This morning I was confronted with a video on Facebook that was posted by a fellow singer who was fascinated by the vocalism in the video and didn't really know exactly technically what was going on, so I decided to break it down in this blog post, because I think it's worth discussing how much tastes and vocal technical practice has changed in the past 49 years, since Christina Deutekom sang the role and was acclaimed by the New York Times (according to this Wikipedia biography of her) as being 'the greatest Queen of the Night of our time'.
Here's the video:
So- I sing this piece- and have been studying it and singing it for 4 years now-just so you know where my thoughts are coming from- and from a technical perspective this recording to me is all over the place. In the recitative she changes the text (at "ja schuldlos" and "dies tief" which at the time she was singing was normal- in fact people here in Germany have even suggested that I do that too sometimes--so it's still happening even now to some degree) and then in the waltz she's covering some vowels crazily and then others not at all (which I find to be the easy way out vocally speaking- of course it's easier not to cover the 'noch sehe ich' - but then it's really really bright in terms of color and I that they can be made prettier if you round out the sound a bit on the top and don't let it get so very horizontal) and she also totally drops out of her resonance/vocal legato line on the last 16th notes of the second 'boesewicht' which I think gives it less dramatic power, not to mention makes the next stuff you've got to sing a bit harder, unnecessarily.
And also- if I sang this today the way she's singing it in terms of vibrato use (and I mean that she really uses a pretty wide vibrato throughout the piece, but especially in the slow second half of the waltz), I'd be immediately advised that it was 'too much vibrato' and that it should be more controlled, more thin, etc...so I'm not sure if that's a performance practice thing because people are going back a bit to thinking of the waltz as written in a style hearkening back to 'early music' and so should sound a bit more 'pure' in a Mozartean way, so aka- less vibrato- still vibrato- but just not so wide. I'd also be told that the 'lft' at the end of "ach, helft" should be able to be heard- unlike here where you can't hear it hardly at all when she does it.
You can also hear if you listen closely on her "du, du, du' that she doesn't set them up correctly support-wise (they should feel as if they're building upon the momentum of the previous one and not just sitting there- they need forward motion) because at the end of that phrase on "gehen" you can tell she's slightly out of breath- and that doesn't have to be the case there if you manage the 'du's' differently.
There's also a different way of thinking about the singing of the phrase immediately after "ja! du wirst der tochter retter sein"- there's large intervals upward on "du wirst" and she just lets them kinda plop out, but you can sing them so that they're connected in a more graceful way with better legato and I think that the direction of the musical phrase speaks better- and I've been told this by countless coaches and teachers too. At the "und werde ich dich als Sieger sehen, so sei sie dann auf ewig sein"- you can hear that she's vocally 'placing' every note and not letting her ear lead her voice there and I find it a bit bumpy-sounding. It could be clearer there with better legato. Not to mention, that's not a vocally friendly way to sing that passage- especially if you're going to be singing this role a lot- talk about vocal fold wear and tear!
Then starting at the 'so sei sie dann' where it then turns into the coloratura runs- those first words are sung normally- then you hear a bit of an 'ng' thing being done by her vocally-right before the long coloratura run on an 'ah' in the score- which is to prepare her to yodel these next passages- yes, they're yodeled- you can tell it by the way that the notes kind of slur together in the overtones and how it nearly sounds like she's doing a 'g' at the start of some phrases, and also how towards the end of the run in the two sixteenth, one eighth note patterns its clear she's yodeling because her rhythm is off but she can't do anything about it because she's in the 'yodel'- and to change the rhythm she'd have to break out of that type of vocal production which would break her line (not a yodel expert but maybe someone is who can explain this technically better than I?) she instead sings something that sounds like swung triplets- which I think most conductors nowadays would kill her for- I've sung them even the slightest bit unevenly simply because they're really hard (lol) and yikes---the response wasn't pretty. From the 'ewig dein. Auf ewig dein, auf ewig dein.' she's singing normally again technique-wise. In case you need a comparison to fully believe the yodeling supposition on my part, here's two videos to check out: (the second one at 1:03-1:04 sounds especially like the Deutekom 'O zittre nicht' at 4:15-4:17)
So, to sum up, there are some things that I disagree with that she does only because I think they're not actually the most healthy choices for her voice and that the healthier choices technique-wise would also sound prettier, but overall you've got to give the woman credit. She's making it work and she's got a great high F (which is possibly all most people in the audience care about, lol) and so yeah....I hope this explanation helps those of you who aren't Coloraturas and or haven't ever worked on or sung this piece. It's surprising how different performance practice is today from when she sung- and she was discovered and championed by none other than Elisabeth Schwarzkopf- so it's pretty fascinating how many things have changed since then- since the advent of technology helping us learn more about our vocal production, to changes in taste in terms of performance practice...it's a whole different world nowadays.
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