Following up on my discussion of the problems posed by the extreme range of Berg’s Sprechgesang instructions (especially for the female voice) in the context of the theatre rhetoric that he and Schönberg  grew up with, Will also appended recordings by three prominent Austro-German actresses—Rosa Poppe (rec. 1904), Margarethe Wiedecke (an operetta soubrette, rec. 1912), and Tilla Durieux (1928). They all show the same wide inflectional range, passing across the passaggio in both directions, that we identify with Anglo-American and French actresses from that period, though of course with timbral variations reflecting differences in linguistic set and cultural attitudes. Durieux, a major actress, is especially interesting for us, inasmuch as her performance is of the final scene of Wilde’s Salome in German translation, with the text corresponding to the same passage in Strauss’s opera. And the recording’s relatively late date gives us some assurance as to pitch accuracy. Her voice embraces great lower-range power in declamatory mode, alternating with a higher, girlish delicacy in the more intimate one, but of course does not extend the “head voice” reach to anything like the pitch or sustainment requirements of Berg’s scoring.

Will also points out that some of the recordings of the celebrated Alexander Moissi, leading man of Max Reinhardt’s famed Berlin ensemble, take him into what is in effect tenor tessitura, with no sense of undue strain or loss of quality. And he writes: “Why would Berg think it a good idea to do male roles fairly close to the extended speaking range of Moissi, but female roles far from the range of Durieux and other recorded women from the period? Did he not really want that range, or was he unsure where it lay? I have the feeling that Berg simply wrote in singing ranges as he understood them (yes, tending to extremes, but not ridiculous extremes) and then unthinkingly assumed that anything could be moved into Sprechstimme as he laid that sauce over what he had composed.”

That’s my feeling, too. I think that Berg didn’t have enough working knowledge of voice to understand that whereas well-developed male voices can venture above the “break,” even in Sprech-y mode, without danger of losing essential continuity, female ones cannot—the required level of “support,” “resistance,” “compression” (take your choice of any one, two, or all three) would prohibit their required and natural upper extension and distort tonal quality to no expressive purpose. And in any case the gap between male Sprechstimme and the straight-tone usages of many a Germanic bass or baritone (and not always in character roles!) is so slight as to be a distinction without a difference; there is no female equivalent that is aesthetically acceptable even to ears tolerant of that from the men (cf. the upper range of late-period Anja Silja). Restricting all of Marie’s role to the confines of the extended speaking range would be too limiting, but Berg coulda/shoulda kept the Sprechstimme to something like that (perhaps pushing that envelope a bit, since operatic voices are stronger and more fully developed than any actress’s), and made the upper octave or so singing-only territory. Even that would be tricky, but doable.

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And finally, A Conductor’s Lament, subtitle: Thoughts on the Decline of Classical Music and the Conducting Profession. This substantial essay (some fifty pages, as printed out) has been forwarded to me by a colleague. It’s the cri de coeur of a professional conductor who has found the artistic world he strove to belong to one of increasingly mechanical practice (he calls it “template-based musical performance”) lacking in ideals, ethics, and dedication, and thoroughly commercialized.