I might point in this connection, did modesty permit it, to what people have been good enough to say concerning my own treatment of coloratura in “La Traviata” and elsewhere. I recall that when I first appeared in London it was upon this point particularly that all my critics dwelt.
They were all more especially struck by the manner in which I managed, while singing Verdi’s florid music brilliantly and effectively in the purely vocal sense, at the same time to make it expressive; and this I took as the greatest possible compliment which could be bestowed on me. For that I think is what coloratura properly sung should be.
It should please the ear by its brilliance, but at the same time it should not, and need not, obscure the dramatic significance of what is sung. I might on this point quote that great artist once again, Lilli Lehmann, who, notwithstanding her strong leaning to music of the more serious class, including Wagner, in which she was so wonderful, was yet a great coloratura singer herself in her younger days, and who has strongly insisted upon the possibility of making even the most florid music expressive also when it is sung in the right way.
She writes: “Thus in the coloratura passages of Mozart’s arias I have always sought to gain expressiveness by crescendi, choice of significant points for breathing, and breaking off of phrases. I have been especially successful with this in the ‘Entführung,’ introducing a tone of lament in the first aria, a heroic dignity into the second, through the coloratura passages.”
But happily I do not think there is any likelihood of coloratura ever going out of fashion, whatever its detractors may say, so long, at all events, as singers shall be forthcoming who are capable of responding to its demands.
Chapter XIX
ENUNCIATION
AFTER the fundamental problems of breathing, tone production and so forth have been dealt with, there is nothing to which the student should pay greater attention than the question of diction, or right enunciation. Yet I am afraid it is rare to find that this view of the matter is acted upon. On the contrary, this question of diction appears to be one of the last to which most singers are disposed to give any serious attention.
Hence the unintelligible sounds which are so often heard proceeding from vocalists, alike in the concert room and on the stage, so that one sometimes can scarcely tell even in what language they are supposed to be singing.
This is, of course, a deplorable state of affairs, but yet one so well established that in nine cases out of ten it is hardly thought worthy of remark by the average hearer. It is taken as a matter of course, in other words, that only a word or two, here and there, of those sung shall be understood by the audience, and one may listen attentively to an entire opera without having more than a vague idea at the end as to what it was all about.
Yet in the case of certain singers one may understand without difficulty practically every word they sing, the fact being thereby demonstrated that there is not the slightest real necessity for the incredibly slovenly and defective enunciation which is permitted with such surprising and lamentable tolerance by the public at large.