I think the difference has more to do with temperament than with
technique. Of course, the need to project the voice over an orchestra is
absent with (most) lieder singing, so I believe singers of lieder actually
have more opportunity use what, for want of a better term, I'll call
"vocal effects". An example is a recital I just attended in which Suzanne
Mentzer sang the "Trois Melodies de 1916" by Eric Satie, and in both Le
Statue de Bronze and Dapheneo, she actually created different voices for
the different characters in the songs. I cannot imagine the very
childlike voice she used for the child in Dapheneo, or the repressed,
brittle voice of the Statue in "Statue de Bronze" being able to project in
the opera house; nor was either voice at all attractive - indeed, he only
times one hears these types of voices are from buffo singers. But they
were absolutely appropriate for the Melodies, and worked just fine in a
small recital hall with piano accompaniment.
But the key stylistic difference between (most) lieder and (most) opera is
the same as the key stylistic difference between (most) poetry and (most)
drama/plays: in the former, the reciter is interpreting the text in a
kind of schizophrenic way: simultaneously reciting as if you were the
poet creating those words for the first time and as if you were yourself
commenting on the words by the way in which you conveyed them (with the
guidance from the music, of course, provided by the composer). With opera,
by contrast, you must sing (1) in the guise of a character (NOT the
writer, and not yourself); (2) always as if you were speaking (singing)
the words for the very first time (unless, of course, the libretto calls
for your character to sing a pre-existing - to the character - song or
recite a pre-existing poem). IN the case of the lied, your own personality
SHOULD come through. In the case of the opera, your own personality WILL
come through, but that's actually something you want to avoid having
happen too much: what you should be striving for is to have the
personality of your character come through.
Now of course there are what I call the "role playing" Lieder, like the
two Satie songs I mentioned, or Schubert's "Der Tod und Maedchen", in
which the lieder are actually dialogues or monologues given by a
particularly character/characters. Here the main difference between an
operatic character interpretation and the Lieder character interpretation
is going to be just how physical the interpretation is. The convention of
Lieder is that characterisation - which is, in a way, just another *mood*
in Lieder - is going to be conveyed almost exclusively by the voice, and
not by a total physical transformation, with realistic gestures that one
would use if one were soliloquising or speaking (singing) in an opera. The
objective with Lieder is to tell a story - and just as story-tellers
create characters entirely with words and "vocal gestures" (tones/colours
of voice, dynamics, tempo changes, etc.), Lieder singers do the same when
telling stories in song. This is different than opera, where one also
uses "vocal gestures", but also physical gestures and other stage movement
to convey character not only through the text and music, but through body
language and physical interaction with one's surroundings and other people
onstage.
Finally, I think the key difference between Lieder- (and all art song-)
singing and opera is the scope: Lieder singing is a more intimate art than
opera - just as story-telling and poetry recitations are generally more
intimate events than theatre. This doesn't mean that you might not sing
Lieder in a concert hall that seats 2,000; nor does it mean that you will
never sing opera in a "shadow box" theatre that seats 100. But it does
mean that the scale of the drama that is inherent in both the music
itself and in the stylistic expectations, is going to be smaller with
Lieder than with opera. I didn't use the word "intensity", because I think
intensity will be there in both forms. But the distance to which you need
to convey that intensity is going to be shorter with Lieder than with
opera. For one thing, the audience is not going to be distracted by stage
sets, costumes, lighting, and "business" by other people on stage when you
sing Lieder. So even when you sing art songs in a large concert hall, and
even when you sing them with full orchestra, the audience is going to be
focussing more directly and intensely on your voice alone than they are in
an opera house (most of the time): so you needn't play the emotions, etc.
as "big" in Lieder, because you don't have to be continually reclaiming
the audience's attention when it wanders to other aspects of the
performance that, in opera, are just as valid as what you're doing. In
Lieder, it's just you and the accompanist (which may be piano, other solo
instrument, or ensemble or orchestra - but it's still a question of two
equal partners, with no other dimensions to the performance).
This may all seem self-evident, but I think these are the things that
"define" the difference between art song and opera much more than anything
technical in the approach to voice production for each genre.
And the reason some people are better at opera and some are better at art
song is, as I started this screed by saying, a matter of temperament. Some
of us are more histrionic on a grander scale than others; some of us are
born actors, while others are born story tellers or reciters. There is
overlap between the two, but it is seldom that you find a master story
teller who is also a brilliant Hamlet...and vice versa.
I think, finally, it's the difference between being aware of the text as
text - which is what a Lieder singer must be - vs. being unaware of the
text except in how it expresses the emotions of the character you are
portraying. Very few libretti strive to create colors, moods, etc. through
words alone. Lieder, by and large, are musical settings of pre-existing
poems: the poems stand up by themselves - the songs are, in truth, just
the composers' commentaries on those poems: the composers' reaction, in
music, to the words. And the singer of Lieder is the vehicle for bringing
those words - and that musical reaction -as well as the singer's own
reaction to the combination of words and music - to life.
KM
=====
My NEIL SHICOFF Website:
http://www.radix.net/~dalila/shicoff/shicoff.html
My Website:
http://www.radix.net/~dalila/index.html
-----
We're sitting in the opera house;
We're waiting for the curtain to arise
With wonders for our eyes,
A feeling of expectancy,
A certain kind of ecstasy,
Expectancy and ecstasy....Sh's's's.
- Charles Ives
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