Voice and dramatic vocality

Today, it is not always easy for young people to fulfil the correct performance of the works of composers from the romantic and veristic period. There are various reasons for this and they are mainly the result of ways of thinking and doing that are distant from the respect of the composers’ dictates by those who should instead protect them in their integrity. Every time, then, that the request for a vocality more suited to these styles is addressed to voices that are unsuitable or unable to adapt to them – mainly for not having the requisites or for lack of technical preparation, an exasperation of Belcantismo is fuelled, which however produces forced singing, unnatural and therefore unrefined, and overly ‘declamatory’, to the point of not even being able to follow the dynamics, fomenting an ungainly and at times grotesque vocal expression, where the dramatic characters lose the elegance of singing and the charm that even a ‘bad’ must have. The proof of a correct performance is in the singing of artists such as Del Monaco, Corelli, Nilsson, Dimitrova and their illustrious colleagues, whose emission has never been coarse, nor has it ever given the impression of loud singing. At present, there is a tendency to adapt to the demands of the theatre by inducing veritable mechanical peripeteia that, besides not honouring the art of singing, condemn the voices of the unfortunate to a short life (if never to achieve success). Starting from the anatomical and physiological knowledge of the vocal instrument, one can understand and tackle any style of singing, without having to exaggerate anything in order to achieve the desired effect in the dramatic and spinto roles. Verdi said: “[…] singers regard singing as gymnastics […] They do not take the trouble to put beautiful phrasing into their singing; all their aspiration consists of nothing more than emitting this or that note with great power. Thus their singing is not a poetic expression of the soul, but a physical contest of their body […]’. Already at that time, evidently, there were singers with the ambition to show off their voices rather than express feelings. It is a deontological choice that stems from the desire to honour the will of the composers: to do masterpieces or gymnastics, to have respect for art or to follow vanity. The spread of the idea that in order to sing these repertoires, one must swell one’s voice beyond measure, has led many singers to distort their own, unfortunately with unpleasant or unhappy results. But where have the true dramatic voices, male and female, gone, apart from a few rare cases? Are the famous ‘high-intensity sopranos’, for example, extinct? Is it perhaps the confusion that is often created between vocal categories that contributes? Dramatic tenors being mistaken for baritones or dramatic sopranos being taken for mezzo-sopranos? Meanwhile, lyric tenors and sopranos who are forced to perform dramatic roles (especially in Italy) pay the price: it is often impossible to find a Pinkerton who is not already exhausted after a first act or a Turandot screaming from the first to the last note with obvious physical exertion.

THE ‘TECHNIQUE’ FOR BECOMING DRAMATIC
The increasingly rampant vulgarisation of singing, especially tenor singing, which, despite the different expressive styles of heroism and drama, must nevertheless be beautiful and harmonious, stems in part from an excessive fanaticism towards daring vocalism, emulated and taken to the extreme when the prerequisites are lacking, which has its roots (and not only) in the desire to find vocal power, as if this were the first or most important attribute of a valuable voice or the only plausible manifestation of the dramatic repertoire. The frantic search for voices that ‘hold up the orchestra’, then, has given the coup de grace to the orchestra’s most delicate instrument: the voice. One of the reasons why they do not hold up the orchestra, even though it does not always take care to accompany them with the proper accompaniment, is once again related to the lack of good technique. Believing that the solution is to embed the sound in the throat (why? otherwise it will vapourise?), some propose examples deduced from the vocality of certain artists of the past with a spinto/dramatic voice, in the singing of which, however, they confuse a chordal mode for a low larynx, thus preventing the voice from expanding in order to offer the audience a free and vibrant singing. The act of bringing the larynx down further than it should have been (thus lengthening the vocal tract and giving the voice a naturally darker colour) is not to be found in these people, who did not in fact have a low larynx as it is thought and made to be, and ‘hearing’ that they brought it down as they ascended to the treble is now scientifically proven not to be true because it is the opposite of what actually happened, since it is an action that cannot be contrasted with the physiological activities of the vocal organ and which, moreover, would produce an ingrown, intubated, ‘hollow’ sound that in fact those singers did not have, on the contrary! All this, of course, is amply demonstrable both scientifically and tangibly. The problem is that people still copy-and-paste things said by artists of the past, ignoring the fact that over the decades, with the evolution of diagnostic instruments and the results of research on how to control the structures that move singing, an objective explanation has been given on how they express sensations and perceptions. One merely imitated. But without a natural predisposition and talent capable of transforming arcane suggestions into concrete acts, what percentage of success can one have with imitation alone? It is indisputable that the sensory method has produced hundreds of great singers, but if we go and observe them one by one, how many of them started with a voice to be built from scratch, with no natural inclinations, limited vocal quality or serious mechanical difficulties? None. With a young person without these extraordinary gifts or with mechanical defects who nevertheless wishes to learn to sing (and this is increasingly common today), the sensory method is not enough. It requires a singer specialised in didactics. To put it briefly: is a singer who teaches based solely on his or her own sensations able to recognise exactly what is happening inside the pupil’s instrument? If the pupil has a problem, can he or she identify exactly what it is and where it is located? And does he or she know exactly ‘where to put his or her hands’ to solve it? The point is this. And it is from this point that we should start again in order to arrive at the results that only correct teaching can offer, accepting that empiricism can only work with those who are ‘born singers’ and that the sensory method must be flanked by the scientific one. In fact, the search for the same sound in the great voices of the past through imitation testifies to a failure to investigate the muscular and cartilaginous actions that generated that sound effect. So to ask a pupil to project a sound towards a certain point by simply pointing at it or making fanciful examples and comparisons without using the right terminology, is to fail to make him understand exactly what is actually happening and he must learn to control it. Therefore, only a pupil with a predisposition and artistic talent will be able to work out the sound you want from him. In short: you may well decide to use only the sensory method for empirical reasons, but let the master acquire knowledge of the anatomy and physiology of the voice, which, even if he does not want to use it, he will nevertheless prove to have with the definitive and rapid resolution of technical problems.