One of those teachers, though (my first, Lief, or Leon, Kurzer), had laid great emphasis on a strongly held view of the role of breath in singing, and taught it effectively in the sense that, because it addressed an important functional issue, as opposed to the more cosmetic solutions of placement-oriented teachers, had an undoubted effect, in certain respects positive, on the voices he worked with. He belonged to the generation of World War Two emigrés—singers, conductors, teachers, coaches—who were so instrumental in the development of the American operatic scene in the 1940s and ’50s, not only pedagogically, but in the establishment of workshops, academic departments, and regional opera companies. His personal history (he’d sung in Berlin in the ’30s) included one of the too-many stories of narrow escape we heard in those years—a border crossing into France, a brief time of concealment in Paris, internment in Vichy France, and ultimately intervention from a member of the Rothschild family that enabled him to come to America. In his own student years, he had studied with George Armin, a prominent teacher in Germany (and later in Denmark) from the early 1900s until his death in 1963.

Armin’s central concept was the Stauprinzip, the “Stowing Principle,” in which the inhaled air is, in  effect, dammed under the glottis, thus heightening the compression which the vocal folds, in their valve function, are seeking to contain while maintaining phonation. Armin, following a line of teachers that sought to establish a native school of technique better adapted, in their view, to the vocal requirements of German opera, song, and declamation than the old Italian methods,  developed his theories in a long series of books and pamphlets, and exercised a strong influence on German pedagogy in the interwar years, though not without raising significant opposition. I own only one of his books (the one called “Das Stauprinzip“), and though I think I grasp his ideas fairly well, would rather present them here as I learned them in practice during my several years of study with Kurzer. ^(I) Lief’s primary exercise for “stowing” the breath was a sharp intake of air followed by a quick shutting of the glottis. The highly compressed air was held for a few seconds, then released in a sort of mini-explosion. Often, the student would sing some exercise pattern immediately afterward. Of course one cannot sing while holding the breath; the object was to sufficiently develop the feel of the stowed air while the “cords” are vibrating, and to make that feel reflexive, so that resistance to a high degree of compression became a default setting and the singer could release the stowing work and sing freely with increased power and range—a high-pressure version of the respiratory balance I described above. Kurzer did not, however, advocate a conscious expansion of the chest, abdomen, and lower back, or a “tanking up” with great quantities of air.

The other marked feature of Kurzer’s instruction was that though our vocalization often employed the traditional “pure” Italian vowels, much of it was done (following Armin) on the “mixed ” vowels (predominantly, ü and ö, and their variants) encountered in German, French, and, in slightly different shades, the Scandinavian languages. Functionally, the “mixed” aspect of these vowels inheres in the introduction of Upper Family activity into Lower Family territory. Thus, they can be useful in blending the “registers” from above; however, they also tend to be associated with the D/P/L  conformation, whereas the Stauprinzip, with its strong laryngeal energization and identification with “chest” grounding, inclines toward a heavy-calibre version of a B/L/T setting. While I’m sure that teachers of the Armin school saw this combination of registrational and vowel-formation concepts as beneficial, uniting the positional steadiness and power to be obtained through stowing with the warmer timbre and more “relaxed” action of the mixed vowels, it can also harbor a contradiction. In my own case (as I later analyzed it), the inherently pleasing timbre of my lyric baritone voice was certainly much augmented in size and completeness of tone through my study with Lief, but hampered by a peculiarly “heady” weightiness in the segment just below the passaggio, so that my access to the upper range was labored and my endurance limited.