Ladies First
This is my way. It’s just,, like,,, I mean,,,,,, so yesterday to let the girl go first and open the door for her as well, but the young will have to forgive me for being so invested in yesterday as the deepest well of knowledge and wisdom concerning all things human. I really am “Old Hat” on principles…… You know those antecedents, preconceptions, pre-determinants, pre-considerations, presuppositions. The old guard had a chance to analyze how things worked and many grey haired successful types managed to write down the lessons they learned. In the case of the Garcia family, it was the second generation who best recorded those life lessons, and Garcia Jr. added a great deal of value to his father’s wisdom. Blocked/Liberated from the pursuit of an active singing career, he brought his special gift, a sharp analytical mind, to bear on the vocal and artistic wisdom he inherited from his father.
Garcia’s writings are my special wisdom well, so let me pull up today’s pail of understanding and guide “Jenny Lind” on a different approach to her project. I hope she doesn’t think me sexist for putting her first, and I really hope she doesn’t. I want to help her singing, but, if she gets offended, her political sensibilities will probably make her immune to this tenor’s arguments. That would be a shame.
Now you all know that Jenny is not her real name. She knows who she is, and her identity is hers to keep secret or reveal. Just to remind everyone, she gave me a starting point with this statement:
My current teacher, Dr. *******, has been having me work to bring the low, settled larynx position into the higher notes, and not strain for them.
I didn’t include:
Dr. ************ always tells me to bring the high position into the low, so she would agree with you completely.
These statements are in response to an Email I received in which I catalogued some specific and general thoughts on Jenny’s voice and singing. I suggested that her category is soprano, not mezzo soprano. She is currently preparing mezzo soprano repertoire, which, given the quality of instrument with which she is gifted, could be a comfortable home for her working life.
Now, Jenny (we all know it’s not your name), there are two problems with living in one category lower than the category of the gift you received in your mother’s womb.
The native timbre of your sound is going to be too light for the more dramatic mezzo stuff and even a bit light for the lyric stuff, especially so in the face of today’s apparent ideals. This is the case for you.
The regimen your instructors are going to impose on your voice will be contradictory. This is the case with the two examples of advice you have received from your instructors.
I have heard thousands of ways to say “Darken that thin sound of yours; pull your larynx down and open your throat!” Many variants of this were directed toward me by a few well-meaning people and many more emanated from a few less ethical individuals who populated my path through the singing life. I have collected even more examples from overheard conversations and stories told by singers and by frustrated students. Your particular variant is a nice PC version. The word “settled” would seem to suggest that an outside agency, like gravity, is accomplishing the pull, or that a successful attempt to use this advice would require the larynx to enter into some sort of consensus with the professor and the singer who’s making the attempt to ascend to the highest notes of her voice. The “low” position for your larynx seems to already be a “settled” issue for your middle voice. Your audition in LA showed me that it is so. You sang in the center of your voice with ease and a “warm” color. That’s a PC way to say you are using Dark Timbre which includes, in your case, a lowered larynx. That low position stands as an impediment to finding your way happily to the top of your voice. The fact of where your larynx is located at the beginning of your assent is not, in itself, an impediment, but the project to maintain the laryngeal position while seeking to sing ever higher notes is just too big a project for your voice to complete successfully in Rossini’s music. This was the most noted deficiency in your singing. That it was probably appreciated differently by each of us on the judging panel is something I expect in any group of Voice enthusiasts, but it entered our ears and we all noticed.
As your voice followed Rossini’s notes, it did a great job of decorating all that landed in the middle voice and a good work of it in the lower parts. The decoration began to mutate as Rossini’s notes guided you higher and higher on the scale. It is not inevitable, but common to humans, that the vocal chords struggle – and ultimately fail to maintain “normal” function in the face of the extra work imposed upon them – by holding the larynx in place or lowering it while ascending the musical scale. I noticed that, as your voice rose to the highest flights of Rossini roulades, you eschewed Head Voice function where it should have begun and kept Falsetto going as Rossini took you very high into your Head Register. This is often forgiven by everyone when a singer is interpreting some other composer’s music, but Rossini is one of the worst on the list of the unforgiving. First he insists on uncovering a singer’s deficiencies and then leaves no place to hide. The rest of us unforgiving types get all tangled up in linguistics just trying to describe what went wrong for the singer caught out by Rossini’s music. Some just default to “Rossini is just too hard.” My short analysis is that your voice finally and suddenly shifted gears from Falsetto to Head Voice at the highest notes you sang for us in LA, and your instrument gave up the laryngeal stasis project about one or two notes below those really high notes. The resulting timbre change was and is “unforgivable”. As absolute values, they were not very pretty. As for what you should do about them, you will get conflicting advice. Your quotes are from two professors who stand in opposition to one another.
Your “bring high to low” professor is giving you good advice. The unfortunate quality of your highest notes is the direct result of excessive Dark Timber use in your upper register. Lowering the larynx is only one component of Dark Timber application to the voice. When you venture out of your middle register into your head register you try to match the “warm” character of the sound you attain in the middle, and you cannot. Other singers may be able to do it, but not you. You must allow your instrument to adjust to its needed clarity for attaining “Head Voice Function” in your head register much earlier. This is especially true when singing those roulades surmounted with challengingly high top notes.
I know that your “settled larynx” professor would most likely disagree with me, as well as with your “high to low” professor if the “high to low” statement is correctly understood. My specific advice to you is to try to use arpeggio exercises to find the most beautiful and effortless high notes your voice will deliver, and use them as the pattern for every high note you ask your voice to produce. Then bring that quality down with you as you descend the scale to your middle register. If you insist on maintaining that “warm” color in your middle voice, please be content to reapply it somewhere between F and D. Let it live in your middle voice and forget about taking it to high Q.
Think of Federica Von Stade and her manner of register negotiation. She presents the pattern of how you should find your way to the top of your voice.
I have other thoughts about traveling into your lower register, but I’m way over my word limit.
Read MoreAdvice for the Young
I’m getting my work done. I have a mission and it looms over everything I do, but no one can “Tote that barge” until barges cease to be, or “lift that bail” until no bail shall be left to lift. It is a special work for me; editing this Garcia book. I started out reading Donald Paschke’s translation with a tenor attitude. You know,,,, I couldn’t really understand how it was important and if people were handing me contracts all the time, what good was that dead white guy going to do me anyway? Now I’m older and totally in love with Paschke’s brilliant idea. By sifting together two different editions of Garcia’s “Method” he allows the reader to discover for him/her-self some very subtle secrets that are becoming even more fascinating for me as I approach the end…. Not my end, I hope,,,, but the end of my first edit of the first book.
“Barge and Bail” Song
Paul Robeson had a great voice, didn’t he?
As important as I know it is to make Garcia’s writings available to young singers, I just had to drop the “Tote” rope and break away from my stack of editing “bails” to jump on an opportunity to be useful to two singers who asked for my advice. I hope helping them in plain view may also be helpful to you.
What fun it is to have a request coming from Sweden. Jenny Lind left Sweden looking for Garcia’s help, and in Paris he put her singing back on track. The results are historic. Well, another Swede, Petter Reingardt, is seeking my advice. I hope I can make Garcia as helpful to this tenor as the Grand Maestro was to that stellar soprano who started her life in Petter’s neighborhood.
The tipping point to distraction from my present “barge” and “bails” landed in my Email as a response to a letter I sent to everyone I recently heard in LA. I was there to audition singers for the Palm Springs Opera Guild Rossini Award. One of the respondents asked me to cover the same program about which the Swedish tenor was asking advice. I just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to make a blog of my answer. Besides, pulling “barges” and handling “bails” are kind of heavy work for tenors anyway.
Some time ago I asked Petter if I could blog my answers to his questions, and he graciously accepted to be outed as a singer seeking help. My correspondent from the Palm Springs Opera Guild Rossini Award auditions may not want to be publicly exposed, and, since I didn’t ask, her name is changed to protect the innocent.
Petter Reingardt:
3. I feel that my voice is quite small but high and light. I’m searching for that dark timbre you have by breathing low, relaxing jaw and throat, and keeping the larynx in a lower position. Now I wonder: have you ever felt that your voice is not big enough? If you did; how did you solve this problem?
Jenny Lind (pseudonym):
My current teacher, Dr. *******, has been having me work to bring the low, settled larynx position into the higher notes, and not strain for them.
Mr. Reingardt could be doing his own thing, but my soprano friend has a teacher telling her to adopt the same project. They use different words and describe different motivations, but the project is the same, and it is totally upside down. According to Garcia, the larynx has no “settled’ level. Garcia asserted and demonstrated to The Academy of Science in France on April 12, 1841, that the larynx has two different mannerisms that are relevant to our discussion. They have nothing to do with attaining a particular size of voice or high note decoration. The larynx moves for many reasons that fall mostly within the category of Timbre application to the voice.
Picking out the position of the larynx as the key feature of the vocal instrument and focusing on maneuvering it to a lower than normal position as a general principle regulating “size” of voice or vocal “beauty” in singing is like deciding to concentrate on the position of the elbows as one takes on the hurdles. I think the modern vocal pedagogical statement can be phrased: If the larynx “settles”, or, better stated, is pulled into a lower position, the singing will improve.
Team USA 400 meter hurdle runner, Georganne Moline, practices on Wednesday, August 1, 2012.
It is no less folly for a Track and Field coach to suggest that if a runner manages to pull the elbows as far back as possible while running the hurdles, he/she will have lower times and fewer downed barriers.
Garcia demonstrated to the Academy the mobility of the larynx in his students while they sang in Clear Timbre and the “fixed” position of the larynx while they sang in Dark Timbre. Today we are faced with acceptance of a very wrong idea. It seems that many think the human voice to be capable of being anything its owner or the teacher in charge wants it to be, and the larynx is the principle tool for building the voice desired. It would seem that my friends are working from the hypothesis that the larynx is in some way an obstacle to attaining the results they or their teachers would like to hear. My soprano friend wants better high notes and Mr. Reingardt wants a bigger sound.
The descriptions that Garcia employs for explaining what happens to the various parts of the vocal apparatus are always post performance discussions. He is describing what can be observed while a person makes a vocal effect. That is to say, one must first attain the effect, and then one can discuss what happened as the individual made the vocal effect.
There are a lot of unrevealed assumptions that Garcia terms “Secrets” and in Philosophical circles the term “presuppositions” would be applicable. They lurk between many lines of Garcia’s writings. I find almost all of them related to a consensus existent during the many days of Garcia’s life. I am talking about a consensus that existed between Garcia, other vocal maestri, critics reporting on the musical doings in their region as well as the majority of the audience Garcia would join when he would attend performances. When Garcia would sit to hear great singers ply their trade on the stage, Garcia and his fellow audience members would enthusiastically applauded and bravo their work according to the satisfaction these singers would provide, and critics wrote of these events with a level of understanding I believe no longer exists. If the singer happened to be a student of Garcia, his pedagogical competition might have curbed their enthusiasm for partisan reasons, but even they would have agreed on one assumption. The great singer they heard had a great gift, and what that gift consisted of was recognized by just about everyone who would applaud. Consensus was there, and a singer of Jenny Lind’s caliber could attain the same level of fame in the Mechanical Age as Luciano Pavarotti did in our Age of Hyper Media.
So, what is my advice? Don’t lower your larynx to make your sound larger, and don’t expect the lowered larynx to make your high notes more beautiful. Laryngeal position management has nothing to do with attaining the best display of a singer’s gift. The larynx moves about as a participating component of the vocal instrument that attains an endless list of vocal effects. The beauty of one’s high notes and ultimate greatness of the individual gift is independent of such technical considerations. Garcia tells us teachers to seek out these gifts:
Often one needs an experienced judgment to recognize in the voice of the student the germ of the true qualities which it possesses.
And then he speaks of the first job of a teacher:
Generally, these qualities are only in the rudimentary state, or well veiled by numerous faults from which it is necessary to free them.
The essential point is to first establish the existence of them; one then manages to complete the development of them by patient and orderly studies.
Voices in their natural states are nearly always unpolished, unequal, unsteady, even tremulous, and, finally, heavy and of short range; only study, but a well-informed and persistent study, can make firm the intonation, purify the timbres, perfect the intensity and the elasticity of the tone. Through study, one can smooth the harsh-nesses, the disparities of the registers, and by uniting them to each other, one can extend the scope of the voice. Study will make us acquire agility, a quality generally too much neglected, especially in Italy. It is necessary to submit to rigorous exercise not only the stubborn organs, but also those which, drawn along by a dangerous facility, cannot control their movements. That apparent flexibility is connected to lack of clarity, steadiness, balance, and breadth; that-is-to-say, to the absence of all the elements of accent and style.
The above text is on page 3 of the book I am about to finish editing. I’ll be back to tell my friends how I think Garcia would advise them further if he were still with us.
While putting this blog together I’ve let a few too many “bails” pile up and that “barge” is drifting away………………….
HEY YOU!!!! LEAVE THAT BARGE ALONE. IT’S MINE.
Read MoreTorino Memories
So I’m back on home ground. I have many reasons to celebrate and want to dedicate this blog to a few of them.
There are so many friends who welcome me home, and a few of them decorate this blog. Everyone passing through my North Country at this time of year is offered a wonderful costume show by my friends and their family members.
It is a short display of glory before they go to bed for the winter. This fleeting beauty is just one of the many local natural adornments that surround me and enrich my life. Happy to show them off, I often remark that this North Country of mine is really God’s country.
Those eight days away from friends and family that I dedicated to playing Johnny Appleseed with Garcia’s wisdom also enriched my life. Unlike the local arboreal color parade, I can’t show you anything without permission, but I can tell the story of three lovely gifts that make me smile every time they come to mind.
When a singer asks for my help, I try to imagine the best possible
future that could be attained by the help seeker. If I can see an accomplished artist as a possible future for the singer, I set to work, using everything I can bring to the task, toward helping the singer to develop into the artist that I can foresee in the future. I am no more able to guarantee an outcome than anyone else, and like every time period in History, ours is interestingly in flux. Who can know of outcomes not yet established?????…… Well,, I do have an answer to that question, but it needs a website of its own.
On the day she arrived, a mezzo soprano, whom I met in a previous Master Class in Rome, planted her feet on the platform and sang two arias on which we had collaborated since our first meeting in Rome. Her performances earned rousing applause. Her singing displayed all the Garcia technique I had introduced to her and her interpretation included every detail of the art I wanted her to master. I asked her where she had
learned to sing those two arias so well and she smiled a big smile and pointed directly at me while mouthing the word “you”. On top of this bang up job of tossing back at me everything I had thrown at her in her lessons, she tossed off NEW things.
The skill and understanding of a great craftsperson is sufficient for delivering everything someone might ask you to do as a singer, but the label “artist” should only be applied to singers who come up with their own successful mix of messages and effects. Paola Cacciatori delivered on all counts this time, and I have great hopes that she will move from “Budding Artist” to “Accomplished Artist” quickly.
My second celebratory Torino story has another gifted soprano at its center. I also met her in that Rome Master Class where I first encountered Ms. Cacciatori.
She came to Torino wanting to prepare arias on which we had never collaborated. She also surprised me and made me smile a lot by taking every Garcia suggestion I tossed at her and turning it to good use. She grabbed every artistic detail and concept I passed on to her as well, garnering good results in her performance. Claudia Alvarez Calderon yanked one of my “Great Crafts Person” labels out of my hand and applied to herself as I applauded her for letting me see our collaboration bear fruit in studio and on stage. This, however, is not the end of the Calderon portion of my Torino story.
I have every hope that Opera is going to survive the present crisis that faces the Arts generally, and it is with that hope that I write these blogs, give voice lessons and run the travel industry gauntlet to play “Johnny Garcia-seed”. Ms. Calderon asked me to endorse her as a teacher of singing. It is with great joy that I do so. When she asked, I told her she was going to have to earn my endorsement, and she earned it both in the studio and on the Master Concert Stage. She knows more than she can yet put into practice as a singer, and what she knows is mountains more than the average voice teacher I keep hearing about in the lamentations of many modern voice students. My endorsement of her as knowledgeable in the craft of singing is of small value. She will have to earn the label “Great Teacher of Singing” by transferring what she knows to others so that they can eventually appropriate the label “Great Crafts Person” for themselves. It is my prayer that Garcia’s banner will be taken up by many students of singing, and, when appropriate, they would take on the mantel of “Johnny or Joanna Garcia-seed”.
If Ms. Calderon finds some students for Garcia’s teachings, I will be waiting to hear some good results.
My third reason to party is a young man. We share a common…. Well, I would say uncommon friend. Alessandro Mormile has been telling me about Pietro Di Bianco for a long time. Sr. Mormile finally brought us together for the Torino Master Class. Pietro has exactly what Garcia tells us to look for. His gift is so exceptional that even the Opera World of today recognizes he has something. I can see for Pietro a future artistic life equal to the lives of the greatest singing artists the World of Opera has ever enjoyed. I hope he will allow me to help him become the artist I know his voice can enable him to become.
With that off my chest, I am back to my homework, which is no less important to my project to see the Operatic Stage populated with exciting singers.
With giving lessons, Garcia translation to do and Christmas coming………. Etc. I expect to be silent until 2016.
Read More
Torino Bound
Summer is starting to cool its heals, and leaf fall is already covering some lawns in my neighborhood. In short order, frost is going to bring my “weeds war” to an end. I’m already planning the day that I’ll have our traction expert change those smooth rolling treads on car and truck for our noisy ice munching studded numbers. They’ve been under wraps since spring rang the bell on our quick bout with short sleeve temperatures. I am happy to foresee the snow that Global Warming seems unable to steal from us, and the redirection of my energy from garden to Garcia. I still have a lot of work to do on Part 1.
I missed doing a master class in Plattsburgh this summer. When my wife and I retired, I believed that living in the North Country would effectively isolate us from the Opera addicted and we could cherish just a few visits from our artistic friends. You know, the ones that happen to be passing our little ‘burgh on their way to somewhere else on Route 87. I was also sure that students of singing would only venture this deep into the woods if they were really serious about asking my help. Well, that isolation worked better than I expected this summer. Preparations were made, thank you Jo Ellen Miano, but interest in visiting us in the woods just wasn’t enough to cover costs. Thanks also to Dr. Karen Becker for making herself available, even if we didn’t get to work together this year.
With weed wars soon to be well behind me, I am looking forward to a Master Class that is, happily for anyone wanting to attend, more convenient for traveling. I’ve been charged with two Master Classes in Torino. The interest of potential participants in the upcoming Master is already greater in Torino than we saw in Plattsburgh. After the press conference scheduled for September 21 that Armando Caruso set for presentation of this year’s activities, see and click on little poster to the right of this text, I hope even more participants will register to participate. Sorry to post an un-translated Italian document, but if you can make the conference, I think you can read it.
For those of you, who don’t dream of becoming stars of stage and screen in the shrinking Opera world but read my blogs anyway, please let me tell you why I think these Master Moments are important. There is no shortage of gifted humans among us on this earth, and I want to help those blessed with the gift of voice. Writing this blog and putting an English translation of Garcia’s books back into print isn’t enough. You may ask: “Enough for whom?” or even “Enough for what?”
I’m glad you asked. Garcia was all about empowering the singer to a high degree of effectiveness with his/her audience. Now that a century has passed since his death, I can see that Garcia’s mission has become a little more complicated. The need for “empowerment” is still with us, but I must add “Audience Expansion” to it. “A.E.” is on the mind of many an arts mogul and opera operative. It has become a subject of “Higher Learning” and a professor of this subject has a clear view of the problem (click to read his latest evidence). I don’t think he and I agree about what is needed to stop the audience shrinkage bothering the Arts, but he can see the problem as well as anyone else. I would say it is just an added component to “Development” (fundraising) as I first discovered it about a third of a century ago. I signed up with an able salesman hired by Houston Grand Opera to “develop” Texas citizens with largish bank accounts. What did I do? I sang for quite a number of lovely ladies and a few handsome fellows in a number of living, meeting and dining rooms. My salesman friend wanted me to help him inspire these well-dressed individuals into donating large sums of money to the benefit of HGO. When I sang for those small groups of happy and successful Texas types, I knew why I was there and did my best to get everyone excited with my singing. I must have been effective enough. Requests to come help out didn’t stop until I was out of town.
If money was pulled from purse, pocket and/or bank account, it wasn’t because of the nobility of the Art of Opera. It was because those open handed cash flush individuals had a good time, and wanted to support a fun art form that was never really profitable. Opera cannot support itself or better yet, it is unsustainable without an excited fan club that can afford it.
News of unsold seats at the bastions of Operatic life make the big, BIG buttons: “DONATE NOW“, “BUY TICKETS“, “SUBSCRIBE“, “GIVE“, “DONATE” and “SUPPORT” quite unsurprising. Unfortunately, just as unsurprisingly we see opera operative elites beginning to view dragging a big bag of cash out the door before the roof falls in as an attractive alternate choice to the rigors of “A.E.”. Click to follow one such story.
The Operatic roof no longer shelters my grey hairs, but I want the roof to stay up. The present and future generations of gifted singers seeking entry into the House of Opera need that roof, and the roof needs them, or it will fall in.
My crusade includes the prayer: “If it be the Lord’s pleasure, may all those relevant buttons on Opera Internet pages be clicked enough to break them.” I believe Garcia has the answer for how to get people to DONATE NOW and BUY TICKETS to the Opera. Garcia offers an un-simple answer, but it is what Opera needs: Gifted and talented singers trained to excite their audiences.
I wrote about Garcia’s first ingredient offered to The Opera World in Factory Made. The relevant quote is:
“Often one needs an experienced judgement (sic) to recognize in the voice of the student the germ of the true qualities which it possesses. Generally, these qualities are only in the rudimentary state, or well veiled by numerous faults from which it is necessary to free them. The essential point is to first establish the existence of them; one then manages to complete the development of them by patient and orderly studies.”
Garcia tells us to discover in the student a voice worth the effort, and then develop that voice. Such developed vocal gifts are Garcia’s first ingredient. The second part of his answer to the question:“How do we develop donations and sell tickets?” is in his second book. In it he tells us how each artist should use his/her fully developed gift with his/her fully functional technique to excite an audience to ecstatic applause. That empowerment to excite is just the ticket to develop donations and ticket sales.
I answer Garcia’s first call to arms in every Master Class. I always discover vocal gifts! Each class gives me a chance to help the owners of these gifts to develop them. When an artist with enough preparation shows up, I can put Garcia’s second book to good use, and teach “Excite your Audience”.
If you want to become a star and you have a gift sufficient to carry you there, the Opera world needs you. I want to find you and I want to help you. Come to Torino.
If you are an Opera lover, and want to see and hear how good singing is key to the survival of Opera, there is room for you.
For the purpose of demonstration, I dust off my vocal chords every day in those classes. Some have lamented about never hearing me sing in the flesh. Well, there’s room for you, too. Come to Torino next month.
Read MoreEmail exchange
I am happy to be home and have my garden somewhere between 10% to 20% weeded. I’m sure the rest of the weeds in my back yard are still comfortably soaking up the fertilizer I intended to feed my flowers, but they should be shaking down to their roots at the prospect that I will get to them in due time. The weather has dropped lots of happy flower making H2O for the roots, topped off occasionally with a magnificent halo of promise for the eyes that can see and appreciate.
As I recovered from my Torino trek, I have wanted to write something about it and my prayers for inspiration were answered in an Email:
—–Original Message—–
From: Michael Papadopoulos
Sent: Tuesday, June 23, 2015 9:18 AM
To: rocky@************************.***
Subject: A note from a fan
Hello, Mr. Blake.
Just a little note to tell you how much I admire you and your voice. I’m a bel canto fan and I was following your career for years. It’s a pity I never heard you live. I think you retired too early! I have heard you in almost all your roles in private recordings. I have the old Mozart and Rossini recital lps and the Dame Blanche cd, but I think that your live recordings show off your amazing coloratura and breath control to better effect. I can’t find your complete Idomeneo. All we have is just the 2 arias on video… You’re pretty amazing in Meyerbeer too, in Robert le diable and Les Huguenots…The current Rossini tenors are fine, but none has your range of colors and unlimited breath resources.
Many thanks for the many hours of pleasure you have given us.
All the best,
Michael
Now I’m just as vulnerable to flattery as the next tenor, but I have a larger view of what it’s all about, and responded to my correspondent with the following:
Dear Michael,
Thanks for your note.
I hope my work will in time raise up a few singers capable of inspiring you to write to them of your admiration.
I have my sights set on even larger targets, but my bottom line is inspiring people like you when you go to the theatre. It was my hope, back in the day when I was still singing, that I might be one among many singers who could inspire people like you to drag your friends to subsequent performances. My dream moments, when I was surrounded by singers who inspired, were few, but magic when they happened. Audiences would stop performances in mid-stream for uncomfortable periods of applause, and sometimes kept us singers and conductor parading back and forth through proscenium curtains held open for us by stage hands dreaming of the wine and cheese that some in the orchestra were already enjoying in bars adjacent to the venues.
I have returned home from a Master Class in Torino, Italy where my efforts were dedicated to this proposition, and the work had a draining effect on me. I seemed to empty myself out in service to the singers who showed up seeking to make their way onto any stage that might allow them a chance to inspire an audience. They did get a tiny open door at a concert that marked the end of the Master Class. An audience of intrepid Opera lovers showed up to see if they would discover any inspirational youngsters.
My drained tank of teaching fuel got a big influx of potential energy from the applause of that audience who came out in the rain to attend our little concert. The post event comments directed toward me that day brought my tank to an even higher level of refill. Your note has brought me to the overflow point.
Many thanks,
Rockwell Blake
I’m going back to Torino in October, and I hope to meet you there if you are on that side of the Atlantic pond or can afford the freight to get there. If you are stuck on the USA side, come to Plattsburgh in August. Don’t worry, our Augusts are cooler than might be thought. We are too far north here to suffer the effects of Global Warming, if you believe in Global Warming.
Read MoreWho was Mario Salerno?
This blog’s for Debbie. (My wife.) The die was cast when I mentioned Mario Salerno in my previous blog. I don’t usually take requests, but I could not resist Debbie’s enthusiasm.
When I kick started my career at Washington Opera in 1976, I met Mario. I found him sitting at our rehearsal piano located about level with the surface of the Potomac River somewhere deep in the bowels of the Kennedy Center in our Nation’s Capital. Great building, lovely river and a familiar sight because I had sung many times just downstream from that great white titan for the arts in open air concerts behind Lincoln’s back at his memorial on the shore of the Potomac with the United States Navy Band. It was one of my goals to sing at the Kennedy Center, but I had no idea how my singing would be impacted when it happened.
George London scheduled a production of “L’Italiana in Algeri” for the early days of 1976 and populated it with some of the best talent I could ever hope to work with and steal from. I did steal a lot from one of them, Renato Capecchi, but Mario became a key figure in my musical life. I hope to tell you about Renato in a future blog.
What I know of Mario’s history was gleaned from tidbits of information that he let slip during our conversations. It would be a boring bit of info to know that he studied at the Conservatorio di Musica Luigi Cherubini in Florence, Italy if it were not for the fact that my voice teacher Renata Carisio Booth studied there too, and they were contemporaries. I was so disappointed that they did not remember one another from those school days, but, even so, I suspect that their teaching styles were so similar because those long ago school days had profound influences on them.
Before Mario found work along the Potomac, he had spent more than ten years at La Scala in Milano, Italy during the golden years of singing, and around fifteen years working for Swiss Radio in their classical music broadcasting program.
When I found him, I needed everything he had learned over his long musical life and he was ready to share. I loved the way he worked in studio. He was full of musical suggestions and was dedicated to improving or just varying an interpretation. He was challenging, meticulous and not easy to please.
Mario became my go to guy for help with repertoire and, after Washington, I made the trek to Milano one summer to work with him at his home. It was wonderful. He would hand me suggestion after suggestion for how to sing 4 measures at a time. Not that he had to hector me to sing the way he wanted, because Renata Booth had done the work necessary to prepare me technically to do everything he asked of me and, sometimes, after only one rendition of his suggested interpretation he would say good, now why don’t you try……… I found this work ethic addictive, and when I was invited to return to Wolf Trap in the young artists program, I suggested to Frank Rizzo that he bring Mario in to coach us youngsters. Frank knew how good Mario was, and I got my wish. The only problem with his method of working, that I loved so much, was that it inspired some of my colleagues at Wolf Trap to leave Mario’s studio with tears streaming down their cheeks. I didn’t know that many of my fellow Wolf Trap singers-in-training were accustomed to running all the way through arias before coaches would make any suggestions. The best comment I remember was from a wet faced soprano that couldn’t believe she had spent the better part of an hour working on 8 measures. If my tenor memory serves, I told her that she must be really good, because Mario had the habit of making me work on only 4 measures at a time!
Nothing was too small to address. While I was doing my best in Milano to sing Mario’s musical suggestions, he got frustrated with me doing recitative according to the composer’s notation. That is to say, me following the note values I had memorized. He decided I should study the recitative as spoken language, and he told me he wanted me to learn the rhythm that would be natural to the language. I was all for it, that is at first. He assigned this teaching task to his teenage daughter. I had my doubts that this young lady was going to be able to do anything for me, but we got started. She listened to me recite the recitatives before telling me “Non sembra Italiano.” (That’s not Italian.) During my month long sojourn her three word comment became less and less frequent. She was more than qualified for the job, and she got it done. Mario was pleased with the way I did my best to forget the note durations in those recitatives and rambled over the notes with the replacement rhythm associated with my recitations that had garnered an OK from his young daughter.
Mario and my voice teacher, Renata, may not have remembered each other from Conservatory time, but I think they remembered a lot of what was taught them while they were there. I wish I had asked Mario about his professors at Conservatorio di Musica Luigi Cherubini. Renata had spent time under Ottorino Respighi’s instruction way back then, and I wish I could say the same for Mario. What I can say is that they were consummate professionals who knew what making music was all about, the traditions and how to drill them into their students. They also taught, Renata by insistence and Mario by example, humility along with confidence in one’s abilities and understanding.
Mario was the natural next step in my preparation for the professional life. Renata dragged me out of the woods, pruned off some of my North Country bumpkin culture and put my voice in order. Mario showed me what I should try to do with my voice and my Renata inspired appreciation of sophistication. It was a long, interesting and fulfilling road with many more people stepping in at just the moment needed to point me along in the direction that my life took.
Along the way, Garcia was dropped in my lap… or on my head… Whichever seems more appropriate to your attitude concerning tenors. These formative influences were living introductions to Garcia. I think of them as:
Introduction to, and implementation of Garcia Part One: Renata Carisio Booth
Introduction to, and implementation of Garcia Part Two: Mario Salerno
(and daughter – sorry, I don’t have a picture of her).
