‘Beautiful’ Singing in Vienna Symposium and Workshop

In the Belle Époque, mezzosoprano Jane Bathori was celebrated for her stylistic performance of French art song. Bathori’s published pedagogy describes her techniques of singing and her sound recordings demonstrate the sound qualities she achieved. Bathori would have understood Garcia’s concept of the interplay of breath, glottis contraction and free movement of the pharynx as a means to generate ‘a sound free from every sort of quavering’. The challenge for today’s musician is to experiment with vocal technique and style to reimagine Belle Époque stylistic sound quality.​

The aim of this study is to investigate the taste and technique of Belle Époque vocal quality of Jane Bathori with a specific focus on her vibrato. Her pedagogy and recordings will be used to analyse, emulate and embody the sound of the Belle Époque. Bathori’s vocal technique will be explored, and the presenter will emulate her vocal practice, and consider the impact on vibrato. Future studies will consider how 21st century singers can adapt and reshape singing technique and sound to realise the sound world of the Belle Époque.

Vocal vibrato is still a sometimes controversial topic, especially as the subject, which has also been referred to as tremolo or Bebung, defies a precise description in words. Historical sources from the first half of the 19th century describe vibrato as an old-fashioned manner and unanimously note that its use has declined compared to previous generations. This information, that less vibrato was used in the Romantic repertoire than in the Classical period, contradicts the widespread idea today and leads to the question of the nature of vocal vibrato in the 18th and 19th centuries and its concrete application in a musical context.

This article approaches vibrato from the perspective of historical sound documents, using the Sonic Visualiser. First, sound recordings of various historical organs from the 18th century with the “Vox Humana” and “Tremulant” stops are analyzed to draw conclusions about the imitation of vocal vibrato in Classical music. Recordings of famous singers from the 19th century will then be analyzed, with a focus on the earliest possible year of birth: Peter Schram, bass (*1819, pupil of Manuel Garcia jun.), Charles Santley, baritone (*1834, also pupil of Manuel Garcia jun.) Marianne Brandt, alto (*1842, pupil of Pauline Viardot-Garcia) and Adelina Patti, soprano (*1843). The spectrogram allows a direct comparison of the amplitude and frequency of the undulating sounds of organ stops and human voices. It turns out that the differences between the examined sounds of the 18th and 19th centuries are much smaller than the differences to modern vibrato, which has a significantly greater amplitude at a slower frequency. Finally, the spectrograms are used to present a hypothesis on the dependence of the trill on the vibrato frequency and the question of the dosage of vibrato as a means of expression or sound production (continuous vibrato) is discussed.

In 1811 Girolamo Crescentini, one of the last important castrati, emphasizesthe importance of vowel colouring for musical expression in Raccolto di esercizi. In 1847 Manuel Garcia Jr. provides a detailed description of the expressive use of open and closed vowels (timbreclair, timbresombre) in the second volume of his Traité complet de l´art du chant. In 1887, Mathilde Marchesi refers to the use of vowel modification in her Traité du chant théoretique et pratique. Throughout the 19th century, it is evident that vowel colouring (chiaroscuro) plays a crucial role in musical expression within the operatic repertoire.

Historical recordings demonstrate that this practice persisted into the first quarter of the 20th century. I will discuss the use of chiaroscuro and its close connection to vocal registration (head voice, falsettone, chest voice). We will listen to recordings by Alessandro Moreschi, Adelina Patti, Clara Butt, Francesco Marconi, Fernando de Lucia, Léon Escalais, Mattia Battistini, Ernestine Schumann-Heink, Marcella Sembrich, Selma Kurz, Antonio Pini-Corsi and Emma Galvany.

Hortense de Beauharnais (1783-1837), Queen of Holland, daughter of Joséphine de Beauharnais and mother of Napoleon III, was not only a prominent figure in the political landscape of her time but also distinguished herself as a patron, singer, and composer, earning the epithet “la reine qui chante” (“the singing queen”) after her death. On the occasion of the Festival de Pentecôte organized in 2024 by the association La Nouvelle Athènes, we embarked on the project “Bel canto pour Hortense”, a musical journey that recreates some of the vocal and solo fortepiano repertoire around her time. 

At the heart of this project lies the integration of historical performing practices, such as the use of portamento, different vocal timbres (timbre clair, timbre sombre), deliberate asynchrony between voice and piano, tempo flexibility, and the embellishment of the musical discourse through melodic ornamentation, interludes, cadenzas, and postludes. Additionally, variations in accompaniment and pianistic texture, as well as different types of untogetherness and arpeggiation drawn from the study of written sources and early recordings, allow for greater expressive freedom. 

This project has been recorded and will be released as part of a CD in 2025, featuring a selection of arias and fortepiano solo pieces that exemplify these experimental approaches. The recording includes arias by Ferdinando Paër and Vincenzo Bellini, as well as solo piano works by Hélène de Montgeroult, George Onslow and Carl Czerny. In this lecture-recital, we will present the historical sources that inspired our interpretations and use these recordings to illustrate our experiments with these historical performance practices.

By the late 19th century, some pianists began to focus their professional careers almost exclusively on accompanying singers. Among the most eminent of these was Coenraad V. Bos, a Dutch pianist who studied with Julius Röntgen in Amsterdam and premiered Brahms’ Vier ernste Gesänge with Anton Sistermans at the age of 20. Despite belonging to a younger generation and later collaborating with distinctly more “modern” singers, Bos remains one of the most knowledgeable and informative figures in the tradition of German Lied-Gesang, particularly regarding Brahms, Schumann, and the tradition of Julius Stockhausen.

Bos’ work as an accompanist is well-documented on 78rpm records, including collaborations with Julia Culp and Elena Gerhardt. What has gone largely unnoticed, however, is that Bos also recorded a significant number of accompaniment rolls for the Duo-Art reproducing piano. These previously undigitized rolls have become available for scanning through the transfer of the IPAM’s roll collection to the HKB this summer. Particularly when compared with his acoustic recordings of the same pieces, these piano rolls—which were undoubtedly created for pedagogical purposes—reveal intricate details of Bos’ aesthetics and early 20th-century Lied-Gesang performance practice. The rolls are especially valuable when considered alongside the instructions Bos provides in his memoir The Well-Tempered Accompanist, in which he offers fascinating insights into his collaborations with singers and devotes an entire chapter to the role of the accompanist as a coach for singers.

A curiosity among Bos’ rolls are two that contain the accompaniment to vocal exercises from the treatises of Mathilde Marchesi, highlighting his awareness of the roots that German Lied-Gesang, particularly in the Stockhausen tradition, had in 19th-century Bel Canto aesthetics.

In this presentation, I will first analyze Bos’ recordings with a special focus on Brahms’ Sapphische Ode, for which we have both his roll and disc recordings, as well as a significant recording by Anton Sistermans. I will then, in collaboration with Kai Köpp and singing students from the HKB, demonstrate how these accompaniment rolls can be used today to practically explore 19th-century performance practice through methods of reenactment and embodiment.

There are no good reasons why the artistic refinements associated with bel canto cannot be introduced today (Project Description – The Shock of the Old:  Significant problems)

Domenico Corri was one of the many Italian musicians who worked in Britain in the late 18^th Century. As Nicola Porpora’s last student, he brought with him, to the singers of Edinburgh in 1771, knowledge of the vocal pedagogy of the Neapolitan school of singing which produced artists such as the great castrato Farinelli. 

Corri’s publications, A select collection of the most admired Songs, Duetts Etc (1782) and The Singers Preceptor (1810) provide musicians with detailed information about classical era performance styles and my current Ph.D. research project is designed to illustrate how Corri’s ideas can be used by singers today, and to show how these ideas influence my own practice.

Indeed, either an air, or recitative, sung exactly as it is commonly notated, would be be a very inexpressive, nay, a very uncouth performance; (Corri, 1782)

I will present a choice of repertoire from Corri’s publications in an open-rehearsal format which includes discussion with the keyboard player and observers on significant musical and vocal directions in the editions, including the use of messa di voce, leaping appoggiatura, the turn grace, cadenzas, observation of Corri’s breathing indicators and implied tempo modification. We will also examine the problems of using the materials in their current available formats.

Is it possible to re-imagine sonically how late 18th-century singers sounded? Currently, classical singing displays little understanding of the continuum of creative practices that existed in the 18th and 19th centuries. Documentary evidence describes how singers actively engaged with expressive techniques in improvised ways, including tempo rubato, rhythmic alteration and agogic accentuation, ornamentation, varied registral colours, sliding and trembling effects and flexible laryngeal positions in order to “[demonstrate] the performer’s unique talents as a creative artist” (John Potter, 2012, p.93). The celebrated pedagogue and inventor of the laryngoscope Manuel García II (1805–1906) was the first to describe these practices in physiological detail, but how can researchers today reconstruct such practices without being able to reference sounded evidence of historical voices? Our recent work in embodiment—a relatively new practice-led method in music research—has paved the way to build new knowledge of pre-recording era bel canto.

This is a systematic process involving i) emulation (imitation) of bel canto singers’ creative practices as preserved on early recordings. This provides an historically appropriate basis for ii) sonifying documentary evidence through practical experiments, to reimagine earlier sonic atmospheres and styles. This has afforded us, as modern trained singers, rich opportunities to expand the palette of expressive devices available to us, and to explore what these earlier practices feel like in our bodies. In this presentation we will cross-reference the recordings of star bel canto singers, including those from the García lineage—Emma Eames, Nellie Melba, and Emma Calvé, as well as Adelina Patti and Marcella Sembrich—with codified performance instructions given by García and a significant earlier vocal pedagogue Domenico Corri (1746–1825). These inspire artistic creativity in our novel interpretations of music by Handel, Mozart, Haydn, and J.C. Bach.