The opera voice needs an overhaul, argues Dominic Muldowney. Can we find a better way for actors to sing and singers to act?
I often find myself telling the story of my father, who spent his days driving buses but his evenings listening to opera on 78 records. He and my mother would sit in a rapture listening mainly to arias, mainly those sung by tenors, and mainly by the great early 20th-century Italian singer Beniamino Gigli.
They had little idea of what the tenor sang. What mattered was the beauty of sound. Mystified, I would ask, "Why are they singing?" This was my first experience of music, and for all kinds of Oedipal reasons no doubt, it revolted and horrified me.
I have spent a lifetime writing songs, song cycles, opera and oratorio. My 25 years as music director of the National Theatre, though, made me wary of writing for the operatic voice with its strained vowels, the "scream" of the high soprano and the strangulated sound in the tenor's throat.
Nowadays, I read reviews that describe a soprano's "smooth, creamy, silky" voice, or her "brilliantly shining" top, the mezzo's "velvety" middle and the baritone's "dark and lustrous resonance". Like the parched traveller offered fine wine, I want to shout: "Slake my thirst before you pamper my palate." Seldom do you read of how the text was managed, if it was even intelligible. Sometimes the review contains a line about audibility (usually mistermed "diction") and the need (or not, confusingly) for surtitles ? that sadly hopeful add-on of the modern opera house.
Working in the theatre, I discovered Brecht, who described music as "the sister muse": a sibling, not a superior art. Of equal importance was the word: what was being sung, not just how it was being sung. I came to prefer the actor-singer's voice to the operatically trained one. I am not talking of the belting "musical theatre" voice, with its mid-Atlantic twang and sentimental vibrato, but the actor approaching the song as another form of dramatic text, and investing more in communicating its meaning than in making the so-called "beautiful sound".
The opera house doesn't seem to have had its "Look Back in Anger moment", as the theatre did in 1956, when deference to old habits ? especially vocal ones ? were shed overnight. Modern opera still sounds 19th-century, although it may not look it. One of the reasons why opera appears so radically a designer's and director's theatre today is because somewhere, somehow, the edifice needs a complete overhaul. The core of opera ? the voice ? seems not to have changed in hundreds of years.
The reason always given is that it needs to be heard over a large orchestra. But in a time of leaner budgets, perhaps we might look forward to leaner voices. We might find singers who refuse to use Italian vowels for English ones, who don't avoid regional accents with their clutter of so-called ugly diphthongs, and who feel compelled to make sense of the words. Opera directors increasingly ask their singers to "take care" of the sense, but at the rehearsal stage it is too late ? surely it is the composers' responsibility? After all, it is they who supposedly wanted to set the text: why set it if it cannot be understood?
I have been running a course for three years at the Royal Opera House for anyone interested in writing for the voice in a theatrical context, from students and singers to established composers. One of the first things I ask participants to do is to play some of their favourite songs, and then talk about why they chose them, and what in the singing they found attractive. Interestingly, out of about 60 tracks played this year, only three were from opera. The rest were by folk, pop and cabaret artists. The communicative skills of Frank Sinatra or the naive directness of John McCormack were more often relished than the selfish wobble of many a soprano.
Over the year, the composers write new material of their own, beginning with solo songs and graduating to more complex dramatic scenes, and on to full "music theatre" works. Here lies another problem ? the hunt for a word to replace "opera". Composers simply do not want the baggage associated with the word, but are still interested in putting music, text and drama on the stage.
We ask if we can we sing our language without the perverse alteration of vowel sounds, or let the text be heard without recourse to snapped consonants ? that curse of the politely voiced cathedral tenor with his "Go......D" or "Lor......D!" How are directors, performers, librettists and composers to find a better way for actors to sing and singers to act, and an uncluttered, direct, modern music theatre to emerge?
The collaboration of composer and singer can often become a collusion. It can feel as if the composer is really writing for a clarinet and not a woman, a cello and not a man, and the singers are ready to collude with this as they can revert to the unquestioning habits of their training ? showing off the smoothness across their "break" and their easy reach of the high and the low. But what is created has nothing to do with sense, or a depiction of human experience. This failure to communicate would not be tolerated in contemporary theatre.
But things are changing. Just recently I have seen a few brave attempts at pushing the boundaries of ? let us call it ? "theatre singing". In the recent OperaShots series at London's Linbury Studio, Stewart Copeland's contribution The Tell-Tale Heart made an interesting stab at how to unpack a lot of sung narration essential to understanding the Edgar Allan Poe story that was Copeland's text. There was a well-judged use of more than one voice in charge of this narration ? a sung one and a half-spoken one ? what Brecht called sprechstimme. Interesting, too, was the casting of Richard Suart ? well known as a Gilbert and Sullivan singer. Whatever you think of the Savoy operetta, you have to admire the space Sullivan allowed the verbal virtuosity of his librettist; experience in this form gave Suart a marvellous clarity.
Another interesting piece currently at the National's Cottesloe is London Road, a "documentary musical" with words by Alecky Blythe and music by Adam Cork. Given that it's about the Ipswich prostitute murders, based on verbatim reports of ordinary men and women, it's amazing that it ever reached the stage. This is not arioso-based opera, but it is almost entirely sung. The singing hovers between monotone and biting choric set-pieces that give voice to the demotic words that are expressing the tragedy. The actors sing the Suffolk accent with all its hesitations, ums and ahs, yet behave musically as if they were in an oratorio, where the tension between prosaic naturalism and heightened singing is the conceit.
As in these two examples, any successful new music theatre will have to address the balance between text and music, and look to new techniques in composition, singing and speaking.
Years of working in theatre has brought me full circle. If the text is not to be heard and nourished alongside the sound it makes, then, in the words of the five-year-old I was 50 years ago, I might well ask today's young composers and singers, "Why sing?"
nOSTalgie, an evening of political songs and new vocal settings, with musical direction by Dominic Muldowney, is performed by the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group at CBSO on 21 May. Details: bcmg.org.uk
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/apr/28/opera-voice-ready-to-change
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