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Why has opera singing declined?
Bryan Caplan has been lending me CDs from the splendid series Lebendige Vergangenheit (and here), so I've been hearing or rehearing the best opera singers from the past. I'm no cultural pessimist, but I share the common opinion that opera singing has declined since, say, 1935. Why might this be?
1. Opera is less culturally central, and so the best voices do something else, or they are more likely to be narrow technicians rather than inspired musical creators and interpreters.
2. The best voices grow up watching TV, rather than reading Romain Rolland and Thomas Mann. The Zeitgeist makes them dull.
3. The average voice is much better, there is simply less individuality in approach and thus lower peaks. This sort of culturally mysterious process also seems to be governing fiction.
4. The best voices came from Germany and Italy and Austria, and World War II destroyed the musical and vocal training networks of those countries.
5. Conservatories and agents choke off musical individuality in the interests of technique and conformity.
6. Opera is now more heavily subsidized and more organizationally bureaucratic. The programs, while still excellent, are biased against individualistic, crowd-pleasing singers and biased toward singers who don't make many identifiable mistakes. It's a bit like the advent of peer review in economics.
Your thoughts?
Posted by Tyler Cowen on April 27, 2007 at 07:35 AM in Music | Permalink
Comments
Mr. Cowen, sometimes you have so good taste that it's positively offensive. Well, at least I find something I can disagree with: I think the best voices were Russian. We have the lebendige vergangenheit for Zara Dolukhanova, and they simply don't make contraltos like that anymore.
One thing that is amazing about the Russian singers is how long they lasted. For most opera singers in history, their careers go downhill after 40 for women, a little later for men, but have you seen the recording of Mark Reizen singing Gremin's aria on his ninetieth birthday? And the women lasted almost as long.
They knew something about technique, those Russians, that we have forgotten today. Otherwise they couldn't possibly have kept so good.
I'm serious. For most fields, we expect knowledge to be passed on to the next generation more or less improved, but the vocabulary for singing technique has been so vague and non-standardized that the opposite has happened for singing. Singing has relied 90% on an oral tradition (no pun intended!), so studying historical recordings is a "must" if you want to be truly good - at least that's what my wife says, and it seems to have worked for her!
Posted by: Harald Korneliussen at Apr 27, 2007 8:30:32 AM
The one opera singer I know would agree with 5-6. Technical perfection is the sine qua non of getting onto the stage.
Posted by: Cyrus at Apr 27, 2007 8:42:09 AM
I flatly disagree that opera singing has declined.
First of all, an argument like this smacks of general nostalgia and the usual "the world's gone to pot" argument.
Second, how much do we really know about the singers of those times? Sound recordings were not nearly as easy to make at the beginning of the twentieth century, so it can simply be the recordings that were made were of above-average performances. And there's been decades to lose all the bad recordings and keep on listening to the good ones.
Third, the voices might not have deteriorated so much as the orchestra has changed. I don't remember the specifics, but in her "Inner Voice" Renee Fleming writes a considerable amount about the increasing volume and pitch of the orchestra. It's simply harder to hear the amazing voices over the pit nowadays.
Of course this doesn't mean that the old classics aren't classics - it's just that our generation is just as capable of creating classics as any other.
Posted by: amissio at Apr 27, 2007 8:52:29 AM
Not all opera singing has declined, but Verdi/Puccini/Wagner singing certainly has. Performance style has become homogenized--but this has afflicted classical music generally. Standards have risen outside of (some kinds of) opera but the interpretive peaks are smoothed out.
By contrast, many of the great singers we miss were pretty lousy interpreters. So it can't be that alone we're missing. I suspect technique is a huge factor in the decline of big, great voices.
Posted by: gundryggia at Apr 27, 2007 9:25:27 AM
7. Your memory of the past is skewed. Stumbling on Happiness, blah blah blah.
Posted by: KRM at Apr 27, 2007 9:35:24 AM
There clearly is a decline but I'm not sure when it started. The zeitgeist is probably one reason. I suspect there is a medical reason as well, having to do with the focus on technical perfection. Recordings from the seventies are much better than those from the eighties when the SSRI pills became common.
Still there are some great singers out there. Here in Sweden we have the russian-born soprano Maria Fontosh who is really a phenomenon, but for some reason extremly underestimated by the critics.
Posted by: Paradigm at Apr 27, 2007 10:11:58 AM
Electronic amplification.
Posted by: Vincent Clement at Apr 27, 2007 10:17:09 AM
(1) It's boring listening to people sing in a foreign language I don't understand.
(2) People with great voices, if they have common sense, will used their talents to enter a more financially lucrative genre of music.
Posted by: Half Sigma at Apr 27, 2007 10:23:21 AM
I'm not sure decline is the right word, it's always been a truism that quality of opera singing has peaks and valleys. Strong in the Caruso and slightly earlier era, strong again in the 50's - 70's, not so strong at other times like the 30's. Also, different types of voice are emphasized at different times -- the heavy sopranos of the 50's Met are definitely out now.
And if you want to hear some really bizarre stuff, try the 1904 (?) recording of the once highly praised Gemma Dusignani (may have spelled the name wrong -- but she sang the first modern dress Traviata) singing Sempre Libera -- but apparently a contemporary described it as cruc' e niente delicioso.
In response to Half Sigma, I have a working knowledge of Italian and German, so I can sort of follow opera in those languages, but I can still recall performances of opera in Russian and Czech that were unforgettable. It's not the language is the artistic idiom and conventions one needs to appreciate. Rather like knowing the grammar of silent movies.
Posted by: Gene O'Grady at Apr 27, 2007 10:31:51 AM
Perhaps the quality of the "Best" singers, directors, choreographers, producers has not declined and the problem is dilution.
Back in the day, there were relatively few opera houses that could afford the best of the best. Operas at these places were excellent, the others were the minor leagues. Now, perhaps, we have the same number of major league performers, but more major league Opera houses.
Baseball is an apt metaphor, for the same debate has been going on there since the 1970s.
Posted by: Allan at Apr 27, 2007 10:31:53 AM
According to a Swedish singing teacher that once gave me a few lessons, the downfall of opera singing was the generalized use of tight jeans.
Posted by: Isabel at Apr 27, 2007 10:35:55 AM
Tyler,
What do you think about this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/26/business/26scene.html?ex=1335240000&en=93ec2a0f5c622931&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
Posted by: L Monasterio at Apr 27, 2007 11:09:31 AM
Godawful boring, pretentious music, sung in grating style... who listens to that crap anyhow?
Posted by: shecky at Apr 27, 2007 11:16:51 AM
"I've been hearing or rehearing the best opera singers from the past."
It's selection bias. See Sturgeon, T.
Posted by: Sock Puppet of the Great Satan at Apr 27, 2007 11:28:16 AM
Tyler,
What do you think about this?
Posted by: L Monasterio at Apr 27, 2007 11:47:55 AM
I dont believe that opera singing has declined. I believe that back in the day music was more about voice quality and now with the singers today it is about a persons looks. Im pretty sure everyone agrees that music today is extremely different than music in the 30s.
Posted by: Lauren at Apr 27, 2007 11:51:47 AM
Joshua Bell. 'nuff said.
Okay, maybe not enough. For those of you who aren't familiar, a top violinist with an extremely rare violin
played an extremely difficult "very beautiful" piece at a train station and was promptly ignored.
Lesson: all of the quality of music above a (suprisingly low) threshold is socially constructed. Whether you
like it depends on how much you're influenced by snobs, not your own independent judgment.
Posted by: Person at Apr 27, 2007 12:08:07 PM
Perhaps the problem isn't the singers, but the libretti. There certainly hasn't been much good new opera since the mid-30s, except possibly musicals.
A theory for the decline of opera was that all the good opera composers (German Jews, largely) moved to America to escape the Nazis, and ended up composing for movies; and that Hollywood has maintained its hold on composers who might have become opera composers previously.
(I read this theory in a book review in The New Republic in the pre-web age, but it sounds reasonable to me.)
Posted by: Anthony at Apr 27, 2007 12:23:44 PM
No one likes a sad ending these days, which disqualifies most of the operas from the 1800s.
Posted by: Paradigm at Apr 27, 2007 12:45:08 PM
Also take into account that now with TV, you see a show and you don't have to experience it live.
This came from comedians/magicians in the past, that they could repeat and repeat their shows to different audiences because there was no TV, but now in present time they'd need to update their repertoire faster.
Posted by: billgaste at Apr 27, 2007 2:25:24 PM
See this: http://www.princeton.edu/~artspol/Paden.html
Posted by: Tyler Cowen at Apr 27, 2007 3:46:16 PM
If you want to "blame" something for the decline of opera, blame capitalism and libertarianism, both of which tend to drive any entertainment or artistic form towards the mass market and hence the less discriminating. That means opera has yielded to the Broadway Musical and Hollywood/Bollywood musical.
Simply put, libertarian notions of economic efficiency are often antithetical to artistic excellence and discriminating taste.
Posted by: squik at Apr 27, 2007 4:04:23 PM
Tyler,
Since 1935, we have had the great generation of the 1950s and 1960s: Maria Callas, Renata Tebaldi, Mario Del Monaco, Giuseppe Di Stefano, Franco Corelli, Ettore Bastianini, Cesare Siepi. In Germany, Elizabeth Schwarzkopf. In America, Richard Tucker, Leonard Warren, and Beverly Sills. If you want to go for elegance and style, Carlo Bergonzi, Alfredo Kraus, and Teresa Berganza. We have had the absolute and dominating voices of Joan Sutherland and Montserrat Caballe in the 1970s. In the 1980s, the Rossini Renaissance stemmed from the unique singing by Samuel Ramey, Marilyn Horne, Chris Merritt, and Rockwell Blake, in addition to the aforementioned Caballe and Sutherland. What about Pavarotti, Domingo, and Carreras? For the Wagnerians, Nilsson and Windgassen. From Eastern Europe: Nicolai Ghiaurov and Boris Christoff. Currently on stage: Mariella Devia and Edita Gruberova. Currently on stage, and likely to last in the foreseeable future: Juan Diego Florez and Natalie Dessay.
I would agree, only to some extent, on #5 and #6 as drivers for #3. But overall, I think we still have a strong case for cultural optimism here. Opera is a very resilient form of art. You may want to rethink your assumptions. I will be glad to send a few recording your way if it can help.
Posted by: Adolfo at Apr 27, 2007 5:17:55 PM
Thanks to better recording technology, more people are listening more critically to opera singers. Reputation and nostalgia carried the singers of the past more than those of today.
Posted by: Tom T. at Apr 28, 2007 12:00:20 AM
but I share the common opinion that opera singing has declined since, say, 1935. Why might this be?
How can we begin to tell? Recording technology has changed beyond belief since then.
Now, what is true is that the sound of recordings has changed. I have a friend who hates classical CDs because CD encoding involves cutting the waveforms, and CD production tries to be very smooth.
Though I don't feel so strongly about it, I also like the feeling I get of '30s recordings. I wonder if what's happening is that classical recordings sound better to many with whatever kind of aural fuzz recordings from the 30s had.
Posted by: Jon Kay at Apr 28, 2007 8:54:56 PM
