A vile beastly rottenheaded foolbegotten brazenthroated pernicious piggish screaming, tearing, roaring, perplexing, splitmecrackle crashmecriggle insane ass of a woman is practicing howling below-stairs with a brute of a singing master so horribly that my head is nearly off.
— EDWARD LEAR
The good singer should be nothing but an able interpreter of the ideas of the master, the composer.
—GIOACCHINO ROSSINI
Let but thy voice engender with the string,
And angels will be borne, while thou dost sing.— ROBERT HERRICK, “UPON HER VOICE”
How hard is it to be an opera singer? Don’t you just open your mouth and sing? It may look that easy, but it’s not.
Why not? Can’t we all sing, if only in the privacy of our own shower stalls? Don’t we all fantasize, at least once in a while, about standing up on a stage and belting out a tune, if not like Pavarotti or Sutherland, then at least like Elvis or Madonna? Admit it: every time Bob Dylan opens his mouth, don’t you think you can sing better than he does? (You probably can.)
Certainly, it is true that some folks are blessed from birth with beautiful voices, the way others have been gifted with extraordinary athletic talent. A voice is not something that you suddenly find you have in your twenties; almost without exception every major singer has discovered this remarkable instrument lurking within at a relatively early age. Now it is true that voices change and mature as the body does. So generally, you must wait until puberty has finished wreaking its hormonal havoc before you can find out exactly what kind of a voice you possess. Boy sopranos, for example, do not necessarily grow up to be fine tenors. (During the baroque period, the best boy sopranos often grew up to be, with the timely application of the surgeon’s knife, men sopranos).
Indeed, the voice is so intimately tied up with the body’s age and physical condition (and why not?) that the training of singers involves a kind of detailed, practical medical knowledge that is not necessary in the education of any other musical performer. Singers, in fact, almost never outgrow their need for some kind of outside consultation, whether educational or medical. Indeed, even in mid-career a professional singer will sometimes return to the studio of his or her vocal master for some brushup lessons or to correct any bad habits that may have crept in. Invariably, singers are on a first-name basis with the same handful of doctors, most of them in New York City, who specialize in the care and feeding of the vocal chords. (One legendary operatic M.D. was Leo P. Reckford, a Viennese immigrant born Leo Recknitzer, who came to New York City in 1939 and quickly became one of the leading practitioners of “phoniatrics.”) Singers are widely regarded to be irrational hypochondriacs when it comes to their instruments—and they have to be, purely in self-defense.
A singer almost never refers to “my voice.” It is always “the voice,” a mysterious, ineffable creature lurking somewhere between the diaphragm and the adenoids upon which the artist wholly depends for his or her livelihood. It is a semisymbiotic relationship, in which the voice is a parasite and the singer merely the host creature; the voice demands, and the singer gives. It may seem an affectation for Pavarotti to wander around at the height of summer with a scarf wrapped around his zillion-lira throat, but for him it’s no joke. The slightest hint of a cold sends a singer into a state of sheer terror, especially in these days of incessant jet travel. Airplanes and colds have a relationship akin to gasoline and lighted matches, and singers positively dread the prospect of flying if they’re even a tiny bit sick. Because when they get off the plane at the other end, what started as a sniffle can become a raging head cold, provoking the familiar preperformance announcement, “Ladies and gentlemen, although Miss Pazzo is indisposed, she has graciously consented to…” (Cheers from the audience, excellent notices from the critics the next day, etc.)
Imagine what it would be like for you to go to work each morning and not know whether the tools you need to do your job are actually going to be there. Imagine walking into your office on the day of a major presentation and finding everything gone—no computer, no desk, no telephone, no secretarial services, nothing. Or, maybe even worse, they’re all there, but in horribly decrepit condition and wholly unable to do the job, although they can approximate it. And only you realize it. How would you feel then? How would your boss feel?
You’d feel the same way a singer does when she’s sick, that’s how. Frustrated. Angry. Embarrassed. Humiliated. Maybe even fired. Trying to go on stage to sing opera in anything less than peak vocal condition is to invite possibly career-ending disaster. No wonder they’re all insane.
What goes into a great voice? What are the considerations that govern vocal production? Marilyn Horne, a great mezzo, once said that, to her, breathing was 90 percent of vocal technique. Now doesn’t that sound simple? What could be more natural to any of us than breathing? And yet, it’s not that you breathe, it’s how you breathe that can determine how good a singer you will be.
Horne, who started singing at the age of five, was lucky in that she had a fine teacher who taught her how to stand and how to breathe. If you’ve ever heard Horne—better yet, if you’ve ever seen her on stage—you’ll already have a vivid image of her technique, because “Jackie,” as her friends call her, probably has the best posture of any singer before the public. Horne doesn’t just stand; she plants herself as if she were rooted to the stage, and (in her words) “thinks out”—that is, thinks about projecting her voice out over the footlights and into the vast recesses of the opera-house auditorium. She succeeds splendidly: whatever one may think of her work as an artist, nobody has ever complained that Marilyn Horne’s voice was too small for its venue.
The great baritone Cornell MacNeil, on the other hand, liked to say that you didn’t need a teacher to sing. He needed a teacher for all the other aspects of opera, but not for singing, which came naturally to him. “The problem with singing,” he told fellow opera star Jerome Hines in Hines’s fascinating book, Great Singers on Great Singing (1982), “is that people complicate it enormously. It was natural enough to me until I was well into my career. I had to learn things like languages and style. That’s what I concentrated on because I didn’t really have any vocal problems.” He’s not alone—such great voices as Adelina Patti, Amelita Galli-Curci, Luisa Tetrazzini, and, closer to our own time, the tenor Mario del Monaco, all were either largely or entirely self-taught.
Others with whom Hines spoke—and his book is a Who’s Who of the postwar operatic scene—speak of the relationship of physique to the kind of voice you have (Horne is as powerfully built as her voice), the importance of intelligence in vocal production, the right frame of mind, even the weather. The point being, I suppose, that not even the great singers really understand, or can articulate, what it takes to open your mouth and have a beautiful sound emerge.
In this respect, then, singers are very much like athletes, and it is a comparison they often either welcome or draw themselves. Like athletes, opera singers live with the certainty that their careers are finite; that someday their skills will abandon them; and that no matter how much intelligence, stamina, etc., they may still possess, all those other qualities are as nothing once the voice itself has vanished.
Like athletes, too, singers do not know the day and the hour of their professional demise—and, indeed, it may occur so gradually that the last person to notice is the artist himself. How many times have we heard the refrain from a washed-up ball player that “I’m in the best shape of my life.” And that, in fact, may be the case; most sports figures, blessed with the careless ignorance of youth, never to stop to ask themselves whence came their talent until it has left them. Since it was always there, they wrongfully assume it will always be there; the thought that it might forsake them is unimaginable. And so our last memories of them are often of the once-great quarterback, sitting on his duff, while men ten or twenty years his junior celebrate his downfall, like a warrior tribe that has just vanquished an enemy chief.
The same goes with singers. Though canary fanciers may cheer the innumerable “farewell” performances of their favorite stars—Sutherland, to take the most recent example, seemed to stagger on for years, ever-more-cleverly redefining the meaning of the word—the rest of us generally find the charms of out-of-tune, wobbly singing highly overrated. But who (besides us congenitally nasty critics) has the courage to inform a singer when he or she is washed up? Damn few opera-house managers or conductors, that’s who.
James Levine, the artistic director of the Met, presents an interesting defense. In his younger years, Levine routinely hired singers who were, to put it charitably, past their prime. He did this partly to realize one of his childhood ambitions, to make music with these men and women he had grown up admiring. But a more important reason, in his view, was to present a vanishing kind of vocal artistry to the public before it disappeared altogether. It was worth it, Levine felt, to hear Renata Scotto at something less than her best in order to show younger audiences the way opera used to be sung. It’s an argument you can certainly dispute, but that’s the way he felt.
Eventually, though, Father Time comes calling for everybody. While operatic careers tend to last longer than sports careers, the renewal of the art form constantly demands a fresh influx of talent. So it is all to the good that careers come to an end, that singers learn to bow out gracefully. Because the ego is closely wrapped up in any discussion of an opera singer’s psyche, however, it is almost impossible to convince a singer that work, age, and the change of life that hits after the age of fifty have taken their toll. Unlike today’s surly, spoiled, and far-too-well-remunerated sports figures, opera singers still thrive on the coin of public adulation, and you would have better luck cutting back their fees than cutting off the applause in which they love to bask. There is nothing wrong with this; it takes extraordinary courage (as well as extraordinary talent) to stand up on stage for more than three hours in what must be the single most difficult performing art. But it does complicate any rational or dispassionate assessment of the state of an individual voice.
Now there’s a word hardly ever used in operatic discussion—dispassion. Opera fans are madly passionate about everything operatic, but no single subject gets their juices flowing the way a knock-down, drag-out comparison of great voices, past and present, does. In any group, there will be those who ardently praise today’s crop of divas and star tenors; they are opposed by an even larger cohort that claims that contemporary stars are not a patch on the great voices of yore—Tetrazzini, Chaliapin, Caruso, Melba, the De Reszke brothers: the good old days, when men were men and the ladies had chicken dishes and fruit desserts named after them. The fact that there are few or no recordings extant by some of the voices cited is of no moment whatsoever. Indeed, a golden-age singer’s reputation is often in inverse proportion to evidence actually in existence.
Were the singers of (pick any historical period) better than today’s? So much nonsense has been occasioned by this question, and so much snobbism, that it’s time to set the record straight. And the answer is yes and no.
Let me explain. The notion of a golden age is a fundamental fiction, dating back to the Garden of Eden. Things were worthier in the old days, goes this line of thinking: people were smarter, the air, food, and water were purer, streets were safer, everything was cheaper, and, damn it, the opera singers were just plain better too. Never mind that, upon inspection, this premise usually dries up and blows away. (Can you imagine what the sanitation conditions were like in the Garden of Eden, not to mention the moral climate, with all those lions lying down with lambs and Adam and Eve running around buck naked?) The notion of a golden age has a powerful appeal because we can console ourselves with the thought that someday even our own horrible times will be looked back upon fondly—if only by us, in our dotage.
You may begin to suspect, then, that I am not a card-carrying member of the L’Age d’Or Society, especially when it comes to opera. The reason is that I am highly suspicious of recordings, which provide a simulacrum of performance but are (when you stop to think about it) almost entirely fraudulent as a reflection of artistic achievement.
By fraud, I don’t mean that the name on the label does not correspond to the sound of the voice on the recording. I accept the fact that if it says it’s Caruso, then it’s Caruso—although perhaps he’s a bad example since, as modern opera’s first great superstar, he recorded so much. Instead, I mean it in two senses:
First, the picture of this particular operatic golden age (roughly the turn of the century) that emerges from recordings is highly arbitrary. Recording was in its infancy then, and not every great voice took to it. Some singers made plenty of Edison cylinders and acoustic recordings; others made few or none at all. Further, the limitations of the medium itself circumscribed the scope of the material. It simply was not feasible to record all of Wotan’s Farewell from Wagner’s Die Walküre on an Edison cylinder, so a lot of encores and bon-bons got recorded instead. The early recordings were also incapable of capturing the auditory range of an orchestra, and so instruments that sounded better were often substituted, with a resulting musical distortion. Finally, it was rare for more than two singers to record together, and so we have little idea of how any of the golden age voices functioned operatically, as opposed to merely vocally.
We can, of course, extrapolate—and some do. Of course certain qualities, or lack of them, are audible on the old recordings. Alma Gluck, the Romanian-born American soprano who made her Met debut in 1909, emerges as an adequate but unremarkable soprano, while Emma Calvé is electrifying. The voice of the great Caruso (to my ears) seems oddly ordinary, although his musicianship is impeccable, whereas his great contemporary, John McCormack, sings with a technique and interpretative insight unmatched among lyric tenors of today. Hear Giovanni Martinelli, perhaps the most important immediate successor to Caruso, sing Lensky’s aria from Onegin (in Italian) without the slightest sense of Russian style; listen to the ravishing Maria Jeritza in an aria from Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Die tote Stadt, and weep. And yet, from this selective evidence, some critics and vocal historians have constructed huge castles in the air as they wax rhapsodic about various obscure (to the layman) figures from half a century ago and more. They may be right; they may be wrong; they may be crazy. The thing is, we can’t really ever know for sure. Which is, I suppose, part of the fun.
Let me interject something at this point, which will be of special interest to Phantom of the Opera fans. If you have read the novel, you know that one of the principal characters is the magnificent Paris Opéra itself, designed by Charles Garnier and one of the glories of musical architecture anywhere in the world. Gaston Leroux, the author, took great care in getting his setting exactly right, and if you have ever actually been inside the Opéra, you will know that Leroux’s description is right on the money.
“Even the lake?” you ask. Yes, even the famous subterranean lake. But of more interest to our discussion here, Leroux also tantalizingly mentions a cache of gramophone records buried on one of the Opéra’s underground levels. In the book, it is just outside this room that Erik the Phantom’s skeleton is found at the end. I always assumed the trove to be fictional, but during a stem-to-stern tour of the Paris Opéra I made in 1987, I discovered to my surprise—and the surprise of my tour guide—that it was not. On the dusty old door of a locked and sealed room is a plaque that reads: “Gift of M. Alfred Clark, 28 June 1907. The room in which are contained the gramophone records.” It is a time capsule, not to be opened until the year 2007. And what does it contain? It’s impossible to know for sure, but Alfred Clark was the director of the Berliner Record Company in Paris, so we have to assume that the chamber holds a sampling of his company’s wares. When it is finally opened, it may well prove to be the single most important collection of turn-of-the-century French vocalism ever unearthed; so far, hélas!, the Opéra administration has rejected all petitions to open it up.
Closer to home, every artist of any reputation or accomplishment is represented on LP and CD. Selectivity is not the problem here: studio wizardry is. Which brings us to my second objection to recorded performances. Ever since Glenn Gould demonstrated the alternative reality of the recording studio, musicians have employed recordings in an extramusical way to create in sound what is impossible to duplicate on the stage. Thus Herbert von Karajan, another who understood that recordings were not live performances and vice versa, could get Mirella Freni, who is fundamentally a lyric soprano, to essay Aida on record. I once asked Freni why Karajan had picked her for one of Verdi’s most challenging roles. “The maestro said to me, ‘Mirella, I no like Aida screaming,’” she replied. In other words, she could sing at what for her was a normal volume, and with her normal method of tone production, and not have to worry about filling the Metropolitan Opera House or the Grosses Festspielhaus in Salzburg, two huge auditoriums. The recording engineer would do it for her. So is Freni a great Aida? Can she even sing Aida? Once again, the answer must be yes and no.
These are two of the reasons I distrust recordings, and why I tend to discount much if not most of the enthusiasm for the golden age. But the most important reason by far is that, in longing for a never-never land that perhaps never was, we ignore the very real operatic strengths of our own time. In fact, I think a strong case can be made that opera has never been better.
Modern opera singers get up every morning and start to vocalize with one tremendous disadvantage. Unless they specialize in new music (and almost nobody does), with each passing year they get further away in time from the wellsprings of their repertoire. When Tetrazzini et alia were active, they were singing music by composers who, if not actually still alive, were only freshly interred. Everybody always makes a big fuss about Arturo Toscanini, who was indisputably a great conductor. But when Toscanini conducted the world premiere of (among other things) Puccini’s Turandot, he was leading music by a man who had been known to him personally. He didn’t have to imagine a connection to Puccini’s time, place, and ethos; he shared it. Without having to find it in the score, he knew exactly what Puccini meant by this musical gesture or that. So much of musical performance in the past relied on the composer’s confidence that he didn’t have to spell everything out for his performers that it is hard for us, as we debate whether the tenor should or should not try to interpolate a high C at the end of the first act of La bohème, to imagine that the answer used to go without saying.
But why shouldn’t this be true? In our time, every garage band from Savannah to Seattle shares a rock and roll lingua franca not only with its contemporaries but with the great bands of the fifties and sixties. They no more need to have rhythmic practices notated than they need to think to breathe. And so it was with the golden-age performers. They were singing and playing music of their time; today’s opera stars are not.
And yet, I would be very surprised if, in any hypothetical battle of the bands between the best of today’s singers and the golden agers, the modern singers did not hold their own. Certainly, to take just two examples from the tenor range, Pavarotti and Domingo are the equal of any of their predecessors in just about any category you care to name. Even McCormack and Beniamino Gigli, two famously gorgeous tenor voices, were not Pavarotti’s equal in sheer beauty of sound; even Caruso probably could not match Domingo in the power of his voice or in the astonishing range and breadth of his repertoire. Faced with their built-in handicap, today’s singers not only have to sing better than their forebears, they have to sing smarter. And, by and large, they do.
Like modern baseball players, modern opera singers are also faced with conditions that an earlier generation could not imagine. They fly vast distances, jump off airplanes, and perform the most demanding roles, hardly batting an eye. They deal with a constantly shifting group of colleagues and somehow forge a sense of ensemble. They confront widely varying acoustical conditions as they travel around the world’s great opera houses. It is the musical equivalent of making Babe Ruth suddenly play a day game after a night game on an eight-game West Coast swing; face a fresh relief pitcher throwing ninety-five miles an hour in the ninth inning; and deal with the postgame interview on ESPN, in which he gets to watch himself strike out with the bases loaded and then tell the interviewer how he feels. Given these circumstances, and the toll they take on the mind and body, it must be admitted the modern singers stack up very well indeed.
Another area in which modern opera performance seems to me superior is in the overall musical preparation. Here, the cultural disadvantage of being removed in time from the source becomes a musical advantage. Singers, conductors, and orchestral musicians know the scores they play practically by heart, and they perform them with a degree of technical accuracy that was simply beyond the capabilities of an earlier generation.
Then there are modern opera’s production values. The past several decades have witnessed the rise of the director as an integral part of opera, and contemporary singers are called upon to be singing actors as well as great voices. Tell that to McCormack, who was positively wooden on stage, or any of his colleagues, who were apostles of the stand-and-deliver school of dramaturgy. Few earlier singers worried or cared much about dramatic nuance or psychological insight. But today’s discerning audiences have come to expect precisely that from new opera productions, so not only do performers have to worry about musical values, they now must occupy themselves with dramatic considerations as well. Naturally, these are still secondary. Nobody really expects Pavarotti to turn into a singing Olivier at this stage of his career, and given a choice between a great singer who acts a little and a great actor who sings a little, opera audiences still rightfully insist on the former. Still, you get an idea of how complex this business of opera has become and can spare a little sympathy for the poor singers.
At root, however, singing today is not much different from singing a hundred or two hundred years ago. The opera houses, especially in America, are certainly bigger than any Mozart ever encountered or envisioned, but the vocal mechanism remains innately human, and thus pretty much the same as the day Og the Caveman sang the first “Air on the Death of a Mastodon.”
Because of where their instrument is located, singers must understand its mechanism in a way that pianists do not need to. A pianist sits down at the keyboard and plays; if he doesn’t like the way it feels or sounds, he calls the tuner or the technician to fix it. He doesn’t need to know a thing about pins and sounding boards and straps and flanges and all the other paraphernalia of the piano. He should know something, of course, but it’s not absolutely vital—unlike the situation for, say, oboists, who have to make their reeds and thus are more intimately connected with the quality of tone production they get from their instruments.
The singer, though, must face up to such physiological aspects as:
Once a singer grasps the foundations of his or her voice, he or she must learn how to control it. Understanding how the body works, and why, is just the prelude to actually mastering the complex processes that occur when a singer opens his mouth. Breath control, as Jackie Horne points out, is a large part of the singer’s technique, and the control of intrathoracic pressure is the basic bottom line of singing. From this evolves the mastery of pitch and dynamics that all great singers possess.
And yet, there is something that not even the greatest of singers can do anything about, and that is the inherent quality of the voice itself. What is the difference between Gigli and the hundreds of other tenors active in the twenties and thirties? Setting aside all questions of taste and technique, Gigli just sounded better, that’s all. In the end, it may be something as simple and unalterable as the tunable and untunable cavities within one’s skull. It is inside these cavities—the holes in your head, as it were—that vocal resonance occurs, helping to impart each voice’s distinctive and unique sound. And there’s not a damn thing anyone can do about them, short of trepanning.
This whole subject of singing is inordinately tricky, but that’s one of its beauties. Because there are almost an infinite number of variables that go into it, there will never be total agreement as to what constitutes great singing or a great operatic performance. Accordingly, rival performance factions have long existed in opera, paralleling the endless words-or-music debate among composers.
Was Maria Callas a greater soprano than Renata Tebaldi? In the 1950s, you could practically get into a fist-fight on the subject. Callas, her partisans would assert, was the foremost singing actress of the day, a performer of such dynamism and magnetism that you could forgive her various technical deficiencies and luxuriate instead in the force of her characterizations in such roles as Norma. (Translation: so what if she can’t sing?) Oh yeah? retorted the Tebaldi fans. Our girl may be a statue, but she’s a beautiful statue with a ravishing voice, and what do you go to the opera for, anyway? (Translation: so what if she’s a cigar-store Indian?)
Who was right? Once again, the answer is a hedge: both of them, as it turns out. Callas was very much a you-had-to-be-there singer, apparently. I wasn’t, and so my exposure to her artistry has come through recordings. And on records, she isn’t much. Her many vocal problems, which were partly exacerbated by her offstage diva antics, including her tempestuous romance with Aristotle Onassis, simply overwhelm whatever musico-dramatic points she is trying to make. Without the corporeal presence of the woman, the voice seems disembodied and adrift; if Callas’s recordings were an audition tape, she wouldn’t get the part.
By contrast, Tebaldi holds up marvelously on records; you can listen to her sing for hours and never get tired of the sound. But I am too young to have seen her on the stage, and from all accounts she wasn’t much of an actress. To be fair to her, she came up in opera at a time when you didn’t have to be; to be fair to Callas, she reinvented the whole notion of what it meant to be an opera singer. On balance, then, Callas is the more important figure, not only for the way she changed our idea of operatic singing but for her effect on the repertoire as well. Without her Norma, the whole bel canto revival might never have happened.
The same goes today for Pavarotti and Domingo. It is their cruel fate to be locked in eternal contemporaneous lockstep with each other (Domingo is a little younger). But isn’t it foolish to try to choose between them? And do we have to? No one can compare in sheer vocal beauty to Pavarotti; no one can compare in overall vocal splendor and musical intelligence to Domingo. Although they are usually lumped together, they actually have little in common beyond a partly shared repertoire. (At this stage of their careers, Domingo’s repertoire is probably ten times the size of Pavarotti’s.) Opera benefits from both their presences.
And don’t think they don’t know it. One time I was sitting with Pavarotti in his New York City apartment, talking about his then-forthcoming appearance as Otello, a role he was singing for the first time. I asked him how he was going about learning the score; the music was open on the piano, and I half-seriously inquired whether he would like to run through an aria or two with me as his accompanist. “No,” Pavarotti said, “I would be too embarrassed.” Come on, Luciano, I said, we’re just a coupla white guys sitting around talking Verdi here, no one’s gonna know. “No,” he said, “I’m not ready yet.” Okay, says I, tell me how you’re learning the part. For an answer he reached down and brought up—yes, the Domingo recording of Otello with Levine. And why not? Nobody sings it better.
Which only goes to show that much of the so-called rivalry between great singers exists largely in the minds of their fans. Callas and Tebaldi were surely smart enough to realize that each benefited from the existence of the other; that they were complementary figures, not antitheses. I have never heard either Pavarotti or Domingo utter a single negative comment about the other, even though they both may harbor private jealousies. Just as there are horses for courses, so are there singers for roles—and audiences for singers. Not everyone is blessed with Joan Sutherland’s voice; and yet Sutherland was hopeless in any role that required dramatic impact that was not exclusively vocal. No matter what language she sang in, it all came out mush. Did that make her any less of a singer? Not every role requires the firepower of Sutherland, Callas, Tebaldi, Pavarotti, or Domingo; not every role would be suitable.
And this, in the end, explains the eternal dynamic of singing. If there were no Pavarotti, would Domingo’s qualities be thrown into quite such high relief? If there were no Domingo, would Pavarotti, no pun intended, loom quite so large?
For a change, the answer is simply no. Enjoy.