A Calendar of Song: For the Tenth Day of Christmas

Jan 4

Calendar of Song: Tenth Day of Christmas

For reasons of time, I shan’t continue this series beyond the Twelfth Day of Christmas. But it seems to me that I could probably choose one different singer, or group of singers, for every day of the year. Just now, there are the areas I’d like to keep investigating. In no particular order:

1.World music. Why haven’t I spent more time thinking of Georgian vocal ensemble music, African click vocalism (based on the Khoisan or Xhason group of languages) and other African song forms, Mongolian singing, and more?

2.Experimental vocalism. I’m one of those who has been happily amazed by Meredith Monk’s singing. (Some of you certainly aren’t.) There are other singers opening up what singing can do.

3.Vibrato. I think I’ve begun to open up the complexities of the area loosely known as vibrato, but I’ve read enough around the subject to know that for some authorities vibrato implies wobble while tremolo is a quite different factor. The speed of vibration/fluctuation is one issue; the nature and tension of vibration is another; the avoidance of vibrato is a third; the occasions when the vibrato intrudes upon both line and sound is a fourth. In 2017, the Met staged Bellini’s “Norma” with Sandra Radvanowsky, Joyce DiDonato, and Joseph Calleja, all three of whom have rapid vibrati: I’ve varied on all three (and their vibrati) over the years, but was fascinated at that performance to find that in one case the fast vibrato intensified the artistry, in another was intrusive, and in a third was one of several insufferable elements. How come a method so seemingly similar had effects so radically divergent? It’s a vast topic, but so profoundly connected to breathing itself that it’s crucial. We’ll never all agree on it, but we might be become more aware of why we disagree.

4. Clean entry into notes, especially opening notes. Evidently I love pingingly clean attack into opening notes - but this is a can of worms. A Russian baritone once assured me that all good singing was about approaching notes from below. That isn’t how his own singing sounded to me, let alone that of many others. Many larger voices certainly need to approach notes from below – the great Maria Callas, who began with a mightily large voice, quite often did - but why is that I’m moved by Martha Mödl’s way of doing so and repelled by her contemporary Astrid Varnay’s, though Varnay sustained a longer career as a soprano and was an evidently intense and intelligent interpreter?

5. Chest register. For some people, Janet Baker is the peak singer; for others, her lack of firm lower notes is a basic drawback about her. Some argue that Kathleen Ferrier was another British mezzo without a real chest sound.

The matter is complicated because a number of very chesty Italian mezzos can be found on YouTube insisting that they didn’t use the chest register, sounding like the Pope denying his Catholicism. A few singers actively avoid chest register in theory and practice – Elisabeth Schumann is the most famous – which for me is certainly always a problem in theory though by no means invariably in practice.

6, 7, 8. Cantilena, portamento, legato are all separate but intimately connected factors that I’ve certainly introduced, but they’re endlessly intriguing. Perhaps this remains the most underrated, most under-analysed, aspect of Maria Callas’s singing.

9,10. Rhythm, metre, rubato, are likewise separate issues, though I accept that rhythm and metre are often treated as the same. Some music comes far more vividly to life when rubato changes a steady pulse into a modified one, but – as with portamento – some sense of discretion and proportion is needed. Fernando de Lucia and Mattia Battistini are the singers who most radically apply rubato of those on my Calendar; but they also show very keen senses of metre and rhythm.

11. Diction. For many of us this is – or seems – the most vital factor of all. T.S.Eliot: “I gotta use words when I talk to you.” I defend Joan Sutherland in the Handel aria I included, because I find her way with the music more deeply eloquent than those who enounce its words better; but I don’t defend that as a general principle. I was lucky that maybe half my early opera-going was with English National Opera at a time when no subtitles were used: much of the time, no subtitles were necessary, even in the “Ring” Cycle, thanks to generations of anglophone singers who made words count. After forty-five years, I can hear how Valerie Masterson sang “I wonder – I wonder” in “Traviata” or “You would not understand” in “Rosenkavalier”; I had already heard those operas in the original language; I knew what was being said (“I wonder” is a very free translation of “É strano”) but oh! the English language, however hard to sing, pierced the heart.

12. Pitch. Some have written that those final head notes of Emma Calvé’s in “Ma Lisette” were subtly flat, while one singer who took years to master the “fourth voice” technique, gently disagrees.

I’ve known two people who had perfect pitch; they both confessed to a form of relief when it disappeared, but I learnt a lot from one of them (who always said that sharpness was preferable to flatness). I’ve listened a lot to two singers to whom perfect pitch has been attributed – Heather Harper and Jo Stafford – but it wasn’t their pitch that I loved about them.

My own sense of pitch is neither the best nor the worst. Once I’ve noticed recurrent flatness in a singer, it tends to be such a problem that I suspect it even where it does not occur. I’ve never noticed it in Amelita Galli-Curci’s recordings, though I’m told it occurs; in live performance, a great voice is yet likelier to make some out-of-tune singing negligible or pardonable, to many of us. But one friend winces at sharp singing more than anyone else I’ve ever known. (How much there is for us to investigate between the ear and the nervous system!)

13, 14, 15. Jazz, spirituals, gospel. I've been sent the greatest examples of Marian Anderson, Kathleen Battle, Sarah Vaughan, I've ever heard. Whole new chapters open themselves.

16. Ensemble singing. One friend asks me to start a series with the “Rigoletto” quartet as led by Caruso and Galli-Curci....

For the last three days of Christmas, I’m not going to choose my top three recordings. I’ve probably already given you several of my top singers anyway, and this is going to be a calendar from which I omit several of my others (Carlo Bergonzi, Suzanne Danco, Frida Leider, Ann Murray, Lucia Popp, Elisabeth Söderström, Jo Stafford, Shirley Verrett, Jon Vickers, Bryn Terfel, Ninon Vallin, Galina Vizhveskaya, Ljuba Welitsch, to name only a few). I’m still making up my mind about whether to exclude Richard Tauber, though I suspect every single one of his innumerable recordings is wonderful, in favour of a more problematic singer tomorrow: we’ll see.

* * * * * * * * * * *

Here’s a singer who was very much loved for well over forty years, Victoria de los Angeles (1923-2005). In the 1950s and 1960s, Gramophone reviews routinely referred to hers as the most beautiful voice before the public. By the time I first saw her in live concert, c.1974, the voice remained beautiful, but she was going badly flat around the top of the stave and above it. Maybe now I’d be better at hearing what was still wonderful about her. At the time, I was eighteen and unforgiving.

I was originally planning to include de los Angeles as an example of vocal purity. Her entry into notes is often imperceptibly spot-on; her voice is beautifully equalized, so that you hear how the lower notes nourish the upper ones. She seems to have the most natural legato, though there’s science to it: I remember hearing the mezzo soprano Ann Murray speak of how she’d spent time with de los Angeles to work on legato, something that I’d love to have heard more about.

Purity by itself can be tedious, though. And a few of de los Angeles’s operatic roles are not-quite-believably goody-two-shoes: the vulnerability has a dash of contrivance. In the de Falla “Seven Popular Songs”, she’s so far from Conchita Supervia – theirs remain the two best-known accounts – that some people have never been able to accept her more restrained delivery. (I certainly can.) As Carmen in the Beecham full-length recording, some (including Beecham’s wife) have always thought her too ladylike – but she’s also much more lightly witty than Callas and most other Carmens, and the sheer allure of her voice does plenty to explain the central character, along with her joie de vivre: I find I don’t need to return to the Callas recording, for all its bite and musicality, but am always happy to return to the Beecham-de los Angeles one. Her voice had plenty of womanly darkness: there’s a live Met Otello in which her Desdemonas replies to Otello’s insults with beautiful vehemence and shock. And she seldom lost a rare gift for communicating the joy of music-making, making it infectious as Lucia Popp also did, even in poignant music. Still, her recording of Ravel’s “Cinq melodies grecques” would make a supreme example of purity: she brings them a quality of of ecstatic radiance and morning-of-the-world innocence. She loved a wide range of music: we have recordings of her singing Wagner at Bayreuth, Massenet’s Manon, Mozart’s Countess, lieder by Schubert and Brahms, and much more.

To me, this song, “El Mirar de la Maja” is an enthralling example of the art that conceals art: it gets under my skin; I need to go back to find why. It's by Enrique Granados (Enrique Granados y Campiña, 1867-1916) is one of her earliest recordings, from 1949, accompanied by Gerald Moore. The words are by Granados’s contemporary Fernando Periquet (1873 - 1940). In an age when we’ve learnt to speak of “the male gaze”, it’s arresting to have a poem that’s "a woman’s gaze". But it’s not quite a song of feminist assertion. Is this woman, merely by using her eyes, in control of the situation? Or is she the beautiful but poignant victim of a controlling man, a man who needs his femme to be fatale? It’s nicely - or painfully - ambiguous. Granados’s 4/5 rhythmic structure is stunningly hypnotic; I think Moore judges it brilliantly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EHsem5hvfo

El mirar de la maja

The woman’s gaze

¿Por qué es en mis ojos

tan hondo el mirar

que a fin de cortar

desdenes y enojos

los suelo entornar?

Because my eyes

hold such an intense gaze,

in order to avoid

disdain and fighting,

I tend to look away.

¿Qué fuego dentro llevarán

que si acaso con calor

los clavo en mi amor

sonrojo me dan?

What fire do they carry inside,

that, with only a little passion,

when I look at my lover,

they cause me to blush?

Por eso el chispero

a quien mi alma dí

al verse ante mí

me tira el sombrero

y díceme así:

That's why this fiery man,

to whom I gave my soul,

when standing in front of me,

tosses a hat my way

and says to me:

"Mi Maja, no me mires más

que tus ojos rayos son

y ardiendo en pasión

la muerte me dan."

"My love, do not look at me anymore

for your eyes are lightning

and burning in desire

they give me death."

The whole thing is a study in understatement. On YouTube, you can hear Shirley Verrett sing it with more force, Pilar Lorengar with more vulnerability and apparent emotion, Montserrat Caballé with more operatic voluptuousness; of those, I prefer Verrett, always intelligently eloquent and vital. But coming back to de los Angeles is to feel the song’s deep ambiguity, mystery – and, I think, poignancy.

As the opening stanza alone shows you, she takes some notes cleanly, others very emphatically from below; either way seems the most natural thing in the world. Her vibrato – check out the sustained notes at the end of each line - is light but remarkably irregular; I love it, but it’s like nobody else’s, and absolutely makes us sense her personal breathing. There are individual syllables she inflects with such lightness that the effect is insidious: “o-jos” in the first line, “mi-rar” in the second – very often the short uppermost note before the lower concluding one. It’s magical - but it's the longer, quieter, lower, following note that catches the subtly fatal rhythm of the song.

It’s in the first two lines of the second stanza where de los Angeles makes me feel that there’s a definite element of protest within this song; she scoops upward. What’s this effect her eyes have? Only a little passion makes her blush. But the way she tapers the third and fourth lines away - is she perhaps the cat with the cream? She’s guarding her mystery.

In the start of the third stanza, the words “chispero” and “alma” are touchingly opposed: “chispero” (it can mean “sparkler”) is the fiery man (uttered with emphatic yearning), to whom she has given her “alma” (“soul”, uttered with terrific delicacy). At the end of the stanza, the words “y díceme así” ("and says to me this:") by rights ought to be unimportant, a transition to what follows, but de los Angeles makes them softly irresistible.

The song ends with the words the man told her. De los Angeles makes their contrasts arresting: The first line ends with “mas” (“Don’t look at me any more”), to which de los Angeles gives the kind of near-flatness that’s surely more interesting than perfect pitch - but when it comes to “ojos” (“because your eyes”) she plucks the word and its highest note cleanly out of the air, a kind of surprising yet satisfying climax to the whole song. Then she completes the thought with “rayos son” “for your eyes are lightning”). And if that’s not enough, he speaks, in the next two lines, of her eyes’ (a) desire (b) killing him. She’s quoting him. Again, de los Angeles fades these closing lines away into herself, holding those final diminuendi like her own private secrets. Who can say whether she does so with female pride? or like remembered wounds?

Onward!