Those of you who read my brief commentary on the Met’s Idomeneo revival (8/10/22) may have wondered why I passed over any mention of the singer of the title part, Michael Spyres. This was by no means because I considered his contribution artistically negligible, but because I wished to take a more extended look at the vocality he is presently championing. The role of Idomeneo, though designated for tenor, lies unnaturally low for any voice we think of as belonging to that category. (Except for a single appoggiatura on an A in “Torna la pace,” its highest note is G, accessed many times, often in passing but sometimes in sustained or declamatory mode.) That’s because it was written for Anton Raaff, a star of the preceding generation whose voice was well past its “best used by” date in 1781. We would normally assume that a role of that time that looks this way on the page must have been written with the presumption of higher ornamental improvisations by the singer. But that seems not to have been the case with Idomeneo. In any case, such interpolations would have been rendered in one variety or another of the reinforced head-voice adjustments with which all tenors then accessed anything above—at a stretch—an old-tuning A, and which we wouldn’t recognize as “full voice.” (I))At the lower end, the part requires low Ds, and even a C, which must be solid and sonorous enough to provide a balanced ground against all three female-voiced principals singing far above the “tenor” in the Act 3 quartet. Yet the combination of tessitura and floridity in the writing would prove problematic for almost all voices we define as baritone.
We have to concede that vocal categories are mutable (certainly the histories of “tenor” and “baritone” illustrate that), and that in declaring one to be “normative,” we are selecting it over other possibilities. But in an effort to examine the legitimacy of a proposed outlier category, we do need to be clear about what we are measuring it against. Where “tenor” and “baritone” are concerned, the standard I’ll be using here comprises 1) voices intended to interpret Western classical music; 2) specifically, operatic music of that tradition; 3) thus, music meant to be sung acoustically from a stage, with orchestral accompaniment; 4) finally, music that reflects both categories as settled upon (with much, though gradually diminishing, overlap with previous usages) some 150-200 years ago—in short, what we still think of as the “modern” tenor and baritone vocalities. Eliminated, therefore, are all voices cultivated for microphone usages, regardless of their pitch ranges. Once the requirement for acoustical projection is removed, the categories collapse not only as to amplitude, but with regard to aesthetic standards and technical control as well, and no valid comparisons can be made. This excludes from our consideration all pop/folk/rock singers of the past 80-90 years, and the voices of our popular music theatre of the past 65 or so as well, whether or not they make “legit” noises, since all shows (even the revivals of once-acoustical ones) have been miked during that time.(II) It also excludes some (not all) voices cultivated primarily for art-song interpretation, and others trained to our inferences of Baroque vocality. These types do sing within the Western classical tradition, and acoustically, but with limitations of amplitude and (usually) of range relative to our standard. And a final grouping cast into outer darkness by this definition is that of the male falsettists—imitation evirati—who call themselves “countertenors.”
Footnotes
| ↑I | The history of concert pitch and its measuring methods is complicated, so an accepted Viennese diapason c. 1780 (including Mozart’s own) in the low 420s doesn’t necessarily mean that the same would apply in, say, the Naples of Rossini’s time there. It does, though, strongly suggest that where Idomeneo is concerned, all those Gs were more like G-flats, and that the lie of the music was even less “tenorial” than what we’d normally hear now. (I’m assuming that for this opera, the Met orchestra tuned at our standard A=440. |
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| ↑II | This miked-vs.-acoustical distinction is increasingly ignored, and is one we must insist on. I notice that Wikipedia’s entry on “baritenor” confuses the term with its pop/B’way purloinings, and winds up citing Frank Sinatra as an exemplar. |