The Classical Voice: Finding Your Way In

How to explain the power that trained operatic voices hold over many of us? For me, the pull began days after I was born, when acoustic 78s of tenor Enrico Caruso and coloratura sopranos Amelita Galli-Curci and Luisa Tetrazzini played in the background. There was something about the way the dramatic-to-the-core Caruso sang, as if his life depended on it, while the high-flying coloraturas skipped lightly through impossible strings of notes. It moved me like little else.

The magic of classical vocal artistry revolves around the ability to seduce with sound while conveying a wide variety of human emotions through voice alone. Rare is the artist like Cecilia Bartoli who can sound joyful one minute, wracked with pain the next, and furious 20 bars later. Many singers can demonstrate multiple emotions in their facial expressions and body language, but relatively few possess the alchemical power to translate multiple emotional states into sound.

Singers allow us to eavesdrop as they explore what music means to them. They make the private public. The more of their personal language we hear, the more intimate and rewarding the experience. This is one reason why we are audiophiles: We yearn to get closer to the creative essence of the artists and composers we cherish.

How vocal music, especially in foreign languages, will touch your heart, I cannot determine. Reading translations while listening to recordings demands more attention than watching foreign films with subtitles. Videos with subtitles can provide a way forward, but some of the greatest recorded vocal performances—most of them, probably—are audio-only. The limited selection of historical recordings on YouTube lack the essential subtle shifts of color and dynamics captured in high-quality digital remasterings. The argument that because the original recordings were inherently limited in dynamics and bandwidth, carefully engineered high-resolution remasterings aren’t worth the effort, does not hold water when you listen on a revealing audiophile system. Because the vast majority of LP transfers of shellac recordings were heavily filtered to reduce naturally occurring surface noise, post-1992 digital transfers are often preferable (footnote 1).

Repertoire from earlier generations continues to offer joy, beauty, and emotional truth, but much excellent, new English-language classical vocal music is being written, addressing issues central to our lives.

If you are one of the too many who have resisted opera, lieder, and other vocal music, it’s time for a reassessment.

Looking back
Singers who began recording at the tail end of the 19th century were blessed with what one might call “singer’s repertoire,” ie, tuneful songs and airs (arias) that showcased their expressive power and technical facility. Even if you didn’t understand the meaning of many of the words uttered by iconic singers of the first Golden Age of opera on record, you could sense when they were singing about love, hope, suffering, war, or retribution because you could hear it in their voices and in the musical line.

Those unique-voiced singers believed body and soul in what they were singing. Many of their interpretations reflected direct experience with the composers of the music they sang. If not, then they at least lived during the period of composition or had studied with someone with a direct link to the composer. Some of their performances bear such an unmistakable stamp of authenticity that, even in the face of newer and far more technically advanced recordings of the same repertoire, they remain indispensable.

If you want to know how Umberto Giordano hoped to hear his glorious short tenor aria, “Amor ti vieta” (“Love forbids you”), from his opera Fedora, turn to the 1902 recording in which he accompanies Caruso. For Francesco Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur, listen to the soprano he begged to sing the role, the dramatically riveting Magda Olivero. Debussy? Put on singers he worked with or who were the first to record his music, including Maggie Teyte, Jane Bathori, Claire Croiza, and the magnificent-voiced Charles Panzéra. Panzéra and his French baritone successors are notable for their willingness to sing with tenderness and vulnerability as well as strength.

The 20th century saw any number of longtime composer/singer partnerships, including Poulenc with baritone Pierre Bernac and Britten with his partner, tenor Peter Pears. Britten was as committed to having the heartrendingly intimate contralto Kathleen Ferrier premiere The Rape of Lucretia, as Richard Strauss was to have Lotte Lehmann create three of his operatic roles and Elisabeth Schumann fill the long-spun lines of his glorious lieder (songs) with golden light. (To understand why Strauss had a lifelong love affair with the soprano voice, listen to these women, who sing directly from their souls.) Closer to the present, Samuel Barber composed his wonderful Knoxville: Summer of 1915 for soprano Eleanor Steber; Kaija Saariaho wrote several pieces for the glowing directness of soprano Dawn Upshaw; Henri Dutilleux created his final song cycle, Le temps l’horloge, for Renée Fleming; and Jake Heggie conceived roles in his Dead Man Walking for the tear-inducing voices of Susan Graham and Frederica von Stade.

Three coloratura sopranos of the LP era—Maria Callas, Joan Sutherland, and Beverly Sills—are responsible for reviving a huge amount of once-lost bel canto repertoire and adorning it with authentic embellishment that, as in jazz, was customarily left to the singer’s discretion. Ditto for our current era’s mezzo-soprano coloratura Cecilia Bartoli, whose repertoire spans the Baroque through the 20th century. While Sutherland was known mainly for her technical fluidity and brilliance, Callas, Sills, and Bartoli perform(ed) in dramatically convincing ways that reveal the emotional and visceral motivation for all their high-flying runs and trills.

Footnote 1: Take it from one who has shelves full of flat-sounding LP transfers of pre-1948 vocal recordings that have been bettered digitally.

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