National Singing Styles - Italy, ca. 1600–1680 (II)

Modern singers, trained to sing with absolute rhythmic precision, need time to become comfortable with the concept of sprezzatura. The easiest way to incorporate it into singing is by first declaiming the text in an impassioned way as an orator or actor might. When I am not singing from memory, I often use a small prompt book with the texts set out according to the poetic lines, so that I can see the text as poetry freed from the musical notation. Sprezzatura can be equally daunting to a continuo player used to counting measures. In Ensemble Chanterelle, a group with which I perform regularly, theorbist Catherine Liddell has developed a notation system for works in stile recitativo, shown in Example 1.1, which reproduces only the singer’s text and the bass pitches corresponding to the correct syllables, without any durational values (plus any necessary figures and some shorthand reminders about chord arpeggiation). This allows me total rhythmic freedom, frees her from unnecessary visual information, and enables both of us to make each performance responsive to the inspiration of the moment.

Perhaps the overriding characteristic of Italian singing in the first part of the century was the passionate engagement of the singer with the music, which in turn engaged the audience. Marco da Gagliano described hearing Jacopo Peri:

No one can fully appreciate the sweetness and the power of his airs who has not heard them sung by Peri himself, because he gave them such grace and style that he so impressed in others the emotion of the words that one was forced to weep or rejoice as the singer wished.

This passionate engagement becomes all the more important today when performing for an audience (mostly) unfamiliar with the language, the poetry, the music, and the style.

The changes in Italian singing that took place in the generation after Caccini and Peri are closely tied to the rise and influence of the castratos and to the stylistic developments in the opera and the cantata that altered the balance between text and music. These changes did not happen overnight and were by no means complete by the end of the seventeenth century, but they were well established by musical developments in Rome and Venice. They involved greater divisions among recitative, arioso, and aria; greater pictorialization of ornamentation to depict or idealize particular words; changes in the shapes, ranges, and character of the vocal lines; and more generalized (and less nuanced) emotional states portrayed in the aria. In the process, speech gave way in the aria to lyricism and spectacle; subtlety gave some ground to sonority; and singers became virtuosos of the highest order. Venetian opera in particular glorified the art of singing.

Example 1.1. Excerpt from Sigismondo d’India, Lamento di Didone (1623), illustrating a notation system devised by a skilled continuo player, Catherine Liddell, for works in stile recitativo. It reflects performance decisions made in rehearsal. This is most apparent with respect to tied and untied notes in the bass that depart slightly from the original notation, and with respect to words that are subject to elision and have been deliberately separated by the singer for dramatic reasons.

Some explanation of the markings in the score:

( ) around figured bass signs indicates that the pitches in parentheses are covered in the vocal part.
- is used in the text (1) to indicate when a bar line or a bass note occurs in the middle of a syllable, (2) to indicate a long(er) note in the vocal part, (3) to provide a visual cue to signal a chord with a special affect, or (4) to signal a consonantal cue by the singer.
 alerts the continuo player to either a place of elision in the text or an anticipazione della syllaba at cadential points.

The Teatro dei Barberini and the Venetian public theaters were larger than the halls of noble palaces where opera had its first performances, but still significantly smaller and with smaller orchestral forces than we normally find today. The Venetian opera “orchestra” often consisted of only two violins and a large continuo group, thus putting more focus on the singers. Castratos, with their penetrating sound quality, wide ranges, large breath capacity, and extensive musical training, were ideal voices for the theater.38 The hermaphroditic quality of their voices gave them the ability to play both male and female roles.

There are characteristics of the castrato voice that we will never be able to duplicate in our time, even though the last castrato, Alessandro Moreschi, sang in the Sistine Chapel until 1913. Modern technology has enabled us to hear an electronic synthesis of the voices of soprano Ewa Mallas-Godlewska and countertenor Derek Lee Ragin, used in the 1995 movie Farinelli, in an attempt to approximate a castrato voice. Whatever one thinks of the results, this is obviously not a viable solution for live performance. The question of what voice type is the best substitute for a castrato — a male falsettist, a female mezzo-soprano, or a female soprano — is still open to debate.

Composers capitalized on the wide ranges of the castratos, which in turn led to an expansion of range in every voice type. At the top of their ranges, castratos rarely went higher than a". Lyric, low, coloratura bass voices, such as the Demon in Stefano Landi’s Sant’Alessio (1631), traversed C up to f ". While the tessituras on the whole seem to us now to be generally low, range became an important aspect of character delineation. Although higher voices of castratos and females were generally preferred, bass voices were also given important roles, while the tenor voice was largely neglected.

to be continued
(by A Performer's Guide to Seveteenth-Century Music)