Dre makes wonderful points about the demands of lieder, especially the linguistic significance, with which I totally agree.
In fact, I think that lieder, in many ways, is much more demanding of an individual instrument than opera, which is why I totally disagree with the practice of giving young singers a steady diet of lieder until they are mature enough to "handle" arias and roles.
To take one example, singing a high pianissimo (correctly, now, not just flipping it into falsetto or flooding the tone with air for a breathy soft sound, or, of course, choking back the sound in strangulation) is one of the most difficult technical concepts that exists, and one that often comes quite late in the training, when the bodily strength and understanding of good vs. bad tension are able to be grasped. There are famous pianissimi in arias, but there are many, many more art songs that demand quiet singing constantly. Hard stuff! And you're teaching a 21-year-old to phrase a lovely, whispering line before she can produce all those notes at a correct, healthy mezzo-forte?
I have seen a lot of (well, maybe 11 or 12) senior recitals in undergraduate conservatories where the student has been polished and poised, and sings in a lovely, artistic, intelligent manner, with perfect dynamic control and linguistic understanding, and the tone is totally untrained and still immature (breathy, lacking in ring, placed too high or falling into the throat, etc.). I would personally MUCH rather see a 21-year-old blast his way through a handful of arias with a correct and exciting tonal quality and no interpretation or dynamics at all. Learn to sing the notes! Technique has to come first -- you can't pick it up on the job! Those artistic "extras" can be taught after you have the tools, the basic instrument; but going back and building a voice from the ground up is not what grad schools and apprenticeship programs are for. Much as I despise the ageism in the Met competitions, they will ALWAYS take the promising voice over the package of acting/languages/phrasing/dynamics/musicality. Why? Because their job is to teach a young singer the latter group of skills, but without a promising, raw voice, they're just polishing a lump of coal. Same with apprenticeships -- same with beginning contracts in Germany -- they want a good voice that won't fall apart under technical pressure, and they can teach you the rest of the skills on the fly. Yes, even theory!
Yes, it's ideal to have it all, but you have to pour ALL your energy and time into learning the technique in the beginning. If you still have free time when you're not practicing, taking lessons, listening to your tapes, scrutinizing old recordings to hear and feel what great singers are doing technically, reading the books about the differing vocal schools, keeping a technical journal for writing down your thoughts and repertoire and new concepts and what you felt worked during that day's lesson, going over your repertoire mentally and imagining what your current concepts should feel like (singing without singing), getting enough sleep and water and exercise for your voice -- if you still have free time during this technical process, study your languages. But for heaven's sake, if you aren't doing all this because you are spending the time taking acting classes and theory and piano and history and gesticulation classes and lieder-repertoire classes and audition workshops and coachings -- you are walking before you can crawl! After you are in control of your voice and can sing every note in your range correctly (not perfectly, but correctly), and have the ability to create effects (soft, loud, colors, diction) without cheating or compromising your tonal quality -- THEN jump into the rest of the package. But don't sacrifice the first step because you're so busy with all the polish!
[Disclaimer Notes: I tend to get all passionate and overstate my opinions on vocalist, because I feel like I'm a lone voice against the academic tradition sometimes -- so please note that I do not think operatic singing eschews diction, dynamics, etc. But, in my experience, people are willing to listen to a young singer forte through an aria paying attention to technique, while a lieder song, for some reason, demands attention to all the "polish" details from the beginning. It's acceptable to listen to a technical rendition of "Il mio tesoro," but not Dichterliebe. The first is a slightly boring step on the path to mastery, the second is a violation of the whole lieder law of text-and-melody-superceding-vocal-technique. And of course there are lieder and art songs that young singers can have fun with and learn from (and I'm not talking about the Italian 24, which were really arias originally, weren't they?), but the 80/20 ratio of song to opera that I see undergrads learning (with the arias/roles learned in the last couple of years) just doesn't cut it, in my opinion. And clearly, you *can* teach anyone to sing correctly with any material (like Porpora and the 5 years of vocalises), but I really think that hopeful opera singers learn to sing opera by singing opera. And, yes, the American schooling system produces working singers, but I still don't think it's the best way of learning how to sing. Whew.]
Isabelle B., getting all worked up again...
===== Isabelle Bracamonte San Francisco, CA ibracamonte@y...
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