Wagnerian Singing and the Limits of Vocal Pedagogy

Wagnerian Singing and the Limits of Vocal Pedagogy Sean M. Parr Wagner singing is [a] special kind of way of singing. Their voices were adapted in a special way to this Wagnerian singing.1 —Nicolai Gedda, tenor Even with exemplary discipline, every singer faces a vocal crisis at some point in her career. Most of us have several. I needed to take a few weeks off and realign my voice after my debut as Eva in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger at Bayreuth.2 — Renée Fleming, Soprano I begin with the words of two of opera’s most musically and technically reliable singers, both of whom highlight the problem of singing Wagner. In spite (or perhaps because of) their masterful vocalism, they decided that singing Wagner once was enough. Nicolai Gedda (1925–2017), one of the most versatile and recorded tenors of the twentieth century, sang the title role in Wagner’s Lohengrin for only one—highly acclaimed—performance. After that January 1966 performance at the Stockholm Opera, he declined offers to sing Wagner, preferring instead to perform lighter and more lyric roles for the remainder of his substantial career. That decision may have ensured his astonishing vocal longevity; Gedda performed into his late seventies. Renée Fleming (b. 1959) took time off from performing to re- tool her singing with her voice teacher after performing Wagner’s Eva at the 1996 Bayreuth Festival. Fleming experienced what she thought of as a vocal crisis after those Bayreuth performances, despite a thorough prepara- tion grounded in a keen awareness “that there were no ‘Wagnerian’ singers when this music was composed” (Fleming 2004, 148). Fleming concluded that singing Eva “was not right. The part is too low for me. Projecting all those German words in the middle of my voice over a thick orchestra was difficult. I’m not saying no to other Wagner, but I won’t do that role again” (Tommasini 1997). In fact, Fleming never again performed that repertory, preferring instead to concentrate on full lyric soprano roles, in operas by Mozart, Strauss, Handel, and Massenet, among others. Gedda and Fleming’s “one and done” experiences with Wagner speak to several of the issues that Wagnerian singing poses to modern vocal Current Musicology 105 (Fall 2019) © 2019 Parr. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons-Attribution-Non- 56 Commercial-NoDerivatives License (CC BY-NC-ND). Sean M. Parr pedagogy: expectations of extreme vocal volume and penetrating power; clearly articulated and projected German diction at a mid-range vocal tes- situra; lengthy and repeated tests of vocal stamina; the consequences of sustained, heavy singing on vocal health; and the problem of vocal catego- rization — determining whether certain individual voices can or should sing Wagner. Can a singer adapt her voice to overcome these challenges or even change her fundamental voice type? And, if so, how can a vocal pedagogue facilitate this? In addressing these questions, this essay explores how singing became “Wagnerian” after Wagner’s death in 1883. In investigating how operatic vocalism adapted to these challenges, I both demonstrate that the “work” of the operatic singer involves much more than having “a voice,” and I open up a new space for considering Wagnerian singing, a topic that Karen Henson suggests has been “extraordinarily neglected” in scholarly litera- ture (2015, 211). More generally, I also build on recent scholarship that has begun to explore the voice in all its material realities and pedagogy as a crucial site of the construction of sonic ideals. As Martha Feldman has theorized, “voice is at its most characteristic when it sounds” and is a “material phenomenon” (2015, 658-659). In the teaching of Western classical singing, as Nina Sun Eidsheim has observed, vocal pedagogy is mandated to naturalize certain sounds, and therefore to encourage a method of singing in which “vocal labor [is] required to maintain a piece’s identity and status” (2015, 133). For the purposes of this essay, the vocal labor in question is of a herculean nature—to perform one of Wagner’s heroic roles, and to sound “Wagnerian,” that is, to sound like a Held. The singer’s sound and the effort exerted must overcome the adversity of the musical task (with great volume, highly articulated diction, vocal stamina, and penetrating power), thus matching the heroic ideology explicit in Wagner’s works. For as Barry Millington mused, the “Wagnerian” label always carries with it the weight of the composer’s heroic aesthetic (and political) ideology.3 Schools of Singing Wagner A truism of singing Wagner, succinctly articulated by Jens Malte Fischer, is that the composer’s vocal writing demands large voices, which “without question are necessary” (1992, 525). What it means to have a “large” voice is of course up for debate, but what the adjective implies is a certain ideal sonority for singing Wagner, an ideal that is suggestive of Eidsheim’s no- tion of a “figure of sound,” a specific construct that refers to a naturalized listening practice and the aural perception of the listener in that mode.⁴ The Wagnerian sound is loud and penetrating, perhaps overwhelmingly so. This sound rings impressively in the opera house, but in a smaller space the 57 Current Musicology sound can overwhelm. I recall sitting in on one of my father’s voice lessons with a Wagnerian tenor, Louis Roney, and experiencing that compulsion to flee, the room being too small to diffuse the intensity of the vocalism. The shockingly sonorous, outsized quality of Wagnerian singing be- longs to what has become an international school of singing, in which singers focus on cultivating a thoroughly penetrating, idealized sound. This sonority-based school stands in opposition to the Bayreuth school, an approach based on the ideals espoused by Cosima Wagner when she held sway as director of the Bayreuth Festival (1886-1906), begun after a period of mourning her husband’s death in 1883. Cosima founded this school in 1892 with the choral conductor Julius Kniese (1848–1905) and jointly they prioritized clarity of text declamation over what Ernest Newman and Fischer have claimed was Richard Wagner’s original intention: a German bel canto school of singing. Cosima feared bel canto singing and rejected it as a “term of abuse” (Newman 1976, 453 and Fischer 1992, 529–530). Unlike his wife, Wagner apparently felt more positive, or at least ambivalent, about the Italian bel canto school of singing, the school today regarded as the healthiest vocal method for singers. Although he thought little of singers who blithely brought their Italian bel canto style to German operatic singing, Wagner admired the melodic writing of Bellini in particular, and idealized the vocal beauty of Josef Tichatschek, the bel canto-trained tenor who created the title roles in Wagner’s Rienzi and Tannhaüser (Fischer 1992, 527-529).5 Nevertheless, together, Cosima and Kniese taught and coached singers at Bayreuth to focus on speech over song, what later became known as Sprechgesang (“speech-song”). In attempting to satisfy the desire for clarity of diction, many singers developed a penchant for spitting consonants so intensely (Konsonanten-Spuckerei) that they were condemned for bark- ing instead of singing their vocal lines. The “Bayreuth Bark” as it became known, was a symptom of vocal deterioration, a voice pushed to its limits in an effort to satisfy Cosima’s conviction that text be more spoken than sung (Spotts 1994, 99). Cosima presumably took this directive from her husband’s preference that some operatic moments be more declaimed than sung, a preference drawn from the theatrical performances of his soprano muse, Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, who created Wagner’s Senta and Venus, and who helped shape Wagner’s idea of Sprechgesang when she oc- casionally abandoned singing tone for dramatic effect (Fischer 1992, 527).6 David Breckbill has argued for a more complicated history of singing Wagner in Cosima’s reign as Bayreuth director, stating that the recorded evidence yields a greater variety of approaches to singing style, while also displaying generally “ugly vocalism” (1992, 363).7 Still, whether following 58 Sean M. Parr the Bayreuth or the international school of singing at the turn of the century, all Wagnerian singers sought loudness. And in doing so, they turned to vocal pedagogues who could help them learn techniques involving not ideas of resonance or phonation, but the disciplining of the breathing body. Breathing for singing Many of the revolutions in operatic singing over the course of the nineteenth century resulted from demands for increasing loudness on the operatic stage, a concern observed by many including Hector Berlioz, who saw that singers impressed audiences more often when they sang more loudly and by sheer sonority rather than by sweet, soft tones or embel- lishments and agility (1994, 69–70). Scholarship in the past ten years has begun to explore the nineteenth-century shift toward a vocal technique that emphasized a lower laryngeal position, what Manuel Garcia II called voix sombrée and the Italians call voce di petto.8 This laryngeal position allowed singers to carry the power of the chest voice or speech-like sound higher and louder. Breathing techniques have been less explored, yet they may have had an even greater effect on singers’ volume and stamina than the change in laryngeal position. There is indeed something special about the way opera singers breathe, leading singers today to liken operatic vocalism to Olympic athleticism. Such an analogy is worth consideration, especially in light of examples such as Novak Djokovic, who, before becoming the top-ranked tennis player in the world, worked with an opera singer to improve his breathing.

Load more