The esteemed and ever-erudite Tako Oda wrote:
>To be fair, I'm sure there were more of these high flying tenors in the
>age of bel canto. Height is inversely linked to vocal weight in most
>cases. Since the advent of the Wagnerian tenor, there have probably been
>fewer tenors who can soar to F5.
What is often not recognised is that this phenomenon does not confine itself
to tenors.
I have recently been studying the lesser-known operas of the bel canto age -
Halevy, Adam, Mercadente, Ricci, Lacerna, Meyerbeer. These operas give the
lie to the notion, often expressed, that the high baritone (or, more
accurately, the low baritone who sings awfully high at times) was the
invention of Giuseppe Verdi. The extraordinary high notes that are so well
known among the tenor parts - Puritani, Poliuto, Adelson e Salvini,
Postillon de Jongjumeau - have their equivalents among the baritone parts.
It is perhaps useful to distinguish two types of high note in this
repertoire: those which form part of a cadenza or fioriture, and those which
form part of a plain melodic line. These second are considered part of the
normal working compass of the voice, and therefore subject to the bel canto
requirements of easy emission of the voice and a timbre in which
neighbouring notes match in plain style. The first are for special
occasions. The speed at which they are frequently required to be executed
disguises the fact that they may not match their lower neighbours, and they
are not considered part of the normal working compass of the voice. They are
often not essential to the melodic line (unlike the second type), so may be
replaced by the singer with notes he finds more comfortable or effective.
Often they are higher than the second type, although there are exceptions,
the terrifying sustained tenor F designed to peal out above the chorus and
orchestra in the finale of Puritani is the most notorious example. For most
of these exceptions we have Rubini to thank: remove him from the equation
and the Bel Canto tenor is rarely required to sustain a line beyond Db or D
(C or C# at today's pitch), although he may be called to take an Eb or F
(Es, for some reason, are rare) in coloratura.
The poise and pliability of the vocal line is far more important in this Bel
Canto style than anything we, from our twentieth century vantage-point,
would consider dramatic or naturalistic in the singing. I have long
suspected that this poise and pliablilty encouraged useful vocal habits. A
voice that seldom has to give vehement expression, whose normal fare is
melisma and whose repertoire encourages an easy flexibility, is more likely
to be produced without any particular effort. This, I suspect, has changed
more than any other element in 'best practice' vocal technique as our
century has waxed old, we accept a certain roughness in our vocal production
which formed no part in the art of Battistini, Marconi, Melba, Patti or
Plancon. This 'roughness' can be exciting: but while written testimony shows
that our great-grandparents found the vocalism of a Ruffo or a Destinn
exciting, written testimony also shows that they found this exciting
vocalism wanting when compared to the vocal art of a Battistini or Patti.
The vocal paragons I was raised to admire, however, were Callas, Gobbi,
Domingo, and Raimondi, and I think my experience is far from unique. These
singers stand in the line of Titta Ruffo and Emmy Destinn, not that of
Mattia Battistini and Adelina Patti; they have all, on occasion, approached
the vocal poise of the Battistini camp, but it is not home ground to them,
and they seem unable to sustain it, if indeed they want to. Developments in
popular music have also encouraged this trend.
Now a voice produced without any particular effort is more likely to have a
wide range (if you want to lose your high notes an effective approach is to
use more pressure when singing them). The extreme high notes in Bel Canto
tenor parts crop up every so often on this list, but has no-one noticed how
low these parts go? The Rossini Rossini tenor may have to sustain a bottom
Bb or A at the end of a run (have a look at 'Otello'), often against a
pretty hefty accompaniament, and he and early Donizetti share a penchant for
the occasional marcato low note as part of a cabaletta line. For me the
defining characteristic of these parts is not so much that they are high,
but that they are wide.
A voice produced without any particular effort is also likely to be able to
stretch a little further at each end. Is it not at least worth entertaining
the notion that in this ease of emission is to be found the answer to the
question of the extreme high notes peculiar to this era? The nineteenth
century seldom spoke of voice production, preferring to speak of emission, a
usage which has descended to contemporary Italian, in which it is hard to
find a synonym for voice-production, while 'una voce morbida' is highly
desireable, and a fit object for study. 'Production' implies that one has to
do something to create a voice, 'emission' that the voice is always there,
but that anything which might impede its easy flow be banished from the
singing. I repeat, this 'easy flow' was encouraged by the general musical
style of the times.
Now, it is often said that tenors negotiated these high tessituras by
employing a style of production which incorporated a degree of falsetto in
the top register. This is variously described, but the broad prinicipal is
as I have stated. So far as the tenor voice is concerned, this does sound
plausible. The timbre of the tenor falsetto is close enough to the timbre of
the tenor non-falsetto voice (call it what you will) singing high for any
mismatch to go unremarked by a contemporary audience, if not by an audience
of our great-grandparents, for whom evenness of scale was one of the chief
criteria of good singing. Indeed, one suspects many tenors have sung in this
way, and met with success.
But does it work for baritones? One does meet baritones who employ some form
of falsetto for their high notes (there are several in the Garcia
tradition), but in this case the timbre does not match. In the best cases
(early Fischer-Dieskau on a good day with a following wind) there can be a
reasonable match in piano, but above that dynamic the difference of timbre
is noticeable, and often disturbing. This does not sit well with the Bel
Canto principle that the scale be even over all dynamics. Some avoid this
difficulty by saying that the high baritone is an invention of the later
nineteenth century. In this they follow Bernard Shaw, who pointed out that
almost anybody one encountered in daily life had enough notes at their
command to sing the bass-clef parts in Mozart's Figaro and Don Giovanni, and
who laid the blame for the ruin of the baritone voice at the feet of
Giuseppe Verdi, who 'kept the baritone banging away in the top third of his
range.' The argument runs something like: the early nineteeth century
baritone cultivated the falsetto, but only employed it in his singing as a
kind of vocal conditioner, or for special, piano, effect; and when later
composers started to require high notes in full voice (the word 'stentorian'
normally crops up about now), this type of production failed to deliver the
necessary animal excitement, and so baritones to force their chest voices
upwards, a solution that only works after a fashion, as a forced-up chest
voice cannot be carried as high as a production which avails itself of the
falsetto.
If this argument be valid, what must one make of much of Rossini's baritone
writing? Look at the two aria's in 'La Scala di Seta', which combine the
tessitura of Mozart's Figaro with an abundance of terrifying top As and an
orchestration that gets busier and thicker as the voice approaches the top
of its range. Are we really to believe that music such as this was
negotiated through the agency of falsetto? That would have meant yodelling
some of the enormous leaps of which Rossini is so fond. Nor is this writing
confined to Rossini. In Adam's 'Si j'etais Roi' (rather a good opera, by the
way) each verse of the baritone couplets feature a top Ab, sustained as part
of the melodic line (it is difficult to escape the conclusion that one of
these was to be taken forte, the other piano), which sits in the Eb to Eb
octave, and Halevy's 'Les Mousquetiers de la Reine' contains an aria (in Bb
and 6/8, but the score isn't with and I don't recall the title) which takes
the voice to the tenor's top Bb in a cadenza. This last instance is
particularly interesting as the part was written for Leon, who had an
Escamillo voice and the tessitura is very low, almost that of a bass.
Despite their enormous difficulties, these arias are all perfectly singable
if one keeps the voice completely calm and refuses to force, however great
the temptation. If it is true that the training of the singers, the music on
which they trained and public taste discouraged yielding to such temptation,
there is no need resort to falsetto in order to reach the high notes.
A final thought. A tenor entering the conservatory now will find himself
encouraged to develop the falsetto as a technical resource: two or three
generations ago, this was unusual. Many of our very excellent contemporary
countertenors have tenor chest voices. Could it be that these two factors
are related?
Happy Singing,
Regards / vriendelijke groeten
Laurie Kubiak
Commercial Analyst - Europe & Africa SMMS
Sales and Contract Support, Shell Services International
Shell Centre, London SE1 7NA
Telephone: +44 171 934 3853; Fax: +44 171 934 6674
Mobile: 07771 971 921: E.mail: Laurence.l.Kubiak@i...
Office: LON-SC 631
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