Yet, there is a whole other side to 19th century singers, a story about technique and the changing views of singers' "types". Trousered mezzos (women with darker voices playing male roles) cropped up and began to perform in lieu of the castrati. Literature reflects the tensions as well, highlighting the dichotomy between two female types: the mechanistic doll who ornaments everything without any soul, and the consumptive woman who sings lyrically due to some illness, who is frail but "perfect", an angel-conduit for the divine music.
Today, we read some ETA Hoffmann excerpts and listened to bits of Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann, which is based on these stories. Olympia is a mechanical doll who sings a jerky aria that's one of the famous ones in the soprano rep - lots of high flying, acrobatic coloratura (all the fast little notes). Antonia is the frail woman who sings beautifully due to some illness (consumption perhaps) but who must not sing because it will literally (and does) kill her.
After this, it was off to a 1 hour Music Bibliography class, which is meant to teach me about the ins and outs of music research, the library, and writing music resource citations.
Two hours of "free time" followed, but these were filled with a few errands, an hour of practicing/warming up since I was performing this afternoon, and meeting with my new (and excellent!) voice teacher. Hurried home to grab lunch and craft an email, and then sprinted back to campus.
The studio class is where all the students in my voice teacher's studio meet and sing for each other. It's a mini-masterclass format, meaning we stand up, sing, and then receive constructive criticism from the teacher and perhaps the other students on our performance. A terrific chance to perform more often, it provides a safe environment for learning and working out some of those pesky bugs that only seem to arise when nerves kick in.
Today, we all simply sang for each other as a way to "work out the nerves", as the professor put it. There's a baby grand piano in the room along with several top-notch accompanists, so it's quite fun. What made it really neat, though, was how amazing all the voices were. There were juniors through DMA students singing, but had I not been told their years, I would never have known what age/stage each was at. Every Single One has an unbelievable voice, and it was a true pleasure to get to be awash in all that glorious music for an hour. There were Schumann, Schubert, and Strauss art songs, Dvorak opera, Rogers and Hammerstein (2 pieces from Carousel), and several others I'm forgetting. It was like seeing a wonderful concert!
My performance? Iffy at best. Not my best but not my worst. Hopefully I'll get a chance to get my grounding soon. I sang "Kommt ein schlanker Bursch" from Weber's Der Freischutz. It's a fun little piece in which a young woman, Annchen, jokes with her cousin about how a pretty young lad will come a-walking, meet a young maid, and the two will marry. Cheerful and light, it's one of my standard "I can sing this under most conditions" arias. Always good to have in the pocket.
After the studio class, I ran to two hours of opera workshop. This will eventually involve working out staging and acting technique, but today it was an intro with forms to fill out. One of these forms was a four page questionnaire/self-assessment with questions like:
- Are you more comfortable as a singer or an actor? Why do you think this is? Would you like to change this?
- How comfortable are you with your physical life onstage?
- How comfortable are you with your emotional life onstage?
- If you could sing any role from musical theatre or opera, what would it be and why?
- If all goes as planned, what will your future career look like?
- Why are you taking this class?
- What are your goals for the semester?
- What do you think your strengths and weaknesses are onstage?
- How well do you take criticism? How much positive reinforcement do you need to feel good about yourself?
- Are you comfortable taking risks in class, even if it means you might fail?
- How comfortable are you with doing things that you may not enjoy or that are the same for a long period of time when the outcome isn't immediately clear? (I phrased this poorly, but the gist of the question was "Are you disciplined enough to stick with exercises that will pay off in the long run but don't show immediate gains?")
This plus a list of my performance experience and my class schedule completed the rest of the paperwork. Interesting.
At this point, it was off to practice a bit more. Then, I headed to the library to pull some articles for the 19th Century Opera class. Amazing to be among the musty smell of books again, copying pages instead of slides.
Tonight, my only remaining work was to pull together my music for Friday's accompanist. I need to perform two selections in opera workshop on Friday. One should be an aria I'm comfortable singing and want to work on all semester. The other? Any piece in any style that I Love to sing. "Something that connects you to that Joy Factor," the professor explained. I'm planning on "La Romance d'Ariel" for that one. An early Debussy piece, it speaks from Ariel's point of view in Shakespeare's Tempest. In this piece, Ariel is in love with Miranda and calls to her, spinning lovely descriptions of nature as a reflection of emotion and Miranda's beauty. Ariel eventually realizes that Miranda isn't coming and ends with a repeat of the opening stanza: "Across the sweet mountains, won't you come to the cry of your Ariel?" But this time, it is a plaintive cry, ending with a sweeping vocal line that sobs. Truly incredible.
I think I'm rather smitten with Debussy.
~Hope
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