1. First, perhaps, should come this question of emotion. It’s all very well for KS to counsel us not to work directly on it. But in opera, it is often clearly the very point of the expressive effort, and thus something that really cannot be “left alone,” much less left to an undetermined outcome. Any classical singer is, a priori, in a different state of being than is any speaking actor. It’s not only that sung expression is always at a higher level of impassionization than spoken, irrespective of the  stylistic medium or the temperamental proclivities of a given singer. Or that the singing actor must therefore reach for an extension and sustainment of energies so closely related to the visceral sources of emotion as to be inseparable from them. It’s that the stage world he inhabits is aloft in the sphere of music. Music is itself his primary “given condition,” already in place before he encounters any of those presented by the dramatic narrative, which must be related principally by the music, of which the words are a component part, their everyday “meanings” still present, but transformed. That alone would seem to put emotion in the driver’s seat. Yet, paradoxically, the very nature of the singer’s “state of being” dictates that emotion be kept under the strictest supervision, on penalty of losing one or more of the three intertwined balance points (of breath, of registration, and of the acoustical spectrum) on which artistic expression with the voice depends. This condition, of emotion present and palpable in the tone, yet withheld by the necessities of tone over a wide range of pitches and dynamics, has no equivalent for the speaking actor.

2. And that relates to a second important difference from the speaking actor’s situation: the absolutes of the written score. Here the singer’s tasks are more closely related to the dancer’s than to the speaking actor’s. The singing actor’s work is filled with vocal/musical requirements, physical requirements, that are not negotiable, and they leave much less wiggle room than the actor has for even the clearest of the demands made upon him. Either the singer can fulfill these requirements, or not. Hence, much of his preparation for professional employment must in most cases be devoted to mastering these absolute demands. And as they are non-negotiable, they determine at least the broad outlines of interpretive choice. The melodic and rhythmic contours are, in effect, the singer’s “line readings,” and the harmonic context at least strongly suggests the mood, the dominant color, of a song, a phrase, a bar. Moreover, the singer operates within a succession of musical structures. They also are absolutes, and whether present at first glance in a “numbers” opera or quite subliminally woven into a through-composed one, they constitute the layout of the singer’s role, the particular way his or her story will be told. The singer must therefore be aware of and responsive to the structural points being made, and search out their expressive potentials, to simply make good sense of his work. Always, the singer’s interpretive creativity lies primarily in the realm of musical interpretation and in the exploitation of words, not so much for their denotative meanings (though those are never absent), but as sounds, for their value as emotionally brimming events within the music. They, in turn, give birth to new depths of “meaning,” more readily felt than defined.