...it's the singer, not the song

Here are some examples of cadenzas by Manuel Garcia II (or 'The Sequel', as I like to think of him). The reason I'm presenting them here is that I'm continuing my thoughts from my last post ("...it's what he would have wanted"), which were on creativity and whether a singer can be a composer in their own right. Well, they used to be. In the 18th century, — the golden age of bel canto — singers were trained in harmony and counterpoint exactly as composers were; they had to be able to understand and analyse the music they were singing so that they could improvise over the top of it. So in those days a singer was judged as much on their taste in improvisation and variation as they were on tone, execution, intonation and everything else that we judge a singer on. And the final test in taste came at the end of a song, when the accompaniment would pause and you would be required to improvise a cadenza showing off everything that you could do, all in one breath!

By the 19th century, though they were still showing off, singers tended to write their cadenzas beforehand and learn them off by heart. But they would still write their own, so it would be a unique part of the performance, the singer's own cadenza. If they weren't creative, their teacher or accompanist would write it for them.

These days, everyone seems to borrow each other's instead of writing their own. There are some variations on songs which have become standard, which I think is a real shame. This doesn't just apply to singers; instrumentalists do this, too, because 'classical musicians' have become so scared of improvisation. Any jazz musician will tell you it's not scary — there are rules for learning it; you don't just make up random notes and hope they form themselves into a tune. You have to understand the chords and the key you are playing in, just as those old singers used to do.

And — look! Here's a handy guide by Garcia, showing you how to build on a simple tune until you have the confidence to turn it into something awesome!

Don't you think it would be fun to encourage singers to be creative again? A new singer singing any old song makes it seem fresh. I think it's a shame that in the 19th century Manuel Garcia the Sequel said, "In the eighteenth century, the singer modulated according to his fancy; now this liberty is only accorded to artists who unite knowledge with perfect taste." Then he gave an example by his sister.

I prefer an example by one of his students, Jenny Lind, who apparently had quite a unique taste when it came to writing a cadenza, but I like how literal she was in interpreting the words. She wrote a cadenza on the word 'tears', and her descending staccato chromatic scale really sounds like tears falling.

But of course — the words! You don't even have to change the notes to be creative with a song. But that will have to be the subject of another post.

...it's what he would have wanted

With my head clear of migraines now it has space for thinking again. And it has been thinking about a point that came up whilst I was being interviewed for the documentary on Resonance FM (which you can listen to again if you missed it — just click here! ). I was asked to provide some recordings of 19th century singers singing 19th century music. The examples I chose to give were of singers singing songs that they had been taught by the composers. The composers were Verdi and Gounod, and the singers were Nellie Melba and Emma Eames. I find it really exciting that we've got recordings of singers who had been chosen by the composers themselves as their favourite voice for a particular rôle and then taught how to sing it exactly. When you hear Melba sing Verdi rôles, you notice that she sings everything marked in the score: every accent; every expression. Verdi taught her his operas, so we can be sure that he wanted everything he wrote to be taken notice of, but no one sings them quite like that these days.

But does it matter? Even singing modern songs, with the composer in the room, do we have to bother singing exactly what they ask us to? Maybe the singers can be the creators of a song as much as the composers are.

When I was at conservatoire, I discovered some recordings by Adelina Patti of some songs by Mozart. She was in her sixties when she recorded them in 1903 and she learnt them when she was young from somebody who had learnt them from somebody who had learnt them from Mozart! (I do hope I have all the facts straight there!) The important thing is that she claimed that she sang them as Mozart wanted them to be sung. I was so excited; I thought this was the holy grail of historical performance —which is what I was studying at college; the whole point was to try to play music as it would have been played in the past. So, I learnt 'Voi, Che Sapete' from The Marriage of Figaro exactly as Patti sang it, and I took it to my singing lesson and sang it.

And at the end, my singing teacher said, "No. You can't sing it like that these days." For her that was the end of the discussion. It sounds so different to how Mozart is sung these days that she felt it was just too alien for modern audiences to be able to cope with, and maybe she was right. Maybe we don't need to bother with attempting to sing Mozart's songs as he wanted them to be sung.

But I remember, when I was taking part in a Mozart piano sonata competition, the adjudicator told me that Mozart was really poor, and ink cost money, so he didn't waste it. Therefore, every mark he made on the paper was important, and you have to play every one of those marks. Patti does; he writes portamento (the slides between notes) all over that song and she sings every one of them. Nobody sings any of them now.

Now, I could sing a whole concert of Mozart and Verdi as the composers wanted their songs to be sung, but would it only be interesting as a museum piece? What do you think? Do you think the tradition should be continued, or should music be allowed to evolve naturally? Should we say to composers, "Once you've written the notes, it's in my hands, and it's as much my song as it is yours"?