Voice Detective - The Voice Detective

HN009 SICILIAN CARDINALS ARE NATURAL SINGERS

In 2005, upon the election of Pope Benedict XVI, “when he entered the dining room of the Casa Santa Marta, the cardinals joined their voices in the traditional Tu Es Petrus and Oremus pro Pontifice, boisterously intoned by the unmistakable baritone of Salvatore De Giorgio, Archbishop of Palermo”

What is clear to me, is that Sicilians can sing regardless of their age, when they are dining, they are doing or their profession!

HN009 SICILIAN CARDINALS ARE NATURAL SINGERS

In 2005, upon the election of Pope Benedict XVI, “when he entered the dining room of the Casa Santa Marta, the cardinals joined their voices in the traditional Tu Es Petrus and Oremus pro Pontifice, boisterously intoned by the unmistakable baritone of Salvatore De Giorgio, Archbishop of Palermo”

What is clear to me, is that Sicilians can sing regardless of their age, when they are dining, they are doing or their profession!

FRIEDA HEMPEL, SOPRANO, JUNE 26, 1885

‘Great music beautifully sung bears a message from heaven. Singing heals the spirit and lightens the heart.’ Frieda Hempel

Born in Leipzig in 1885, the precocious talent of Frieda Hempel debuted in the Königliche Oper in Berlin in the role of Frau Fluth in Otto Nicolai’s Die Lustigen Weiber von Windsor in 1905. She had been a star pupil at the Conservatorium, first as a pianist and then only later as a singer. According to her own account, her stage career actually began when as a young child she joined a travelling circus in the role of a kidnapped baby!

Her voice was first noted as a coloratura of exceptional flexibility and warmth. Indeed Richard Strauss himself rewrote parts of the role of Zerbinetta in Ariadne auf Naxos after hearing her perform. ‘One evening when we gave The Barber of Seville, he [Strauss] came running to my dressing room, all excited and said, “Jesus. Jesus, you just sang a high F-sharp!” I had sung the Proch variations with a high F-sharp and had added other high notes, and he just could not get over it. This inspired him to write the part of Zerbinetta for me, in Ariadne auf Naxos,…. I have the original manuscript as well as the first printing, with all his corrections.’ Strauss was so enamoured of her talent that he saw in her, his ideal singer as the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier, one of the roles for which she is now best remembered. Otto Kahn, onetime chairman of the Metropolitan Opera once told her, ‘Miss Hempel, no matter how often I hear you in Der Rosenkavalier, I never fail to get chills down my spine when you sing, “Ich weiss auch nichts – gar nichts.” You fill that pause with so much meaning.’ Her other show-stopper was as the Königin der Nacht in Mozart’s Zauberflöte. And of Mozart she later wrote, ‘I know of no other composer who lifts me in spirit as he does. It is like drinking champagne.’ In the later judgement of J.B.Stearne ‘she was at least as good a lyric soprano as she was a coloratura.’

In the same year as her debut in Berlin, she was invited to sing in Bayreuth by Cosima Wagner. At the age of 22 she found herself after having performed Lucia in Berlin on 11 September 1907 to newspaper reviews stating she ‘was established as the leading coloratura soprano’ in Germany. Singing with Caruso, Chaliapin and other greats gives some idea of her talent and musical gifts. Frieda sang in Ostende, which in those balmy days just before the First World War was a summer resort for high society, and where she was given perhaps the finest compliment other singers could give, ‘they were rehearsing a Wagnerian opera in an upstairs room when Hermann Gura came running up to them and cried, “Come downstairs! Come and listen! Here is a girl who has everything!” They all came downstairs and listened at the back of the auditorium. “It was true, you were really unbelievable,” In 1912 she established herself at New York’s Metropolitan and a mere seven years later in 1919 she virtually ceased singing in opera and concentrated solely on concert appearances. By this time, she had become a naturalised citizen of the United States, something for which political currents in her homeland would not forgive.

Her concert career can be divided into two types of appearance; as herself, Frieda Hempel, and as Jenny Lind in a Jenny Lind Show, which had started as a tribute to Jenny Lind on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Lind’s birth. Such was its popularity it was revived for a number of years afterwards. Yet it is clear that she had a fascination with Lind, for when she visited Lind’s home at Wynd House she recalled, ‘The caretaker took us in and showed us the house. I sat down at her piano and let my thoughts wander.I thought of her sitting in that very room, practicing, practicing, and letting her soul talk. I saw her in front of me, in her hoop skirt; I sensed that at any moment she would walk in, and I felt great reverence when I touched that piano. Had she been alive, I would not have touched it.’

Despite her leaving behind the world of opera, her concert work should not be underestimated. She herself wrote, ‘Concert work is much more rewarding than operatic work, but it is also more demanding. As a concert artist, I stand alone on the stage for an hour-and-a-half or longer. I have absolutely nothing to aid me. I come out, stand in the bow of the piano, and there I am. I must create setting and scenery out of nothing but my inner sense of beauty and my art. I must live the song so fully that my audience sees and feels what I see and feel. My imagination must become its imagination.

And perhaps too, we need to recall that Hempel embraced developments in technology to reach a wider audience, just as her contemporary Caruso had done. She sang on live radio, and included a special service for radio-telephone subscribers. The subscribers could listen live to a concert through their telephone! And move over Johnny Cash – Frieda sang a memorable concert at the Auburn Jail in New York State for 1400 prisoners. The occasion clearly moved her as much as the prisoners. ‘It made no difference to whom I was going to sing – I would still give the very best that was in me to give. … The men hung on every tone as complete silence reigned. As I sang the men began to smile, and emotions began to flood the room. I thought to myself,” They cannot be so bad, when one can awaken these emotions in them.” …’

Her star burned all too quickly and she passed away in Berlin in 1955, just as the first German edition of her autobiography was being prepared for publication.

If longevity in a career is any reflection upon the greatness of a singer, then surely Ernestine Schumann-Heink must rank as one of the greatest artists of all time. From a precocious debut at age 17 in the role of Azucena – yes, you read that correctly – to her final performance as Erda at age 67, Schumann-Heink had one of the most spectacularly long careers of any singer of any age.

Notwithstanding her own early start on stage, she later wrote that, ‘It is my opinion that no girl who wishes to keep her voice in the prime of condition all the time in after years should start to study much earlier than seventeen or eighteen years of age. In the case of a man I do not believe that he should; start until he is past twenty or even twenty-two.’ Ernestine kept great store by the preservation and condition of her voice and no doubt she wrote from experience, seeing the rise and fall of many colleagues.

But it is not her stamina and sheer endurance we must admire. Ernestine Schumann-Heink was one of the outstanding artists in a golden age of opera, and she cultivated her popularity and success in that least recognised vocal domain, that of the contralto. Ernestine sang under Mahler, Richard Strauss, and with the finest exponents of the vocal art. She encompassed all the repertory, songs, popular and art, Grand Opera, Wagner and twentieth century classics. She created the role of Klymenestra in Elektra in Dresden in 1909, where perhaps infamously the composer Richard Strauss, shouted to the conductor Ernst von Schuch, ‘Louder, louder the orchestra! I can still hear the Heink!’

Schumann-Heink possessed a tremendous range, and her most notable roles as far as the Anglophone public were concerned, were Erda and Waltraute. In the words of Henry Pleasants, ‘the glory of her sumptuous voice was at the bottom rather than the top.’ A contemporary described her voice as, possessing, ‘opulent and flexible tones from low D to high B, the amazing fullness and evenness of her shake, her artistic conviction, dramatic temperament and vivid enunciation.’ which explain part of why she was a sensation.

But possibly another secret is found in her own words, ‘My secret is absolute devotion to the audience. I love my audiences. They are all my friends.’ And further due to this profound respect for her audience, ‘Therefore it is necessary for me to have my voice in the best of condition every day of the year.’ She also noted that, ‘[the] voice must first of all be beautiful. Bel canto – beautiful singing – not the singing of meaningless Italian phrases, as so many insist, but the glorious bel canto…’

For those who take an holistic view of a singer’s vocal health, it is of interest that she practiced deep breathing every day of [her] life. This quite possibly contributed to her remarkable capacity to remain focussed at all times. She had this to say about being in, what we call nowadays, ‘the zone.’ ‘The singer must relax all the times. This does not mean flabbiness. It does not mean that the singer should collapse before singing. Relaxation in the singer’s sense is a delicious condition of buoyancy, of lightness, of freedom, of ease and entire lack of tightening in any part. When I relax I feel as though every atom in my body were floating in space. There is not one single little nerve or tension.’

Born in 1861 in Lieben in Austria-Hungary, Ernestine Schumann-Heink, who became naturalised as a United States citizen, passed away in Hollywood on 17 November 1936.