I believe that things happen for a reason. Although this tenor started trying to answer the question Hal David asks Alfie long before he wrote his lyrics, I haven’t found all the answers. I expect Alfie and the rest of humanity to come up short in their ability to consider all things and give a perfect summation. I wish we could all agree that we suffer this limitation, but that is not our lot in life, and I know that there are only a few who share my first statement of faith. To say: “Things happen for a reason.” is to say that meaning exists. Heady stuff for a tenor, don’t you think?
OK, since a tenor would certainly risk a migraine by trying to understand everything, I’ll save myself that pain in the brain by dialing back my focus to my last couple of days inhabiting the above location: Latitude: 44.718231 and Longitude: -73.403633.
It was only a few days ago that I made my first reference to the above page on the internet and added a few comments to the following page:
The text is a little hard to read in the image above, so here it is again, if you don’t want to visit that page to be able to read it:
On these pages we have an extended analysis of the phenomena Falsetto and Chest Voice as they were understood before Garcia came along to add to this discussion the conclusions he derived from his own research. There is a really important facet to this “preamble” to Garcia’s method. Falsetto and Chest Voice were very well recognized as distinct vocal products. There was no consensus as to their mechanical production, but no one had to be instructed in how to recognize these phenomena. Sadly, I see confusion everywhere today.
When I completed these chores, I started cleaning up my email and tripped over the following missive. I keep the identity of my correspondent and his location anonymous with fantasy names.
Dear Maestro Blake,
I’m the younger tenor of “Twilight Zone”. I write to you in order to inform you about my situation and conditions. With my teacher I’m studying Dalla sua pace and I confess I have some problems. At first the teacher told me that I must study the aria “with ‘voce piena’ because today even lyric tenors not only leggero tenors sing Don Ottavio”. So I sing with “voce piena”, but, altough I succeed in singing the first two G, when I’m singing “quel che le incre-E-SCE”, when I should sing F, I find this passage very difficult. The throat closes by itself. I don’t know what I should do. I remember your advices in “TwiliteZone”, I remember you spoke about falsetto and I read on your site that you say about falsetto in relation to Una furtive lagrima. Falsetto is very very important, so I don’t understand why my teacher forbids me to use it. He says “With falsetto singing, orchestra covers you”. I cannot believe it and all people who would like to teach me to sing tell me the same thing. So, according to them, is better that I sing like a slaughtered capon; and according to them, I cannot lower the tone because “in theater never could you make this [singing in falsetto] because the conductor wants the right tone”. I’m desperate. I run away from this people and still do not have a teacher. I would like to come in “MasterClassVille”, but it’s impossible to me. I hope to find a real teacher as soon as possible. According to you, what should I do?
Thanks!
“Ottaviohopeful”
I answered this email a long time ago, but here it was again screaming at me to answer it,,, again. Everything conspired to suggest this blog. There is a reason things happen and the best answer I can muster to this young man’s email I will put in full view of anyone who wants to know what this argument is all about. I know, I know, no tenor can know all that there is to know about anything, but this website is about this tenor presenting the content of his mind, and what’s contained between my ears will certainly not tax the internet’s storage capacity.
Composers of the ancient past often had to improvise when they faced unfortunate cast members. Rossini cut the tenor aria in the first act of SEMIRAMIDE when he got to know John Sinclair, his first Idreno.
Rossini took his self-editing activities as protector of the Venetian public so seriously in 1823 that he chopped Mr. Sinclair’s second aria roughly in half and revised and reduced the number and difficulty of the notes the audience would be forced to hear from this English singer. By the time Rossini finished, what remained of “La Speranza Più Soave” was only slightly more difficult than Mozart’s “Dalla sua pace”.
Pragmatism is a necessary attitude for anyone hoping to make a career in “The Arts” and Rossini seemed well supplied.
Unlike Rossini’s experience with writing and producing SEMIRAMIDE, Mozart knew the voice of his first Don Ottavio before he composed DON GIOVANNI, and he wrote “Il mio Tesoro” for Antonio Baglioni for the Prague premier.
When Mozart got to Vienna for the first revival of his Opera, he found Francesco Morella in the tenor role. Oops,,, this one needed a new aria. I happen to like the Mozart way of accommodating a less than consummately capable tenor, because, as a result, we tenors of the future, like me, receive more music with which to work. The following is my rendition without the distortion I found in the previous embed I used:
If you have the liberty to be a complete artist, singing “Dalla sua pace” is only slightly more difficult than falling off a log. It becomes a complex conundrum when your professor instructs you to sing it without recourse to Falsetto.
Here is an Italian using more Falsetto than Chest Voice:
Here we have an Italian using more Chest Voice than Falsetto:
Here is an Englishman intermixing Lots of Falsetto with occasional Chest Voice insertions.
Here is a Canadian playing the same game as our Britisher with a lot better control:
A tenor from Peru does a good job of it too:
All in all, Falsetto is not missing from these performances and should be used to build an interpretation. It should not be a refuge from vocal challenges. In only one of the above examples does a singer seem to use Falsetto as a way to overcome apparent vocal difficulty. You figure that one out.
I’ll be back next week with the nuts and bolts advice for my email correspondent.