Singers Now and Then
By W. J. Henderson
The first half of the eighteenth century is accepted by historians of musical art as the golden age of singing. Nevertheless, it is often questioned whether the singers of to-day are not as great as those who caroled the arias of Handel in the Haymarket. To the typical opera-goer of the present the names of Caffarelli, Farinelli, Senesino, Faustina, and their contemporaries are not even echoes. His acquaintance with the names of singers goes back only as far as the halcyon days of Grisi and Mario. Jenny Lind and Tietjens he may have heard of, and the name of Giorgio Ronconi may not be altogether strange to him.
But he who reads the records of song knows that according to all accounts, contemporary and subsequent, the singers of the early eighteenth century were the demigods of a sort of age of fable. They seem now to have moved through a rosy mist of glory with their sublime heads haloed by the radiant stars. They were princes and queens; at their feet the world bowed and fell. Furthermore, they were the first and the only authentic exponents of that most adorable of all arts, the Italian bel canto, the art of singing beautifully. They drew their knowledge from the original and unpolluted fountain. They poured it in rivers of pure water through Europe, and made the land glow with the verdure of a spring that has never returned.
At any rate, that is how it all appears to one who looks back into the record of the time or turns the pages of histories compiled by men who never heard a songbird earlier than Piccolomini. What, then, are we to think of our idols of today? How does our adored Jean de Reszke compare with the princes of song in the early eighteenth century? What rank would have been accorded to the suave and polished Plançon or to the beloved Sembrich?
These are questions which cannot be answered to general satisfaction. To project a de Reszke into the serene atmosphere of the era of “Radamisto” or “Almira”? would be to thrust upon a comfortable public a problem quite insoluble. To ask the votaries of Siegfried and Otello to listen to Caffarelli or Farinelli singing one of their elaborate exfoliations of a melodic idea would be to invite an emphatic expression of impatience. The singers of the golden age sang with a totally different purpose from that of the singers of to-day, and to that purpose their style was adapted. They were singers pure and simple. They had to contend with no obstacles of textual significance. No strange and ear-testing intervals confronted them. The orchestra never obtruded a vigorous independence of utterance upon their ears. And above all, they were not called upon to unite with the graces of song the interpretative functions of the actor.
If we go back to the very beginnings of operatic art, we find that the recitative invented by the Florentine adventurers into music was very elementary in its demands on the artist. It serves to convince us that the characteristics of fine singing in the days of Francesca Caccini, daughter of Giulio Caccini, author of the Nuovo Musiche, must have been smoothness, purity, and equability of tone, and a fluent emission of the successive notes. These are the basic qualities of the Italian legato, the foundation of all good singing. Caccini, however, wrote some simple ornamental passages, and from these and similar ones in the works of his contemporaries were developed the
