CHAPTER XVIII

COLORATURA SINGING

I suppose there is no question which I am more frequently asked by vocal students and others interested than how to acquire agility, but I am afraid my answer is usually disappointing. For I can only repeat that it is simply a case of perseverance and hard work, plus, of course, whatever natural abilities in that direction you may possess.

It is obvious that all singers are not equally endowed in this respect. The mere fact that there is such a difference in this matter between the various classes of voices is sufficient to prove that. No one ever expects a contralto voice to have the same facility in this regard as a light soprano, and still less a bass or a baritone.

The most unceasing practice would never have enabled an Alboni or a Lablache, say, to achieve the dazzling runs and fioriture of a Patti or a Catalani. And to a less marked degree there are similar differences between individual voices of the same class. All are not equally capable in this particular even when in other respects they may be equally good.

Some experienced teachers indeed recognise this fact so clearly that they do not advise even soprano singers to cultivate coloratura singing unless they have the necessary natural facility to begin with. I think myself, however, that all should endeavour to acquire the maximum agility, even if they do not attempt to sing coloratura in public, simply for the benefits which they will derive from it in other respects. After all the voice cannot be possessed of too much flexibility whatever style of music be attempted; and there is no way in which flexibility can be more surely developed than by the practice of coloratura.

For the rest I can only repeat that, given the right kind of voice in the first place, there is only one way to acquire agility, and that is by practice. No short cuts are possible here, and I have no trade secrets to impart.

And the necessary exercises themselves are all of the simplest character, at all events in the beginning; just simple scales--or rather portions of scales--in the first instance, with others more elaborate in due course. But the scales are the foundation, and if they are properly mastered the rest will follow without difficulty.

An important feature of good coloratura singing is, of course, not only that the notes shall be cleanly sung, but also that they shall be absolutely in tune and of good tone quality. One not infrequently hears singers who possess the necessary agility to sing the note, but are lacking in these other qualities. Their runs will lack brilliancy because the notes will not be perfectly in tune, and the quality of them will be so hard and disagreeable sometimes as to give more pain than pleasure.

The cause of this will usually have been a desire to make progress too hastily in the earlier stages. They will not have devoted sufficient attention at the outset to practising _slowly_, and so ensuring absolutely just intonation and satisfactory tone quality. Therefore, it is emphatically a case here of “more haste less speed.” You cannot acquire velocity quickly. I will not repeat again the well-worn story of Porpora and Caffarelli. But that illustrates the point.

I cannot refrain from adding a few words while on this subject in defence of coloratura, which is so often contemptuously spoken of in these days by those who do not possess the power of singing it. We all know the kind of way in which it is referred to. Coloratura music is false, showy, superficial, unworthy, dramatically unreal, and so on. But what nonsense this is!

What is the difference in principle, I would ask, between the fioriture passages of the vocalist and those introduced as a matter of course in the most serious instrumental music? Why should a cadenza for the voice be reckoned less worthy than a similar passage for the violin or the ’cello? All the greatest masters have introduced florid passages in plenty in the noblest instrumental music. Yet the view is very generally adopted that these are inadmissible, or, at all events, belong to an inferior phase of the art when the instrument employed happens to be the voice.

No doubt the quality of the works more particularly identified with vocal music of this order has had something to do with the matter. Yet it is hardly necessary to recall that vocal fioriture is by no means confined to the music of Donizetti, Bellini, and the like.

Bach, for one, had no sort of prejudice on the point, as is demonstrated often enough even in his most solemn work, while Handel, again, revelled in coloratura, alike in the case of his operas, containing some of the most wonderful florid music ever written, and of his oratorios, to which no less applied.

That Mozart can be reckoned in the same category it is hardly necessary to recall, while even Beethoven did not disdain to utilise the arts of vocal decoration in many of the numbers of “Fidelio.” If, therefore, coloratura singing is sometimes spoken of disrespectfully, it is not from lack of distinguished names which can be cited in its defence.

Nor is it only among the ancients that such are to be found. In the modern Russian School we have Rimsky-Kosakoff’s “Hymn to the Sun” from “Coq d’Or.” And have we not also such an eminently serious master as Richard Strauss challenging comparison in our own time with the most extravagant productions of the past in this particular genre in the music of Zerbinetta in his “Ariadne”? One of his latest songs, “Amor,” is purely for coloratura singers.

As to the charge that coloratura in dramatic music is unnatural and undramatic, those who argue thus surely overlook the fact that all opera might with equal justice be disposed of in the same manner. People do not express themselves in song in real life, any more than they speak in blank verse, as they are made to do in Shakespearean drama.

Yet we are glad to have “Don Giovanni” and “King Lear” none the less! It is, indeed, truly straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel to condemn coloratura while accepting opera as a whole.

I go further than this, for I venture to say that coloratura can be not only delightful to the ear but also thoroughly appropriate and dramatically expressive. What could be more suitable to give expression to the madness of Lucia than the roulades which Donizetti gives to her? Or how could the joy of Marguérite be more exquisitely expressed than in the strains of Gounod’s “Jewel Song”?

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.