Callas would fall chronologically into Group 3. As Will points out, and as we can confirm by reference to the stats, Callas was an outlier in her time in three respects. First, she already had an unusually slow average rate (hanging around between 5.0 and 5.2, again isolating for the high C) while still in her twenties.^(I) Second, she displayed a marked discrepancy between forte and piano notes, the latter, Will tells us, “almost always below what any non-elderly singer had done before.” Third, she had “a truly unprecedented slowness in the upper range in comparison to the rest of the voice,” and this whether at forte or piano—a rate “previously reached only by a few elderly singers recording near or after retirement.” Finally, while all this made Callas an outlier in Group 3, she’d fit right in with Group 5, the most recent one.

There’s much more to be explored in this matter of vibrato rates and their association with vocal stability and longevity, both with respect to Callas herself and to the state of vocality in general. But one association is sufficiently substantiated to declare it an established fact, and that is between the decline in rates and the advent of the slow, wide wobble, a form of functional decay never encountered among the earlier singers except at advanced ages and career stages, and rarely then, but a frequent symptom now among younger, mid-career singers, and the most easily heard flaw in Callas’ singing (see below).^(II) Amplitude (that is, the swing in pitch above and below the note being sung) is involved here, too, and our ears would tell us that it is the key element in the sometimes excruciating episodes encountered with progressive frequency in Callas’ singing. As it happens, though, the evidence indicates that in Callas’ voice speed itself is the more important determinant, compared with other voices similarly afflicted.

As to the cause(s) of this lowered vitality of vocal function, it seems inescapable that it reflects a weakening of laryngeal energization, of the brain-to-muscle impulse that mobilizes the entire chain of co-ordinations that constitute “voice” as we are speaking of it, and that this weakening is an aspect of our devolution from a natural, warm-body mode of communication to the predominantly virtual ones we activate now. The synchronicity of the decline with the introduction of the microphone (it’s been just about 100 years now, since that device launched radio, electrical-process recording, the talkies, and many other aspects of spoken and sung communication), and of the several generations of expanded usage and the setting of models—to the point that the virtual has installed itself as “the natural”—with the acceleration of the decline, is too sharp for our common-sense deductive faculties to ignore. Still, since even associations as strong as these aren’t proof, I believe we must hold open the possibility that for some reason (environmental, perhaps?) there has been a deterioration in the responsiveness of the tissue itself, instead of or in addition to weakened energization, that bears some of the responsibility. As to the large and urgent question of what, if anything, might be done by way of remediation of this logy overall condition (through training, for example), I’ll have to bypass that for today, in favor of pondering a proposed contribution of technique to the distressingly early loss of voice in the specific instance of one supremely gifted artist, Maria Callas.

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I have often heard and read that Callas had a superb technique but a flawed voice. Since, as I suggested earlier, I believe that voice is as it does, and that we cannot separate “voice” from “technique,” I disagree. But then I encounter some version of a question Cori Ellison asks in her article: “How could a singer with an ugly voice and a flawed technique be the supreme master of bel canto, in which tonal beauty and technical perfection are everything?” A logical question, but one that has an easy answer: “technique” has two levels, the executional and the functional. The latter underlies the former. Talented, ambitious, hard-working singers (I think we can agree that Callas was all three) routinely override functional problems, of which they are often unaware, to achieve their interpretive and aesthetic goals. Until they can’t. And when the singer’s talent, ambition, and work ethic are all as abnormal as Callas’, there can be a wide discrepancy between executional fulfillment and underlying dysfunctional tendencies.