Conrad Osborne: High Fidelity Critic/Blogger - Specialty: Opera

[André]

Yikes.

It's true that Aida/Radamès/Amonasro-size voices are in extremely short supply these days. If Opera Houses were limited to 1500 seating and ticket prizes were frozen, things might be quite different.

As it stands, patrons who pay large sums of ill/hard-earned money want to be wowed. A wowing Aida may last 4-5 years, after which she'll become a shrewish Tosca, then a dramatic mezzo before she is relegated to the Countess in Pique Dame.

Hall size is inversely proportional to vocal health. So critics should be directed to the House's Manager's Office and stop complaining about the singers. They got what they paid for (i.e. nothing: they get to complain for free).

[Cato]

Yikes.

It's true that Aida/Radamès/Amonasro-size voices are in extremely short supply these days. If Opera Houses were limited to 1500 seating and ticket prizes were frozen, things might be quite different.

As it stands, patrons who pay large sums of ill/hard-earned money want to be wowed. A wowing Aida may last 4-5 years, after which she'll become a shrewish Tosca, then a dramatic mezzo before she is relegated to the Countess in Pique Dame.

Hall size is inversely proportional to vocal health. So critics should be directed to the House's Manager's Office and stop complaining about the singers. They got what they paid for (i.e. nothing: they get to complain for free).

Thanks for the comment, André!

Conrad Osborne is positive that modern singers have been taught classical-music singing incorrectly for most of the twentieth century, with part of the problem being the invention of the microphone.

Since he is 90 or 91 years old, and recalls Metropolitan Opera singers who had been taught their craft from 1900-1920, he is appalled more and more by what he is hearing today, and has heard for decades.

For some years he has sponsored workshops on proper technique - with an emphasis on breathing especially, as he deplores current trends in teaching the special breathing needed for opera.

But other things are involved: he suspects that chemicals in the environment have damaged current generations hormonally, thereby affecting the masculinity or femininity of maturing voices.

...I'll be offering thoughts about the state-of-being of today's beginning singer⎯⎯the teenager with a nice voice, some musicality, and some indicated interest or ambition⎯⎯as he or she starts professional study.

That person may be very talented and vocally mature for his or her age, but I can safely promise you that he or she will present a radically different set of strengths and weaknesses, vocal and personal, (from) those of the 19-year-old Fyodor Chaliapin, the 18-year-old Rosa Ponselle, or, as I suggested in my post of Sept. 30, the 16- or 17-year-old Lotte Lehmann.

I'm not going to rank these considerations yet. I'm quite sure that "microphones" escapes my lips first-off because it assuredly belongs at or near the top of any such ranking, along with several broad socio-cultural influences that can be, at one and the same time, socially progressive yet also sources of collateral damage when it comes to great singing.

See:

https://conradlosborne.com/2017/10/27/before-the-first-lesson%e2%8e%affirst-in-an-occasional-series/

[Florestan]

That person may be very talented and vocally mature for his or her age, but I can safely promise you that he or she will present a radically different set of strengths and weaknesses, vocal and personal, (from) those of the 19-year-old Fyodor Chaliapin, the 18-year-old Rosa Ponselle, or, as I suggested in my post of Sept. 30, the 16- or 17-year-old Lotte Lehmann.

So what? I think I can safely promise that the 19-year-old Fyodor Chaliapin, the 18-year-old Rosa Ponselle or the 16- or 17-year-old Lotte Lehmann presented radically different set of strengths and weaknesses, vocal and personal, than Nicolas Levasseur, Giuditta Pasta or Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient at corresponding age.

It's the same old and tired canard: past times were better times. False. Past times were different times, that's all that can be safely promised to us.

I firmly believe people who say "40/50/60 years ago things were better/simpler/calmer/whatevererer (sic!)" simply mean "40/50/80 years ago I was young, handsome and had a whole life ahead. Today I'm old, ugly and rapidly approaching the end." 

[Florestan]

I don't imagine we're going to see controlled studies of scale on the vocal effects of endocrine disruptors. There's no money in that. But think about this de-virilizing trend (as I did, the instant I first heard about it) in relation to the dearth of dramatic voices and the absence of deep voices (weakened "chestiness" being the technical component in both phenomena), to the apparent cultural preference for lighter voices and  for male voices that behave and sound more like female or androgynous ones. .

Nihil novum sub sole. Castrati, anyone? 

And btw, post 1850 Rossini deplored the loss of the art of fine singing and the dearth of beautiful voices (kind of a Conrad Osborne avant la lettre, one is tempted to add) and blamed it on two things: disappearance of castrati and bad teaching. I wonder what Osborne would make of that. 

[Cato]

Nihil novum sub sole. Castrati, anyone? 

And btw, post 1850 Rossini deplored the loss of the art of fine singing and the dearth of beautiful voices (kind of a Conrad Osborne avant la lettre, one is tempted to add) and blamed it on two things: disappearance of castrati and bad teaching. I wonder what Osborne would make of that. 

Nihil novum sub sole is possible of course: on the other hand, he did hear Kirsten Flagstad in her prime, along with Ezio Pinza, Robert Merrill, and many others.

Perhaps his memory is lionizing those people: comparing a modern performance of "aria X" with a recording from the 1940's would, of course, be difficult, as one would need to ignore the technical imperfections in recordings from that era.

To be sure, he has written about listening to early recordings of the most famous singers from c. 1900 and beyond.

e.g. Concerning Fyodor Chaliapin's early recordings (now on the MARSTON label):

...There soon follows, though, one of Chaliapin's greatest records, of Pimen's Act One monologue from Boris Godunov. From the opening words, we are aware of a different sort of person from any of those he has brought before us—one of infinite gravity and patience, old but still fully in command of his powers, who, as his lamp gutters, approaches the end of his great mission as chronicler. If we have been listening to the brilliantly ringing, varicolored high bass of his other recordings, we are startled by the depth and darkness of tone we hear, and then the consistency with which it rolls through the music, giving and taking with the dynamics and setting forth the words with bardic clarity and purpose...

See:  https://conradlosborne.com/2019/03/22/chaliapin-phenomenon-part-two/4/