Estaba buscando citas para hablar mal de Wagner (el hombre, no el músico, ¿eh?
) en el otro hilo que puso MarttiT, y revisando "El perfecto wagneriano" de Shaw me encontré con una reflexión sobre las voces wagnerianas que me resultó sorprendente.
Supongo que por ignorancia, y también por la notoria escasez que ya hemos comentado mucho, yo pensaba que era de los compositores que más dificultades ponía a los cantantes. Pero Shaw (a quien pienso que podemos darle crédito como crítico musical profesional) tiene una opinión bien diferente.
Se las cuelgo aquí (perdón por el inglés, si hay problema se las traduzco el fin de semana). ¿Qué opinan los que saben? Baci,
Maddalena
No nation need have much difficulty in producing a race of
Wagnerian singers. With the single exception of Handel, no
composer has written music so well calculated to make its singers
vocal athletes as Wagner. Abominably as the Germans sing, it is
astonishing how they thrive physically on his leading parts. His
secret is the Handelian secret. Instead of specializing his vocal
parts after the manner of Verdi and Gounod for high sopranos,
screaming tenors, and high baritones with an effective compass of
about a fifth at the extreme tiptop of their ranges, and for
contraltos with chest registers forced all over their compass in
the manner of music hall singers, he employs the entire range of
the human voice freely, demanding from everybody very nearly two
effective octaves, so that the voice is well exercised all over,
and one part of it relieves the other healthily and continually.
He uses extremely high notes very sparingly, and is especially
considerate in the matter of instrumental accompaniment. Even
when the singer appears to have all the thunders of the full
orchestra raging against him, a glance at the score will show
that he is well heard, not because of any exceptionally
stentorian power in his voice, but because Wagner meant him to be
heard and took the greatest care not to overwhelm him. Such
brutal opacities of accompaniment as we find in Rossini's Stabat
or Verdi's Trovatore, where the strings play a rum-tum
accompaniment whilst the entire wind band blares away,
fortissimo, in unison with the unfortunate singer, are never to
be found in Wagner's work. Even in an ordinary opera house, with
the orchestra ranged directly between the singers and the
audience, his instrumentation is more transparent to the human
voice than that of any other composer since Mozart. At the
Bayreuth Buhnenfestspielhaus, with the brass under the stage, it
is perfectly so.
(...) A presentable performance of The Ring is a big undertaking only
in the sense in which the construction of a railway is a big
undertaking: that is, it requires plenty of work and plenty of
professional skill; but it does not, like the old operas and oratorios,
require those extraordinary vocal gifts which only a few individuals
scattered here and there throughout Europe are born with. Singers
who could never execute the roulades of Semiramis, Assur, and
Arsaces in Rossini's Semiramide, could sing the parts of Brynhild,
Wotan and Erda without missing a note.