...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"?