Ballads do not always require power or compass of voice, it is true, nor do they tax the singer on the score of flexibility or physical strength; but they are the severest test of enunciation, mezzo-voce singing, neatness and readiness in producing tones of any gradation, and perfect control over the voice.
To sing a ballad well demands a really cultivated taste, a certain dramatic power, suppressed it is true, but influencing the whole delivery; a sympathetic voice, and a manner which will enlist the interest and sympathy of the audience. Ballad singing is neither declamation nor recitative: there is no chance of surprising or astonishing your audience; but you must contrive to please them, you must touch them somehow; and, for an ordinary person in the costume of the nineteenth century, to "touch" others of the same species is not easy. Sometimes, no doubt, the words of a good song are in themselves so touching and charming that, so long as the music be not positively hideous or destructive of the sense of the words, the singer has only to let them be clearly heard, and the battle is won; but more frequently he has to trick his audience into interest in a song where the words in themselves are either hopelessly silly, or too obscure in sense for their full meaning to appear at a first hearing or reading. All that he can then do is to deliver it in such a way that they shall feel that there is a meaning to it all, though they have not fully caught it yet, and so they may wish to hear it again. I do not, of course, mean any allusion to the ridiculous fashion of encores, but simply that the feeling at the end of such a song should be one of liking it sufficiently to wish to understand it entirely.
Many songs would tell their own tale and produce their own effect well enough, if the singer would let them, and therefore the ballad singer must only be sufficiently self-conscious to keep himself out of the way. However good his singing, however original his reading of the song, while he is singing it should all go to the credit of the song, and the hearers be charmed into forgetting him till he is silent.
Recitative.—Good recitative singing is of great importance, and requires careful attention and study. Recitative is midway between speaking and singing; it is a sort of modulated intoning, that is, that in delivering it the note and the word that belongs to it should be given with equal intention, and appear to belong to each other so completely that the musical sound should seem to be the natural intonation which the reciter would give to the word. Recitative is (or was) practically an attempt to express, in musical notation, the inflexions of the human voice in speaking; and how accurately, in some cases, musical notation can do this, will be seen at a glance by the following illustration:
Who are you?
Who are you?