Opera Singing--Old vs Contemporary

[OrthoFan]

I stumbled upon this today--part of an online series, "Phantoms of the Opera"--and though it was an interesting comparison of the differences between the singing style of today, compared to 100 years ago --

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3D61xTkgoU

I especially agree that today's voices are much "darker" sounding than those of the past.

I don't know much about opera singing, so it will be interesting to hear what others have to say.

OF

[epigramophone]

I and several other forum members had the pleasure of meeting this lady and hearing her sing at one of Graham's gramophone gatherings in 2019. She owns an EMG, and has adapted her singing style by listening to early operatic records on it.

I am in no doubt that standards of singing have declined since the age of Caruso. There are exceptions, but many of today's opera singers have poor diction and an inability to sustain a note without wobbling. A hundred years ago they would have been lucky to get a place in the chorus.

In the UK we have a number of individuals who style themselves as opera singers but who have never performed in opera. All they do is sing operatic arias in concerts with varying degrees of competence.

[BillH_NJ]

Caruso was actually probably one of the causes or motivations behind some of the change in vocal styles. You can hear this if you compare his recordings to those of contemporary tenors who tended to have that lighter, brighter sound and to those of the next generation. Musical styles also changed and encouraged a different type of vocalist as verismo developed. The more controlled vibrato and legato of Pol Plancon and Mattia Battistini were eventually replaced by the wider, slower vibrato common among most singers now and the kind of effortful performance shown in the Kaufmann, Alagna, and Netrebko segments.

[epigramophone]

Very true. Tenors including Bonci and De Lucia exemplified the older style, while Caruso was something new. His fame was such that, ever since, many lesser tenors have tried unwisely to copy him, forcing their top notes in their efforts to match his volume.

[melvind]

I have watched several of the "Phantoms of the Opera" videos and I am afraid I am not as enthusiastic as many are with her conclusions. She is very entertaining but her musical examples often do not fully support her conclusions as much as nearly debunk them (in my opinion). There were great trained singers then as there are now. The 19th century Bel Canto technique is still largely what is taught today in one form or another. Perhaps Wagner singers take things a bit over the top sometimes, but they did back in the early 20th century as well. Listen to Johanna Gadski sing Wagner and tell me it is much different than what you are hearing today. In many cases much screachier then than now.

If you take an acoustic recording of a singer that is said to be in the "old style" and compare it to the same singer in an electrical recording I think you would be surprised how contemporary and "the same" they sound as many of today's great singers. The full sound of the voice is rarely captured in acoustic recordings. Some voices recorded very well even in acoustic recordings. I think the two most striking examples of older acoustic recordings that worked very well are Enrico Caruso and Claudia Muzio. Also, Rosa Ponselle. These recordings are much more in what I would say are being referred to as contemporary singing. They are round, robust and somewhat darker sounding than other recordings of the time. Another wonderful singer was Frieda Hemple. Bel Canto singing, which is really what most singers are striving for is a natural use of a trained voice.

Anyway, I don't want to debate any of this and don't mean to offend anyone but I thought I would put my 2 cents worth into the ring. I just think there is some sensationalizing being done by her. But, she is very good at making nice videos that sound and seem convincing.

[Inigo]

The only Bel canto I've listened to is De Lucía. But it's his style of singing and adding ornaments in his soft voice what I admire most. He added these out of his. But it's similar to what Bing did when singing any song, including tone inflections that weren't in the original. This is personal art.
What amazed me is why this woman takes examples of not very famous artists. I didn't knew any of her modern examples. Why didn't she take the world famous singers? I love Kathleen Battle, for instance... or Juan Diego Flórez....

[Titta Ruffo]

I especially agree that today's voices are much "darker" sounding than those of the past.

I agree with this lady that singing is in a very wrong place today. And today's "darker" is simply called in old books a throaty singing, la voce ingolata, a voice that is stucked in the throat, an obstruction in a free passage of sound. It is fake dark and not a beautiful darkness that comes from an open throat and resonance. Voices of the past were dark and clear. Balanced. Today people sing either dark with knedel, or too bright, shrill, like so called today's "rossini tenors"; there was never such a thing like a rossini tenor. Tenors of the past sang everything.

About de Lucia: he's the first to record a full Barbiere and Rigoletto. Books say that he had a baritone voice and trained himself to be a tenor. There is a very interesting interview on YouTube of his student - Georges Thill one of the last belcanto singers.

Belcanto is not only ornaments, it's also a beautiful sound, developed registers, a full mastery of the voice. It's the technique. So called rossini tenors who have caprino instead of a free vibrato are on a completely different page to belcanto even when they sing music or a romantic era. And nobody can teach belcanto today. Nobody even tries to do it in the universities. Show me a contemporary singer who can make a trill like Caruso, Plancon, de Reszke, Jadlowker, Sembrich and others from that period.

In my humble opinion this lady is doing some great research work with books and recordings. Although, I think that she went a wrong way and she has nobody who can give her a feedback on her voice. She tries to imitate sound of the sopranos on acoustic recordings and this is wrong. As an effect her singing voice doesn't sound natural. Listen to Hina Spani acoustic and electric. Books say that sopranos were suffering the most from a distortion on their acoustic recordings. You will hear a bell like quality, clear small sound, but no colour and size of the voice. Muzio is a different thing yes, how? I don't know. In one book I've read that Caruso was so well recordable because he was a master of sostenuto.

I myself have around 130 old books on singing written by the great singers, their teachers ect. all what they preach is naturalness. The voice should be natural, pure, clear and sonorous. I think that it's so difficult now because we are different, we speak differently, we live lives full of fake environment, opposite to nature.

[Inigo]

very interesting... thanks!

[Marco Gilardetti]

I also watched some of her viceoclips when they were introduced on the board one year ago or such. Her line of research is highly interesting, her clips are well made and she's also charming, which - like it or not - improves attention level.

From the lowest level of subject knowledge that I have, I confess that in some cases she points the attention to some detail, but then in the subsequent old/new comparison tracks I seem to get exactly the opposite impression of what she suggests. But again, it's surely the result of my ignorance.

I definitely agree that trying to derive objective data about singing technique based on old records is complex, and will always be subject to debate. This is especially true with female voices, which being higher in pitch tend to get closer to the upper bandwith limit, which is where the tone harmonics are inevitably eroded. There are countless records in which the voice of a soprano is returned as a sort of colourless mewing, and it's really beyond my knowledge to understand if this could have possibly been intentional, but I suspect it wasn't and it's just the result of inadequate or approximate recording instruments.

As an Italian native speaker, I should also add that most "old" voices show dialectal accents, speech defects or "liberties" of pronunciation that are quite annoying to the contemporary listener. Today, these are rarely heard even in non-Italian operatic singers. I remember that my mother, who was way more into operatic music than I will ever be, insisted that this should be forgiven, that the voice itself is what matters, and that pronunciation faults must not be overheard. Still, from the bottom of my ignorance, I prefer to listen to Juan Diego Florez than to most of the legendary opera singers of yesteryear.

It is also far beyond my understanding of the subject to evaluate to which degree there is a "recall bias" towards the voices of the past. It is common to consider coming from a legendary lost golden era what comes simply from the past. This is common on all fields of humanities, not music alone, and should be taken with a grain of salt. Sportstmen once considered superhuman, would compete in advanced amateurs cathegories today. Cinema divae for whom men would suicide in their days, are returned by old pictures as elegant ladies of the neighborhood. And so on. Again, it's really beyond my knowledge to assess wether this fully applies to operatic singers as well; but I have the uneducated feeling that yes, the surviving recordings of singers that were once considered legends, clearly show us that they had limits.

However, understanding old singing techniques (as well as period instuments, and alike) is an interesting and important research field, and I wish her all the luck and success in her studies.