Toby the Tenor

Part 3

Having fused the song with natural speech, the singer is on the right track to making song relatable. The principle behind making the sung words sound as close to the spoken sounds as possible is to remove any barriers between the listener and the performer. 

If the listener is distracted by idiosyncrasies of pronunciation it’s going to be harder for them to be transported. If the listener believes in the authenticity of the pronunciation they can think about the interpretation. 

Unlike any other instrument, singers have to enjoy language. I heard Frank Skinner on his poetry podcast recently talking about AE Housman. He talks about the value of reading verse aloud and that he wishes poets would sometimes indicate how to stress their poetry in order to reveal its intended meaning. I’m glad they don’t because the pleasure of reading poetry is to be found in mining the ambiguities for deeper significance. 

Part of a singer’s art is to study the text separately from the music and to find his or her way into it for themselves. Taking in isolation the music of settings by different composers of the same text, the songs are often unrecognisable as flowing from the same poetic source. 

Take Goethe’s poem Ganymed, as set by Hugo Wolf and Franz Schubert. Without the text the composers focus on completely different aspects of the poetry. Schubert’s pictographic version seems to focus on the pastoral setting, imbuing Ganymed with a nonchalance that Schubert imagined would have caught Zeus’s eye. This is a shepherd boy of pre-Freud insouciance, unaware of his allure for the über-God and passive in Zeus’s advances. We experience his privilege in being a chosen one through his excitement to be taken up by a father figure. 

Wolf’s setting, also written in Vienna but after the explorations of the later C19th had taken hold of the psyche in the city, drips with erotic heat. The boy in his version is as much protagonist as chosen one. I enjoy programming two versions of the same text when I’m putting a recital together. This is where we can reveal the art of song in its starkest relief. Before we can live up to the demands of two versions of one song text we have to have lived our own experience to pull out the subtleties of the difference in the two composers lived experience. 

I’ve been asked many times “What one piece of advice would you give a young singer?” The answer is always the same: be someone. In order to be a singer worth listening to you have to have something to sing about. Being able to read a text and recognising within it something of oneself is halfway to an interpretation. Singing is part interpretation and part autobiography in that the singer embodies the music and the text as one entity and synthesises it into something recognisable for the audience. 

To provoke an emotional response in the audience, the singer often has to be mindful of working in opposites. Sad singing does not make audiences sad. If anything it distances the audience. To draw the audience in and trigger in them a sense of the sadness within a situation, the singer has to intelligently search for textual clues that lead to a truthful rationalisation for the journey between beginning and end. 

In Schubert’s song cycle Die Schöne Müllerin, the further the protagonist descends into jealousy, heartache and despair the more it helps the audience to feel his journey if the singer focuses on the humour, denial and lack of self-awareness embedded in Wilhelm Müller’s text. The characteristics humanise him and in doing so point up the tragedy of his eventual suicide.

Are there limits to interpretation? Only if the poet is too clever for their own good. WH Auden and Chester Kallman’s libretto for The Rake’s Progress is so dense with scholarship it’s hard to know what to do with it in a staging. Tom Rakewell’s manifesto aria, Here I Stand, is Martin Luther as interpreted by Shakespeare’s baddie in King Lear, Edmund. Clever clever but only useful as characterisation in the wider context of the opera. There’s no way the Tom can do justice to such detail in the moment without sailing over the heads of the audience. 

The above are no more than examples of interpretation. The gift lies with the singer to look inside themselves to find common ground with the poet and composer. The more they have lived their life, gained experience and read with breadth, the more they will have to bring to the music and text.