So (gosh, this is getting long, and forgive the metaphor above), should we as singers bend to the changing esthetic tastes of audiences (thus forcing tenors to shout their way through Mozart's high tessitura, for example, and making only a soprano of Nilsson's volume acceptable in the dramatic roles)? How much does "what the composer intends" really matter?
Isabelle B.
===== Isabelle Bracamonte San Francisco, CA ibracamonte@y... ibracamonte@y...
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