Red/The New Art of the Singer

by Carl Van Vechten

The New Art of the Singer

The art of vocalization is retarding the advance of the modern music drama. This is a simple statement of a fact although, doubtless, you are as accustomed as I am to hearing it expressed a rebours. How many times have I read that the art of singing is in its decadence, that soon there would not be one artist left fitted to deliver vocal music in public! The Earl of Mount Edgcumbe wrote something of the sort in 1825, for he found the great Catalani but a sorry travesty of his early favourites, Pacchierotti and Banti. I protest against this misconception. Any one who asserts that there are laws which govern singing, physical, scientific laws, must pay court to other ears than mine. For twenty years I have heard this same man shouting in the marketplace that a piece without action was not a play (usually the drama he referred to had more real action than that which decorates the progress of Nellie, the Beautiful Cloak Model), that a composition without melody (meaning a creation by Richard Wagner, Robert Franz, or even Edvard Grieg) was not music, and that verse without rhyme was not poetry. This same type of brilliant mind will go on to aver (forgetting the Scot and the Greek) that men who wear skirts are not men, and that women who smoke cigars are not women; indeed, he will not hesitate to settle a score of other problems in so silly a manner that a ten year old, half-witted schoolboy, after three minutes light thinking, could be depended upon to do better.

The rules for the art of singing, laid down in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, have become obsolete. How could it be otherwise? They were contrived to fit a certain style of composition. We have but the briefest knowledge, indeed, of how people sang before 1700, although records exist praising the performances of Archilei and others. If a different standard of vocalization existed before 1600 there appears to be no sound reason why a different standard should not exist after 1917. As a matter of fact, maugre much authoritative opinion to the contrary, a different standard does exist. In certain respects the change in tradition is taken for granted. We do not, for example, expect to hear male sopranos at the opera. The Earl of Mount Edgcumbe admired this artificial form of voice almost to the exclusion of all others. His favourite singer, Pacchierotti, was a male soprano. But other breaks have been made with tradition, breaks which are not yet taken for granted. When you find that all but one or two singers in every opera house in the world are ignoring the rules in one way or another you may be certain, despite the protests of the professors, that the rules are dead. Their excuse has disappeared and they remain only as dead commandments framed to fit an old religion.

In Handel's day a singer was accustomed to stand in one spot on the stage and sing; nothing else was required of him. He was not asked to walk about or to act; even expression in his singing was limited to pathos. The singers of this period, Nicolini, Senesino, Cuzzoni, Faustina, Caffarelli, Farinelli, Carestini, Gizziello, and Pacchierotti, devoted their study years to the preparation of their voices for the display of a definite variety of florid music. They had nothing else to learn. As a consequence, they were expected to be particularly efficient. Porpora, Caffarelli's teacher, is said to have devoted six years to the instruction of his pupil before he sent him forth to be "the greatest singer in the world." Contemporary critics appear to have been highly pleased with the result, but there is some excuse for H. T. Finck's impatience, expressed in Songs and Song Writers: "The favourites of the eighteenth century Italian audiences were artificial male sopranos, like Farinelli, who was frantically applauded for such circus tricks as beating a trumpeter in holding on to a note, or racing with an orchestra and getting ahead of it; or Caffarelli, who entertained his audiences by singing, in one breath, a chromatic chain of trills up and down two octaves. Caffarelli was a pupil of the famous vocal teacher, Porpora, who wrote operas consisting chiefly of monotonous successions of florid arias resembling the music that is now written for flutes and violins." All very well for the day, no doubt, but could Cuzzoni sing Isolde? Could Faustina sing Mélisande? And what modern rôles would be allotted to the Julian Eltinges of the eighteenth century?

When composers began to set dramatic texts to music, trouble immediately appeared in the doorway. The coevals of Sophie Arnould, the "creator" of Iphigénie en Aulide, are agreed that she was greater as an actress than she was as a singer. David Garrick pronounced her a finer actress than Clairon. From that hour to the present there has continued to rage a triangular conflict between critic, composer, and singer, which, up to date, it must be admitted, has been consistently won by the academic pundits, for, although the singer has struggled, she has generally bent under the blows of the critical knout, thereby holding the music drama more or less in the state it was in a hundred years ago (every critic and almost every composer will tell you that any modern opera can be sung according to the laws of bel canto, and enough singers exist, unfortunately, to justify this assertion), save that the music is not so well sung, according to the old standards, as it was then. No singer has possessed enough courage to entirely defy tradition, to refuse to study with a teacher, to embody her own natural ideas in the performance of music, to found a new school . . . but there have been many rebels.

The operas of Mozart, Bellini, Donizetti, and Rossini, on the whole, do not demand great histrionic exertion from their interpreters and for a time singers trained in the old Handelian tradition met every requirement of these composers and their audiences. If more action were demanded than in Handel's day, the newer music, in compensation, was easier to sing. Nevertheless, early in the nineteenth century we observe that those artists who, pushing on to the new technique, strove to be actors as well as singers lost something of the old vocal facility. I need only speak of Ronconi and Mme. Pasta. The lady was admittedly the greatest lyric artist of her day, although it is recorded that her slips from true intonation were frequent. When she could no longer command a steady tone, the beaux restes of her art and her authoritative style caused Pauline Viardot, who was hearing her then for the first time, to burst into tears. Ronconi's voice, according to Chorley, barely exceeded an octave; it was weak and habitually out of tune. This baritone was not gifted with vocal agility and he was monotonous in his use of ornament. Nevertheless, Chorley asserts that Ronconi afforded him more pleasure than almost any other singer he had ever heard in the theatre! If this critic did not grasp this opportunity to point the way to the future, on another occasion he had a faint glimmering of the coming revolution: "There might, there should be yet, a new Medea as an opera. Nothing can be grander, more antique, more Greek, than Cherubini's setting of the 'grand fiendish part' (to quote the words of Mrs. Siddons on Lady Macbeth). But, as music, it becomes simply impossible to be executed, so frightful is the strain on the energies of her who is to represent the heroine. Compared with this character, Beethoven's Leonora, Weber's Euryanthe, are only so much child's play." This is topsy-turvy reasoning, of course, but at the same time it is suggestive.

The modern orchestra dug a deeper breach between the two schools. Wagner called upon the singer to express powerful emotion, passionate feeling, over a great wave of sound, nay, in many instances, against a great wave of sound.^[1] It is small occasion for wonder that singers began to bark. They very nearly expired, indeed, under the strain of trying successfully to mingle Porpora and passion. According to W. F. Apthorp, Max Alvary once said that, considering the emotional intensity of music and situations, the constant co-operation of the surging orchestra, and, most of all, the unconquerable feeling of the reality of it all, it was a wonder that singing actors did not go stark mad, before the very faces of the audience, in parts like Tristan or Siegfried. The critics, in this new situation, were consistently inexorable; they stood by their guns. There was but one way to sing the new music and that was the way of Bernacchi and Pistocchi. In time, by dint of persevering, talking night and day, writing day and night, they convinced the singer. The music drama developed, but the singer was held in his place. Some artists, great geniuses, of course (for example, Jean de Reszke and Lilli Lehmann) made the compromise successfully, but they rendered the further progress of the composer more difficult thereby; music remained merely pretty. The successors of these supple singers even learned to sing Richard Strauss with broad cantilena effects. As for Puccini! At a performance of Madama Butterfly a Japanese once demanded why the singers were producing those nice round tones in moments of passion; why not ugly sounds?

Will any composer arise with the courage to write an opera which cannot be sung? Stravinsky came very near to achieving this happy result in. The Nightingale, but I am looking forward to a more complete break with the past. Think of the range of sounds made by the Japanese, the Gipsy, the Chinese, the Spanish folk-singers. The composer of the future may ask for shrieks, groans, squeaks, screams, a thousand delicate shades of guttural and falsetto vocal tones, from his interpreters. "Why should the gamut of expression on our opera stage be so much more limited than it is in our music halls? Why should the Hottentots be able to make so many delightful noises that we are incapable of producing? Composers, up to date, have taken into account a singer's apparent inability to bridge difficult intervals. Why? It is only by ignoring all such artificial limitations that the new music will definitely emerge and the new art of the singer be born. What marvellous effects might be achieved by skipping from octave to octave in the human voice! When will the obfusc pundits stop shouting for what Avery Hopwood calls "ascending and descending tetrarchs?"

But, some one will argue, with the passing of bel canto what will become of the operas of Mozart, Bellini, Rossini, and Donizetti? Who will sing them? Fear not, lover of the golden age of song, bel canto is not passing as swiftly as that. Singers will continue to be born into this world who are able to cope with the floridity of this music, for they are born, not made. Amelita Galli-Curci will have her successors, just as Adelina Patti had hers. Singers of this variety begin to sing naturally in their infancy, and they continue to sing, just sing. One touch of drama or emotion and their voices crack. Remember Nellie Melba's sad experience with Siegfried. The great Mario had scarcely studied singing (one authority says that he had taken a few lessons of Meyerbeer)^[2] when he made his début in Robert, le Diable, and there is no evidence that he studied very much afterwards. Melba, herself, spent less than a year with Mme. Marchesi in preparation for her opera career. Mme. Galli-Curci asserts that she has had very little to do with professors, and I do not think that Mme. Tetrazzini spent her youth in mastering vocalizzi. As a matter of fact, she studied singing only six months. Adelina Patti told Dr. Hanslick that at the age of seven she had sung Una voce poco fà with the same embellishments which she employed later when she appeared in the opera in which the air occurs. No, these singers are as much freaks of nature as tortoise-shell cats and, like those rare felines, they are usually females of late, although such singers as Battistini and Bonci remind us that men once sang with as much agility as women. But naturally, when this type of singer finally becomes extinct, the operas which depend upon it will disappear likewise; for a cognate reason the works of Monteverde and Handel have dropped out of the repertory and the Greek tragedies and the Elizabethan interludes are no longer current on our stage. None of our actors understands the style of Chinese acting; consequently, it would be impossible to present a Chinese drama in our theatre. As Deirdre wails in Synge's great play: "It's a heartbreak to the wise that it's for a short space we have the same things only." We cannot, indeed, have everything. No one doubts that the plays of Æschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles are great dramas, but to become personally cognizant of that fact today one is obliged to read them; the composers to whom I have just referred can also be admired in the closet. Even now, no more than two works of Rossini, the most popular composer of the early nineteenth century, are to be heard.^[3] What has become of Semiramide, La Cenerentola, and the others? There are no singers to sing them and so they have been dropped from the repertory without being missed. Can any of our young misses hum Di tanti palpiti? You know they cannot. I doubt if I could find two girls in New York, and I mean girls with a musical education, who could tell me in what opera the air belongs, and yet in the early nineteenth century this tune was as popular as Un bel di is today.

Coloratura singing has been called heartless, not altogether without reason. Nevertheless, at one time, its interpreters fired composers to their best efforts. That day has passed. That day passed seventy years ago. It may occur to you that something is wrong when singers of a certain type can only find the proper means to exploit their voices in works of the past, operas which are dead. It is to be noted that Nellie Melba and Amelita Galli-Curci are absolutely unfitted to sing in music dramas even so early as those of Richard Wagner; Dukas, Strauss, and Stravinsky are utterly beyond them. Even Adelina Patti^[4] and Marcella Sembrich appeared in few, if any, new works of importance. They had no bearing on the march of musical history. Here, then, is an entirely paradoxical situation: a set of interpreters who apparently exist only for the purpose of delivering to us the art of the past. What would we think of a modern actor who could make no effect save in the tragedies of Corneille? Berlioz, one of the first to foresee the coming day, forewarned us in his Mémoires: "We shall always find a fair number of female singers, popular from their brilliant singing of brilliant trifles, and odious to the great masters because utterly incapable of properly interpreting them. They have voices, a certain knowledge of music, and flexible throats; they are lacking in soul, brain, and heart. Such women are regular monsters and all the more formidable to composers because they are often charming monsters. This explains the weakness of certain masters in writing falsely sentimental parts, which attract the public by their brilliancy. It also explains the number of degenerate works, the gradual degradation of style, the destruction of all sense of expression, the neglect of dramatic properties, the contempt for the true, the grand, and the beautiful, and the cynicism and decrepitude of art in certain countries."^[5]

So, even if, as the ponderous criticasters are continually pointing out, the age of bel canto is really passing, there is no actual occasion for grief. All fashions in art pass and what is known as bel canto is just as much a fashion as the bombastic style of acting that prevailed in Victor Hugo's time or the "realistic" style of acting we prefer today. All interpretative art is based primarily on the material with which it deals and on contemporary public taste. Florid singing is a direct derivative of a certain school of opera and, as that school of opera is fading, more expressive methods of singing are coming to the fore. The very first principal of bel canto, an equalized scale, is a false one. With an equalized scale a singer can produce a perfectly ordered series of notes, a charming string of matched tonal pearls, but nothing more. It is worthy of attention that it is impossible to sing Spanish or Negro folksongs with an equalized scale. Almost all folk-music, indeed, exacts a vocal method of its interpreter quite distinct from that demanded by the art-song.

We are aware at last that true beauty lies deeper than in the emission of perfect tones. Beauty lurks in truth and expressiveness. The new art of the singer should develop to the highest degree the significance of the text. Calvé once said that she did not become a real artist until she forgot that she had a beautiful voice and thought only of the proper expression the music demanded.

Of the old method of singing we may be sure of the persistence of only one quality in the late twentieth century, and that is style. The performance of any kind of music demands a knowledge of and a feeling for its style, but style is about the last thing that a singer ever studies. When, however, you find a singer who understands style, there you have an artist.

Style is the quality which endures long after the singer has lost the power to produce a pure tone or to contrive accurate phrasing, the quality that makes it possible for an artist to hold his place on the stage long after his voice has become partially defective or, indeed, has actually departed. It is a knowledge of style that accounts for the long careers of Marcella Sembrich and Lilli Lehmann,^[6] or of Yvette Guilbert and Maggie Cline, for that matter. It is a knowledge of style that makes De Wolf Hopper a fine artist in his interpretation of the music of Sullivan and the words of Gilbert. Some artists, indeed, with barely a shred of voice, have managed to maintain their eminent positions on the stage for many years through a knowledge of style. I might mention in this connection Victor Maurel,^[7] Max Heinrich,^[8] Antonio Scotti,^[9] and Maurice Renaud.

A singer may be born with the ability to produce pure tone (I doubt if Mme. Melba learned much about tone production from her teachers), she may even phrase naturally, although this is more doubtful, but the acquirement of style is an arduous and tedious process and one which generally requires specialization. Style is elusive. A sensitive auditor, a good critic, will recognize it at once, but very few can define it with any exactitude. Nevertheless, it must be fairly obvious to the careful listener that Olive Fremstad is more at home in the music dramas of Gluck and Wagner than she is in Carmen and Tosca, and that Marcella Sembrich is happier when she is singing Zerlina (as a Mozart interpreter she has had no peer in the past three decades) than when she is singing Lakmé. Mme. Melba sings Lucia in excellent style, but she probably could not convince us that she knows how to sing a Brahms song. So far as I know she has never tried to do so. A recent example comes to mind in Maria Marco, the prima donna of. The Land of Joy company, who sings Spanish music with irresistible effect, but on one occasion when she attempted Vissi d'arte she was transformed immediately into a second-rate Italian singer. Even her gestures, ordinarily full of grace and meaning, had become conventionalized.

If this quality of style which, after all, only means an understanding of both the surface manner and underlying purpose of a composition and an ability to transmit this understanding across the footlights, is of such manifest importance in the field of art-music, it is doubly so in the field of popular music or the folksong.^[10] A foreigner had best think twice before attempting to deliver a Swedish song, a Hungarian song, or a Polish song of a popular or folk nature. Strangers, customarily, do not meddle in such matters, although we have before us at the present time the interesting case of Ratan Devi.^[11] It is a question, however, whether Ratan Devi would be so much admired if her songs and their traditional manner of performance were more familiar to us.

On our music hall stage there are not more than ten singers who understand how to sing American popular songs, which, as I have said elsewhere, constitute America's best claim to a participation in the art of music. It is very difficult to sing these well. Tone and phrasing have nothing to do with the matter; it is all a question of style. Elsie Janis, a clever mimic, a delightful dancer, and possibly the most deservedly popular artist on our music hall stage, is not a good interpreter of popular songs. In this department she cannot be compared with Bert Williams, Blanche Ring, Stella Mayhew, Al Jolson, May Irwin, Ethel Levey, Nora Bayes, Cecil Cunningham, Fannie Brice, or Marie Cahill. I have named nearly all of the good ones.^[12] The spirit, the conscious liberties taken with the scores, for the vaudeville singer must elaborate his own syncopations, as the singer of early opera embroidered on the score of the composer, are not accidents that just happen. To acquire them demands any amount of work and experience with audiences. None of the singers I have named is a novice. Nor will you find novices who are able to sing Schumann and Franz lieder, although they may be blessed with well-nigh perfect vocal organs.

Still the music critics, with a curious persistence, continue to adjudge a singer by the old formulz and standards: Has she an equalized scale? Has she taste in ornament? Does she overdo the use of portamento, messa di voce, and such devices? How is her shake? Etc., Etc. But how false, how ridiculous, this is! Fancy the result if new writers and composers were criticized for failing to conform to the old laws.^[13] Creative artists always smash these ancient tablets and it does not seem to me that interpreters need be less progressive. Acting changes. Judged by the standards by which Edwin Booth was assessed, John Drew is no actor. But we have become aware at last that it is a different kind of acting. Acting has been flamboyant, extravagant, and intensely emotional, something quite different from real life. The present craze for counterfeiting the semblance of ordinary existence on the stage will also die out, for the theatre is not life and representing life on the boards, except in a conventionalized or decorative form, is not art. Our new actors, with our new playwrights, will develop a new and fantastic form of expression which will supersede the present fashion. Rubinstein certainly did not play the piano like Chopin. Presently, a virtuoso will appear who will refuse to play the piano at all and a new instrument will be invented without a tempered scale so that he may indulge in all the subtleties between half-tones which are denied to the pianist.

It is all very well to cry, Halt! and Who goes there? but you can't stop progress any more than you can stop the passing of time. The old technique of the singer breaks down before the new technique of the composer and the musician with daring will go still further if the singer will but have the courage to follow. Would that some singer would have the complete courage to lead! But do not misunderstand me. The road to Parnassus is no shorter because it has been newly paved. Indeed, I believe it to be longer. Caffarelli studied six years before he made his début as "the greatest singer in the world," but Mary Garden is still studying, although she has been before the public for eighteen years. The new music drama, combining, as it does, principles from all the arts, is all-demanding of its interpreters. The new singer must learn how to move gracefully and awkwardly (Thaïs and Santuzza), how to make both fantastic and realistic gestures (Snegourotchka and Louise), always unconventional gestures, because conventions stamp the imitator. She must peer into every period, glance at every nation. Every nerve centre must be prepared to express any adumbration of plasticity. Many of the new operas, Carmen, La Dolores, Salome, Elektra, to name a few, call for interpretative dancing of the first order. Madama Butterfly and Lakmé demand a knowledge of national characteristics. Pelléas et Mélisande and Ariane et Barbe-Bleue exact absolutely distinct enunciation. Monna Vanna and Tristan und Isolde require acting of the highest poetic and imaginative range.

It is a question whether certain singers of our day have not solved these problems with greater success than that with which they are credited. Yvette Guilbert has announced publicly that she never had a teacher, that she would not trust her voice to a teacher. The enchanting Yvette practises a sound by herself until she is able to produce it; she repeats a phrase until she can deliver it without an interrupting breath, and is there a singer on our stage more expressive than Yvette Guilbert? She sings a little tenor, a little baritone, and a little bass. She can succeed almost invariably in making the effect she sets out to make. She is, indeed, a living rebuttal to the statement often made that unorthodox methods of singing ruin the voice. Ruin it for performances of Linda di Chamounix and La Sonnambula very possibly, but if young singers sit about saving their voices for these operas they are more than likely to die unheard. It is a fact that good singing in the old-fashioned sense will help nobody out in Elektra, Ariane et Barbe-Bleue, Pelléas et Mélisande, or The Nightingale. Cast Mme. Melba, Mme. Destinn, Mme. Sembrich, or Mme. Galli-Curci to sing in one of these lyric dramas and the result would be deplorable.

We have, I think, but a faint glimmering of what vocal expressiveness may become. Such torch-bearers as Mariette Mazarin and Feodor Chaliapin^[14] have been procaciously excoriated by the critics. Until recently, Mary Garden, who of all artists on the lyric stage is the most nearly in touch with the singing of the future, has been regarded by those who sit in high places as a charlatan and a fraud. W. J. Henderson once called her the "Queen of Unsong." Well, perhaps she is, but she is certainly far better fitted to cope with the artistic problems of the modern music drama than such Queens of Song as Marcella Sembrich and Adelina Patti would be. It has occurred to me that Unsong may be the name of the new art.

April 18, 1918.

1. It is significant, in this connection, that Wagner himself admitted that it was a singer, Mme. Schroeder-Devrient, who revealed to him the possibilities of dramatic singing. He boasted that he was the only one to learn the lesson. "She was the first artist," writes H. T. Finck, "who fully realized the fact that in a dramatic opera there may be situations where characteristic singing is of more importance than beautiful singing."
2. Mario, as a matter of fact, also studied with Bordogni of the Conservatoire for voice production, with Michelet of the Comédie Française for declamation, and with Ponchard of the Opéra-Comique, but for no extended period.
3. Seldom more than one.
4. She made an abysmal failure in Carmen.
5. "The influence exerted by the prima donna on the evolution of music has nearly always been reactionary. Even so great an opportunist as Handel was driven to threats of personal violence in order to secure her submission, and the greatest and most original composers have been precisely those who treated her with the least consideration." C. L. Graves in Post-Victorian Music; page 283.
6. Born November 24, 1848, this remarkable woman is still singing at the age of seventy-six.
7. Died, 1923.
8. Died 1916.
9. On January 2, 1924, Scotti appeared as Scarpia in a gala performance of Tosca to celebrate his twenty-fifth consecutive season at the Metropolitan Opera House.
10. According to no less an authority than Cecil J. Sharp, the peasants themselves differentiate between the two, and devote to each a special vocal method. In English Folksong, he writes: "But, it must be remembered that the vocal method of the folksinger is inseparable from the folksong. It is a cult which has grown up side by side with the folksong, and is, no doubt, part and parcel of the same tradition. When, for instance, an old singing man sings a modern popular song, he will sing it in quite another way. The tone of his voice will change and he will slur his intervals, after the approved manner of the street-singer. Indeed, it is usually quite possible to detect a genuine folksong simply by paying attention to the way it is sung."
11. An Englishwoman who gives concerts of Hindu songs, mostly, to be sure, art-songs, but so greatly do they differ from occidental songs that their manner of interpretation is a special study in itself.
12. Written in 1918. I have made no attempt to bring this list down to date, although, of course, other names might now be added.
13. So they are, my son, but not for long.
14. When he visited this country in his prime in 1907-8. When he returned in 1921, he was unanimously saluted as the greatest living lyric artist.