The voice of experience

A couple of years ago Gramophone magazine published an article about sopranos who resisted against leaving soubrette roles behind and embracing lyric repertoire. Their case example was Kathleen Battle – years after her debut still in -ina roles. She was not interviewed by the author, but Barbara Bonney did add her two cents. I won’t be able to quote her verbatim, but her whole point was that Lucia Popp’s career helped to create the myth that it is natural to start as Sophie and end up as the Feldmarschallin. That was not her story; her voice did not develop outside her original Fach the way Popp’s voice did. Maybe because actors simply are not cast in roles decades younger than themselves – and we live in a world where movies are omnipresent and opera is not – reviewers and members of the audience expect that singers evolve in the same way. I would guess that singers themselves would prefer it that way. I remember an interview with Christa Ludwig in which she said that at some point of her career she did not feel anymore in the mood to sing about maidens and their sweethearts, flowers in blossom etc. The question remains – is there a choice there? Are all voices supposed to grow heavier and stronger?

It is a fact that singers – as much as everyone else – grow older and their bodies and also their mental disposition change in the process. So, yes, their voices are supposed to change in the process – women’s especially (there is childbirth and menopause, to start with). Saying that voices “decay” in the process is an oversimplification. The curve is not necessarily a descending straight line. Some singers actually “blossom” later in their careers – especially those with dramatic voices. As we have discussed here before, these singers often take a while to mature their muscles and their “energy management” before they tackle such demanding roles to full satisfaction. And there is also experience – when one becomes aware of his or her limits, he or she increasingly understands where “safety zone is” and can be a little bit more adventurous about taking risks. But the fact is – lighter voiced singers experience a similar development too. And yet Lucia Popp’s story is indeed “outside the curve”.

I unfortunately know Popp only from recordings, but when I ask those who saw her live, I generally hear the same description – “more vertical than horizontal”. I.e., it projected well but was not voluminous. Some mentioned that in heavier repertoire her high notes could acquire a metallic edge that jarred a bit with the usual smoothness of her vocal production. In any case, even in her earlier recordings, in which the voice is brighter and lighter, we can hear that its gravitational center is lower in comparison to someone like Edita Gruberová or Arleen Augér. She has always had a middle register richer than those of other singers in these roles – and her low notes were always actually pretty solid. She herself said that she couldn’t wait to stop singing the role of the Queen of the Night and felt that Zerbinetta was simply too high for her. And there is the above-mentioned metallic edge she could occasionally resort to when she needed to shift to the fifth gear. In other words, her potential for lyric roles was there since the beginning.

Helen Donath’s is usually the second case example in this case. Unlike Popp, her voice always sounded pretty ina-ish when she was indeed singing lighter repertoire. When Herbert von Karajan convinced her to sing Eva in his recording of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, what he probably sensed is that the natural radiance of her soprano could pierce through a Wagnerian orchestra, especially in his hallmark “smoother” garb. If she was first hesitant about this career move, she finally embraced it by singing the role live, as much as other lyric parts such as the Feldmarschallin. I would say that Donath is a lesson in how to sing heavier roles with a light voice. As one can hear in broadcasts and recordings, she never tampered with her basic sound. Her “superpower” was the extraordinary brightness of her soprano – and she never let that go. The sound remained light – one could say that her Eva was ina-ish in sound – and yet she had an extraordinarily long career in which she was also able to keep her first roles to the very end. Let’s not forget that her last “big” official recording was in the role of Despina on the 2006 video from Salzburg. This may sound self-evident, but experience shows us that most singers who try heavier roles actually believe that they should “adapt” their voices to the new repertoire, generally by darkening the sound and overcompensating the lack of volume by forcing the tone.

Vocal technique is full of contradictions and non-evident truths, but a darkened sound rarely pierces through in the auditorium, especially in the context of a voice naturally less voluminous. These singers end up sounding tremulous, effortful and rather pale in tone. We have spoken of sopranos so far, but tenors are generally those who end up beefing up their tones, especially if they were trained with “Italian technique”. If there is one vocal category in which singers always need a little help from their voice teachers, these are tenors. The demands made by composers on the tenor voice are always a bit unreasonable – what they do could only be explained as “let’s imagine that all soprano roles were like the Queen of the Night” – and they are particularly dependant of tonal manipulation to survive the “high altitude”. It is not unusual to leave the theatre saying “the tenor had good high notes, but the rest of the voice was a bit hard to hear”. This is in most cases healthy – the problem is when the tenor starts to play with their middle register. That is when everything sounds puffed up, hollow and laborious. It is curious that many an opera-goer is ready to take this vocal production as appropriate in Verdi and Puccini roles. You know what I’m talking about – the glottal attacks and releases, the lachrymosity, the uncontrolled vibrato, the edge. When a tenor takes that direction, it is a path of no return. If you ask him “sing Don Ottavio’s Dalla sua pace“, he would realize he is unable to do something minimally acceptable.

That takes us back to the situation of singers whose voices may have gone stronger but still remain in their original Fach. Is there any fun for them in being avuncular Taminos or Zerlinas too long in the tooth? It depends. I knew Edita Gruberová’s Zerbinetta from the video from the Vienna State Opera (with Janowitz and Kollo under Karl Böhm) and finally saw her live in the role in her farewell run of performances, some decades after that… in the same production with the same costumes. When she first appeared on stage, I had to adjust my memory of her younger self to her then present age, but then I realized that she had done that herself. Gruberová was not pretending she was young then – she was showing us a Zerbinetta who had been at it for a while, almost a bit tired of the whole thing. It was actually a fascinating and fully convincing performance. It is easiest said than done, of course – but it can be done. Actually, one of the great things about opera is that anyone can climb on stage and be anyone else. To keep with R. Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos, let’s remember (again) Jessye Norman’s Ariadne. She would have never been cast in that role in a movie – but on stage (and on video) you just need two minutes to see that she is Ariadne. The fact that there is an art form when one’s limits are entirely one’s talents is a reason why opera – in spite of many predictions – never goes away…

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