The two principal factors in the technique of singing are vocalisation and articulation, the one referring to music, the other—articulation—to speech, each complementing the other, though I hold that of the two articulation is the more important, since it is not the vowels but the consonants which enable a singer to "bring out the meaning of," i.e., to interpret a word. You may sing the vowel, for instance, of the word "soul" ever so beautifully, it is not until you add the "l" with the same intensity of purpose that the word puts on flesh and blood, as it were, and becomes a living thing. Or take the word "remember." No actor, impersonating, for instance, the ghost of Hamlet's father, could make an impression with the word by dwelling on the vowel "Reme-e-e——," but leaving the vowel quickly and continuing to sound the "m" a good actor could walk almost across the whole stage holding on to that consonant without exaggeration—"Remem-m-m-ber." It is the consonants, as I said before, which convey the meaning of a word, and they should be made the subject of special study. If you wish to interpret you should, in the first place, strive to make yourself understood, and that, with the best vocalisation in the world, you can do only by a mastery of the consonants, i.e., by a perfect articulation. You all know that delicious story of the dear old lady coming home from a village concert, where the hit of the evening had been made by a girl singing, "Wae's me for Prince Charlie." Being asked whether she had enjoyed the concert, she said, "Not very much; I couldn't understand half the people who sang, except one girl who sang a nice funny song." "Do you remember the title?" "No, but she kept on asking 'Where's me fourpence, Charlie?'" This singer evidently had not made a special study of consonants.
In vocalisation, too, there are certain details which often fail to receive, on the part of the singer, the attention which should be paid to them. One of them, and, in my opinion, a very important one, because of its great help towards interpretation, is the colouring of the tone. I have heard many an otherwise good singer whose singing became exceedingly monotonous after a while by reason of a lack of variety in tone-colour, and I remember one lady in particular, the possessor of a beautiful rich contralto voice, from whose singing—had it not been for the words—you could not possibly have told whether what she sang was sad or cheerful. And yet our five vowels A, E, I, O, U being what we may call the primary colours of the voice, a singer should be able, by skilful and judicious mixing of these colours, to produce as many different shades of, let us say, the vowel A as a painter of the colour, say, of red. I have in my long experience of a teacher found it of the utmost value to make a pupil sing even a whole song on nothing but the vowels of the words, with the object of expressing the character of the music by mere vocalisation. We all love that glorious aria in the Messiah, "He was despised." Well, let a student try to convey its sadness, its deeply religious feeling in that way, i.e., without words, by the instrument of the voice alone, and, if after a while she succeeds, she will have taken a very big step toward realising, i.e., toward interpreting, the full beauty of that exquisite blending of words and music. For a thoroughly artistic rendering of emotional songs of that kind or of songs of dramatic character, such as ballads in which the singer has to impersonate character and run up and down the gamut of passion, it is of the greatest importance that the singer should have under perfect control not only his technique, but his feelings too. If your feelings get the better of you before the public, you are apt temporarily, and for physical reasons, to lose the mastery of your technique. There is a story told of the famous American actor, Edwin Booth, whose daughter, his severest critic, always, at his request, had to be in the stage-box where and whenever he acted. On one occasion the play was Victor Hugo's The King's Jester, known to us all from Verdi's Rigoletto. The part of the Jester was considered one of the best of Booth's many fine impersonations. When the harrowing scene came in which the poor man finds the body of his murdered daughter in the sack, Booth on that night for some reason or other was so overcome by the situation that actual tears ran down his cheeks, and he thought he had never acted that scene better or with greater feeling. The first thing his daughter said to him as they met in his dressing-room after the play was, "Were you quite well, father?" "Quite. Why?" "Because that scene with Gilda's body never made so little impression on me and on the people, as far as I could see."
And naturally. When you lose control of yourself you must not expect to be able to control your audience.
On the other hand, there was a great singer, Wilhelmina Schroeder-Devrient, the greatest exponent of the part of Leonora in Beethoven's Fidelio. In that wonderful scene in the underground prison when, disguised as the jailor's boy, and unrecognised by her unfortunate husband, the chained prisoner Florestan, she hands the starving man a crust of bread, singing to Beethoven's touchingly appealing notes, and in a voice choked with emotion, "There, take this bread, thou poor, poor man," that great singer was often known to actually crack a little aside joke with old Rocco, the jailor, whilst the front of the house was in tears. That is what I call art. Very likely she had cried herself many a time over that same scene when studying it.
Of course the actor—and by that I mean the operatic-singer as well—has a not inconsiderable advantage over the concert-singer, in that he possesses in facial expression and gesture two additional aids to interpretation, both important and powerful. I say two, although facial expression is available to the concert-singer as well, but whilst that and gesture form an essential part in the training of the actor, facial expression is hardly ever systematically studied by the singer of songs who, in this respect, is left to his own resources with often rather curious results. I have listened to many a singer—I am sorry to say mostly of the fair sex—who, very likely for fear of making grimaces, maintained throughout a whole song, and heedless of the varying moods and sentiments expressed in it, a sickly, inane, apologetic sort of a smile, whilst, on the other hand, I remember hearing a famous singer who, in Schubert's great song, Der Doppelgänger, allowed his features already during the short prelude to the song to assume a most ghastly expression of pain and terror which, quite apart from such a proceeding being apt to have the opposite effect, was in this case quite the wrong thing to do, for the opening of the song is merely a sad recollection, on the part of the unfortunate lover, of happier times when his beloved was still inhabiting the house he is passing. "The night is still, the streets are silent, 'twas in this house my true love lived." The tragedy and horror only commence with "There too stands a man and gazes up on high, and wrings his hands in agony of pain," reaching the climax with the words, "I shudder when I behold his face, the moon reveals to me my own image." But when this climax came it was robbed of much of its impressiveness by the singer having anticipated it. He evidently took it for granted that his listeners knew Heine's poem and Schubert's song, or had made themselves acquainted with the words beforehand by looking into the book of words. That is a great mistake. You should always sing as if the song you are interpreting had never been known or sung before, and you were the first to make it public. Every one of you, I am sure, has at one time or other told a little fairy-story to a child. You know how deliberately such a story should be told, how distinctly the pronunciation of every syllable, every consonant, in order that the little ones may grasp the meaning of what you are saying the very moment you are saying it, so as not to lose the thread of the tale, to break the spell. Well, that's the way you should sing. Even if you know that what you are singing is the most well-known, popular, hackneyed thing, always imagine one person in your audience—sitting in the very last row—to whom it is something absolutely new, and that imaginary person should be the child to whom you are telling a story. So you see all these little details have to be thought out. The singer should even be careful in the selection of his songs. (When I speak of "him" and "his" I, of course, mean "her" and "hers" as well.) The greater the singer's art the more will he be able to force his hearers into forgetfulness of a possible discrepancy between, for instance, his personal appearance and the sentiment or character he is endeavouring to represent. But here, too, some discretion should be exercised. A lady, for instance, weighing fourteen stone and a half should not, as I have heard one do, put the audience's capacity for self-control to too severe a test by singing baby-songs like, "Put me in my little bed, mother," or "If nobody ever marries me and I don't know why he should." Yes, even the time of day, and the scene and the occasion should find a place among the questions to be considered by a singer when choosing a song for performance, as under circumstances the best interpretation may not only fail to be appreciated, but even produce an effect utterly unlooked for.
It was many years ago, two or three nights after Gilbert and Sullivan's incomparable Mikado had been launched on its triumphal career at the Savoy, that there was a big evening party at Sullivan's flat, to have the honour of meeting the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Edinburgh. An excellent little programme of music had been gone through, and just after midnight, supper being over, the whole party once more repaired to the drawing-room for some jollier things. Nearly all the principal singers from the Savoy had come over in their Mikado costumes and, with the composer at the piano, delighted the guests with excerpts like "Three little Maids from School" and "The flowers that bloom in the Spring, tra-la," doubly fascinating then on account of the novelty of the thing.
Everybody, and none the least so the two Royal guests, who occupied two armchairs in front, with the programme in their hands, enjoyed the entertainment to the utmost, and the fun was at its height when one of the guests, a celebrated contralto, famous for her rendering of ballads—I mean the style of ballads in vogue thirty-five years ago—was asked if she wouldn't sing one of them. She, of course, readily consented, solemnly mounted the little platform, and there was a hush as she stood there, motionless like a statue, her face expressing a seriousness so strangely in contrast with the mirth and laughter that had pervaded the room but a few minutes before, that I noticed the two Royal programmes being brought somewhat nearer the Royal faces. Then the accompanist struck the first chords of the introduction and—could we really believe our ears?—the lady began to sing—you'll never guess—"The Three Fishers!" Higher and higher up went the Royal programmes, a dead silence reigned in the room until it came to the "Three Corpses," when, little by little, small noises like half-suppressed sneezes or sobs could be heard here and there, increasing in frequency and volume, and when it came to the refrain—it was now a little after 1 a.m.—"The sooner it's over the sooner to sleep," the last "moa-oa-oa-ning" was drowned in a vociferous applause of a character such as I am sure that ballad had never before evoked.
And now I should like to mention another factor in the rendering of music, the importance of which is often underrated, and that is the tempo. Good music, I have found, not only does not lose but rather gains by the tempo, whatever it might be, being taken with deliberation. There are degrees in any designation of time, and one is apt to forget that the Italian words in common for that purpose may refer, not only to the metronomic measure, but also to the character, the mood of a piece. Allegro means lively. But there are degrees of liveliness. An elephant may be lively, but I take his liveliness to be of a somewhat different kind from that, for instance, of the frisky little chap whose antics are so deliciously and humorously described in Goethe and Berlioz's immortal "Song of the Flea" in Faust. I remember once hearing Schubert's Erlking taken at such a break-neck speed that I wondered both father and child were not killed before the end of the first stanza. It reminded me of a rather amusing series of telegraphic versions of celebrated poems, which many years ago appeared in the Fliegende Blätter—the Continental Punch—and of which that of the Erlking might be rendered in English by something like this: "Night wild—Father and child—Ride through the dark—Erlking out for a lark—Boy frightened—Father's grip tightened—Father, ride on—Yes, my son—Reach home in fear and dread—Father alive, child dead."
When we recall the definition of the word Interpretation as it refers to music and poetry, viz., Rendering by artistic representation or performance, we shall find that that little qualification "artistic" makes all the difference in the world, inasmuch as it clearly shows that a mere representation or performance may not necessarily be an interpretation and that it requires an artist to make it such. And it follows that there must be any amount of variety in the interpretation of one and the same thing. An old Latin proverb says: "Duo si faciunt idem, non est idem." When two people do the same thing, it isn't the same thing. Well, if that be true in any undertaking, how infinitely great must be the possibility of such variety when the two people of the proverb are artists! For though we speak of the artistic temperament as if it were something absolute and definable, we know in how many different ways such a temperament may manifest itself.
There are no two painters who, put before the same landscape, would paint it, i.e., interpret it, in the same way. Neither, I maintain, are there two actors who would interpret Hamlet, or two singers who would sing the same song exactly alike. They each have, when they have attained maturity, their own style, and style, as an eminent painter of the last century has admirably expressed it, is the leaving out of everything superfluous, a definition which fits our subject equally well. No two artists will think the same thing superfluous; indeed, what the one considers so, the other may deem essential. Here, too, the actor—to come back to poetry and music—is better off than the musician. He has a far greater scope, i.e., a far wider outlet for his imagination. He is given the words to do what he likes with. One actor—to keep to Hamlet—might after long study have come to the conclusion that, for instance, the last lines of that fine monologue at the end of the second act should be triumphantly exclaimed in a loud voice: