This third opera in the series from the New York Metropolitan Opera that I watched yesterday was of a 2015 livestream. It was a little different from the other two. For one thing, it had more set pieces where a performer sang a solo uninterrupted, allowing them to really show their virtuoso skills. The female lead playing Leonora had plenty of occasions to sing what I typically think of as occurring in opera where a soprano holds apocryphally glass-shattering high notes for a long time with a kind of rapid up and down tremolo effect (I am sure there is an operatic term for it.)
The physics involved in the art of vocal destruction seem straightforward enough. But although stories of powerful singers shattering wine goblets, vases and eyeglasses abound, real instances of this feat are suspiciously missing from the historical record. The famous tenor Enrico Caruso was said to have had the ability, but after he died his wife denied these rumors. What gives?
…Then in 2005 the Discovery Channel television show MythBusters tackled the question, recruiting rock singer and vocal coach Jamie Vendera to hit some crystal ware with his best shot. He tried 12 wine glasses before stumbling on the lucky one that splintered at the blast of his mighty pipes. For the first time, proof that an unassisted voice can indeed shatter glass was captured on video.
Vendera’s glass-breaking wail registered at 105 decibels—almost as loud as a jackhammer. Not many people can muster the lung power for that kind of noise. Opera singers train for years to build up the strength to produce sustained notes at volumes above 100 decibels.
When watching films or reading books, I am usually picky about the plot, wanting them to be coherent and plausible. With opera, I have had to throw that expectation out the window. It seems like the story is just a device, however flimsy, to string the music together, not that there is anything wrong with that. In this particular opera, the story was particularly wacky, confusing, and implausible but I was thrown for a loop by a really unexpected twist at the very end, something that M. Night Shyamalan would have been proud of. I did not see it coming.
At the end of this opera at the curtain call, flowers were thrown on the stage, something that I had earlier commented on did not happen in the other two. A bouquet was thrown at the female lead who played Leonora but I was surprised when the second male lead who played Count di Luna had a whole lot of loose flowers thrown on the stage for him, while the principal male lead who played Manrico got loud applause but no flowers. I later learned that the singer who played di Luna had just returned from brain surgery and that the audience was showing its apprication that he had recovered enough to perform so well. He collected the flowers from the stage and graciously gave them to the two female leads.
As far as I could tell from their accents when interviewed after the performance, none of the main performers were Italian so I began to wonder whether they had to learn the language in order to sing or they just memorized the words phonetically.
The next opera that I will watch today is another one by Verdi, the 2018 production of La Traviata. For us low brow types who do not even speak Italian, having two operas with such similar names by the same composer is guaranteed to cause us confusion when trying to remember them later. I learned that ‘trovatore’ means ‘troubadour’ (though troubadouring (if there is such a word) plays a highly marginal role in the opera) while ‘traviata’ means ‘fallen woman’. These translations might help me keep things straight later.
After three straight tragedies, I am in the mood for a happy ending today but tonight’s title referring to a fallen woman does not give me much hope of getting one. But for laughs I can always watch A Night At the Opera with the Marx brothers because a big scene involved them creating havoc during a performance of Il Trovatore.
You can never get enough of the Marx brothers.
The term you’re probably looking for is vibrato (generically, for any type of music).
These days, the term “tremolo” (and “trill”) is reserved for rapidly alternating between two definite pitches. That’s different from providing some color or intensity to a single note (as in vibrato), by performing the note in a wavering, fluctuating, undulating fashion…. Think of this effect as being more like rapidly flipping a switch, as opposed to wiggling it very slightly.
These are also both distinct from more elaborate “ornaments” or “embellishments” or “diminutions” which are additional notes that are performed instead of the more simplified written material. (Traditionally, they were not explicitly notated at all, as with many other aspects of notation that we now take for granted). Those can come in all sorts of crazy patterns (not just “up, down, up, down”), which establish new melodic or harmonic relationships that were not in the written part. But anyway, that sort of thing shows up in a lot of operatic material too.
Verdi was in the 1800s, but vibrato has been commonplace in vocal music for a very long time — also in instrumental music, to a lesser extent, for the winds and strings and such that can do it. Certain music historians (and “early music” revivalists) have disagreed about the use of vibrato, but some good research on it is presented in this youtube video: Vocal vibrato 1500-1700 (14:59). (By the way, he does mention the historical use of “tremolo” in the video, which appears to be synonymous with vibrato for some authors, but this is non-standard today.)
In the end, different singers will prefer to do it more or less, and of course, it also depends on the piece of music being performed. My policy has always been “if it sounds good, do it.”
Yeah, they can be very silly, pulpy, contrived…. Remember: it’s basically just a musical, with more music. For me, it’s the music that makes or breaks it, although I am happier when the story isn’t too ridiculous.
Some do, some don’t. If they’re in opera, they probably do know a fair amount of Italian – not necessarily to the point of being fluent, but good enough. In any case, it’s very standard for all vocal music students to take “diction” courses, especially for Italian, French, German and English, where the basic goal is to learn good pronunciation.
Also, as you may realize, tons of musical terminology is Italian, so every music student has to learn a bit of vocab that way. (It’s really not all that much though. My Italian is garbage.)
Thanks! That was very interesting and informative.
Just for fun, you might check out some Hollywood actresses who were magnificent coloratura sopranos. (Coloratura refers to the ability to perform the embellishments that Consciousness Razor was referring to). Jane Powell, for instance, was a terrific singer and a coloratura. You may remember her from “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers”. In her movie, “A Date for Judy”, she performs a song called “Love Is Where You Find It” that just blows me away. You can find it on u-tube. Katherine Grayson was also a coloratura. And unless you’re a 3 Stooges fan, you may never have heard of Christine McIntyre, who sang such numbers as “The Voice of Spring” and “Sextet from Lucia” in different episodes. You can find these on u-tube as well. Enjoy.
The plots of almost all operas are silly. It is necessary to suspend disbelief in order to be able to enjoy the music for most operas. Occasionally composers have tackled important topics as Beethoven did with his sole opera Fidelio which deals with corruption and injustice. This is probably my favourite opera, but is scorned by most opera-buffs(TM).
Contemporary composers have occasionally tackled difficult topics, including american composer John Adams who (among others) wrote Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer, which deals with terrorism. Neither of these is exactly box-office gold, alas.
I am a long time opera lover (I am a retired old man) and I enjoy your comments because you are being open-minded and, since it is new to you, you are noticing touches that someone like myself would barely register.
Both of my parents were opera lovers and so listening to opera music on the record player, even when I was quite young, was normal. Also, my parents were members of the First Congregational Church of Downers Grove, IL. One of the prominent families in this church was named Milnes. The son, Sherrill Milnes, went on to become one of the great baritones of all time. He definitely sang di Luna many times, often at the Met.
I heard him sing up close and personal a few times and it is jaw-dropping to be within a few feet of someone with a voice like that.
I hope you blog about ‘La Traviata’. Truly, ‘Trovatore’ has a bizarre (even for opera) plot but ‘Traviata’ is rather more intelligible, albeit a bit of a tear-jerker at the end.
Spoiler alert: it is apparently possible for a woman to be within seconds of dying from tuberculosis and yet still be able to sing and project into a large hall.
These operas always make me think of Alfred Noyes and his Barrel Organ, one of my favorite poems of my teenage years:
And there La Traviata sighs
Another sadder song;
And there Il Trovatore cries
A tale of deeper wrong;
And bolder knights to battle go
With sword and shield and lance,
Than ever here on earth below
Have whirled into—a dance!—
Go down to Kew in lilac-time, in lilac-time, in lilac-time;
Go down to Kew in lilac-time (it isn’t far from London!)
And you shall wander hand in hand with love in summer’s wonderland;
Go down to Kew in lilac-time (it isn’t far from London!)
This France24 video was made about a year ago, Celebrating 350 years of Paris’s iconic Opera: “This week, we’re taking you on a tour of one of Paris’s most iconic sites, as we mark the 350th anniversary of France’s Opera. Created by the Sun King Louis XIV in 1669, the world’s first permanent dance academy consists today of both the Garnier Palace, inaugurated in 1875, and the 30-year-old Bastille Opera.”
brucegee1962 @#6,
I had heard the part about going to Kew when I was a child. I seem to recall our English teacher recited it to demonstrate something about poetry. I forget the point he was making but that bit stuck in my memory. I was not aware of the rest of the poem and did not know about the stanza that referred to these operas.
joelgrant @#5,
I am gratified that an opera aficionado like you finds my opera-ignorant musings on this topic to be of interest!
Mano, I’ve enjoyed your opera posts a great deal. I am a bit of a fan of opera, but not a real devotee. I love Carmen and my favorite of Verdi’s is Rigoletto, which has a great music and a fair amount of action (I don’t like it when most of the show is pontification by solo aria). But my favorites are Mozart’s comedies, especially Marriage of Figaro, which is funny and mostly sung in ensembles, duets through septets. The story is ridiculous in a literal sense, but the themes translate well to our world, so much so that the famous Peter Sellers 90’s production was set in Trump Tower, with the clueless and evil Count as a thinly disguised version of DJT. There might be a video of that production in PBS archives, not sure.
@4: there are plenty operas with decent till good plots. Three famous examples are Tchaikovsky’s Evgenij Onegin (about social codes of Russian rural nobility) and Pique Dame (gamble addiction) and Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov (how power can bring down an emperor). All three of them are from the 19th Century, two -- three decades after La Traviata.
@leftygomez -- Think of the ‘Marriage of Figaro’ plot in broad strokes: A couple and a married woman conspire (humorously) and are conspired against by the married woman’s husband, who has a temper and is an authority figure. In the end, the three pals win and everyone is happy.
Compare that to the basic plot of ‘I Love Lucy’. Those writers knew gold when they ran across it!
@joelgrant Great point about I Love Lucy 😁