Artistic singing originated in the search after the best method of delivering the chants used in the early Christian church. These chants developed from the materials used in the worship of the first followers of the new religion. Of the psalms, hymns and spiritual songs mentioned by St. Paul, the first were taken from the ancient Hebrew ritual, the second were texts from the Bible and not forming part of the psalter (as the thanksgiving of Hannah) and since called canticles, and the third were rhapsodizings and improvised songs made among the Christians themselves. In these rhapsodizings, described by the apostle as the " gift of tongues," the early Christians almost certainly made an adaptation of the Greek custom of caroling on vowel sounds in honor of the gods. These carolings consisted of long, undulating cadences on single vowel tones, such as one hears sometimes even now in the final phrases of church chants. Thus entered the florid element, which afterward rose to such artistic height.
Out of these elements grew up a chanted liturgy. No general system was possible, however, till the unification of the Roman Church under Constantine (306-337). Then came the foundation of singing schools in Rome by Pope Sylvester, the entrusting of church singing entirely to the choirs by the Council of Laodicea in 367, and other important steps.
The building up of the vast and splendid treasury of Roman church music occupied centuries, and its history must be sought elsewhere. But through the labors of the Benedictine fathers of Solesmes we are able to arrive at a knowledge of the amount of vocal culture which the early church singers possessed. As the chant gained in breadth, dignity and fluency and as it added to its sustained cantilena a richly florid element the singers acquired a solid body of fundamental technique.
We find, then, that before the middle of the Sixteenth Century all the basic essentials of vocal art had been ascertained and were systematically taught. The ability to sing smooth, flowing music in long, beautiful tones (legato), the importance of breath control in sustaining tone, and joining notes in symmetrical phrases, the value of pure vowel sounds, the necessity of distinct enunciation of consonants and the skill to deliver the florid passages with elegance and agility were assiduously studied, and many singers excelled in these matters. Several treatises on voice and singing appeared about the beginning of the Seventeenth Century and these contained many of the principles afterward incorporated in the modern Italian method. These treatises dealt with the different kinds of voice, registers (head and chest were recognized), emission of tone, hygiene and deportment. They contained vocalizes for each voice on all the intervals.
When the Italian opera was invented at the end of the Sixteenth Century its music differed in no essential of technical requirement from that of the church, and hence singers were prepared to deliver it. The first recitatives were musically nothing other than secular chants. With the advent of Claudio Monteverde (1567-1643) the element of dramatic expression forged to the front and the chant began to approach true recitative. Rhythm and accentuation, previously of small moment, now began to be significant, while the melodic phrase appeared and became the bridge between recitative and air.
The true aria, however, arrived a little later in the works of Cavalli (1599-1676) and in it the melodic basis of music finally and fully superseded the literary basis on which the chant form had rested. The dramatic character of singing now became defined and its technic entered upon a period of development embracing not only all the essentials demanded by the old church compositions but the added excellences of great flexibility of tone, skill in nuance, taste in phrasing and a larger agility than had previously been known. Monteverde had utilized florid cadences similar to those of the ornate chant, and his successors were not slow to perceive the pleasing possibilities of such writing, which they assiduously cultivated.
In 1637 the first public opera house, the Teatro San Cassiano in Venice, was opened and opera was transferred from the exclusive consideration of a cultured nobility to that of the general audience. It was now required to appeal to popular taste. The result was that in a short time it became a field for the display of vocal skill. This reduction of opera to a low artistic level deprived singing of its dramatic sincerity but equipped it with a remarkable technique. The operas of the closing years of the Seventeenth Century, especially those of Alessandro Scarlatti (1659-1725) showed a perfect demarcation of the various forms of recitative, clearly defined aria forms and all possible vocal requirements from broad and sustained cantilena to the most brilliant colorature. High voices were almost exclusively used, basses being the only low ones. Tenors were employed sparingly. Sopranos, male as well as female, reigned, while contraltos were their consorts.
In 1700 we find fully equipped singing schools teaching the now completely codified Italian method. These were the schools of Fedi at Rome, Antonio Pistocchi at Bologna, Joseph Brevio at Modena, Francesco Redi at Florence, Joseph Amadori at Rome and those of Porpora, Leo and Egizzio at Naples. Some of the pupils taught by these masters were the famous Caffarelli, Farinelli, Tesi, Cuzzoni and Bordoni. These singers and their contemporaries were heard frequently in the works of Handel, the greatest master of the period, whose recitatives and arias provide us with the best understanding of the character of the music of the time. The breadth and dramatic dignity of his recitatives have never been surpassed, while his arias demand of the singer perfect quality of tone, flawless intonation, great breath support, command of brilliant floridity, and great beauty of style in sustained cantilena. They summarize the best traits of the music of the preceding century without preserving its extravagances, and for this reason are the most admirable schooling for singers.
The domination of great singers, however, led to a rapid decline of the Italian opera and in the period immediately succeeding that of Handel it became a mere parade ground for vocal show. Feats of agility and breath sustaining were accepted in lieu of beautiful style and expression. However, the time was now at hand when the element of nationalism was to make itself felt in opera, the great field of artistic singing. Italian opera had ruled for a time in France and Germany, but these countries were developing schools of their own. In France the labors of Lully (1633-1687) and Rameau (1683-1764) had established a national school in which broad, elegant, finished recitative and a classically suave and dignified delivery, known as the " grand style," were the imperative demands. This style was preserved in the operas of Gluck (1714-1787). The florid element found little favor with the French masters and by centering attention upon the grandiose character of their music and the pompous style of its delivery they preserved French opera from becoming merely a field for the exploitation of vocal agility. The problems thrust into vocal technique by the nature of the French language early attracted the attention of Parisian singing teachers and as far back as 1668 we find Bernard Bacilly (Remarques sur l'Art de Bien Chanter) explaining how the final E in feminine rhymes should be pronounced and giving directions for other peculiarities of singing in his native tongue. The suave and elegant character of the older French vocal music survives in the graceful measures of such works as Gounod's " Faust," while the most accomplished Gallic singers of the present possess a polish in their melodic phrasing and their pronunciation of the words which is the result of precepts laid down by Lully and Rameau.
In Germany, as in France, Italian conceptions of singing at first prevailed, but in the course of time the temperament of the people and the exigencies of the national language combined to produce a style essentially Teutonic. The taste of the Germans for musical plays was largely developed and formed by the " singspiel," in which song alternated with spoken dialogue, as in modern " comic operas " and in Beethoven's " Fidelio." From long familiarity with the " singspiel " the German gained a conception of the musical play which demanded a perfect understanding of what was going forward on the stage. The result was that when recitative began to take the place of spoken dialogue he still expected to hear every word of the text in order that he might follow the development of the story. This public demand led to a cultivation of clear enunciation. But the character of the German tongue easily betrayed singers into a sacrifice of beautiful vowel sounds and the concomitant beauty of vocal tone to forcible delivery of the consonant. This trait of German singing was emphasized by the popular seriousness toward all forms of drama, which forbade all sacrifice of interpretation for the sake of merely external polish, and indeed on the other hand rather called for the sacrifice of beauty to truth whenever the two seemed to be opposed. The exaggerated treatment of the consonants worked its way from recitative into the cantilena and thus all lightness of style and elegance, such as was prevalent in the florid school of song, disappeared from the German manner of singing.
The various conflicting elements of vocal art were more nearly harmonized in the works of Mozart than in those of any other composer. In his operas we find all kinds of recitative, from the lightest and airiest conversational type to the broadest and stateliest dramatic utterance. His singers were thus required to have great elasticity of delivery, while in the flowing passages of his arias Mozart exacted from them the broadest, smoothest and most musical manner of singing. He preserved in certain parts the florid style of the earlier Italian operas (as in the music of the " Queen of the Night " in " The Magic Flute ") and he utilized also the more dramatic style of florid song, as in the great airs of Donna Anna and Donna Elvira in " Don Giovanni." But in using the latter he broadened and deepened its dramatic significance so as to impose new requirements upon the singers of his works.
When, therefore, Beethoven and Weber, the first masters of the modern German School, came to write their operas, they built chiefly upon the foundations which they had in the works of Mozart. In such episodes of their operas as the "Abscheulicher " in " Fidelio " and " Ocean, thou mighty monster " in "Oberon," they refashioned all the elements prepared for them in such numbers as the " Don Ottavio, son morta " of " Don Giovanni." They employed the broad and powerfully accented recitative, the style half way between recitative and aria (called arioso), the sustained melodic phraseology and the big, dramatic kind of florid passage work, best described as dramatic bravura. This kind of song abounds in runs and other difficulties, but these are treated with a view to their expressive character and with no regard for their availability as mere mediums for the display of vocal skill. Just as Weber used the most brilliant flashing of violins through the range of the scale in his overtures so he used the voice in some of his dramatic scenes.
But this practise of the German composers, developed in order to meet the public demand for sincerity of expression, did not affect vocal style in Italy. Although the operas of the Rossinian period showed an advance over their predecessors, in some details of dramatic expression, they preserved most of the characteristics of the older school, and singing continued to be a display of technical skill in the delivery of tones without much regard for the pronunciation of the text or the significance of the scene. At this time, however, the introduction of the custom of writing operas with the recitatives accompanied throughout by the orchestra, whereas the harpsichord had been previously used for much of this work, led to the recognition of the need for bigger tone and greater volume in the cantilena, in order that the recitatives should not become apparently the more important parts of the works. It was, therefore, in the first thirty or forty years of the Nineteenth Century that the school of combined florid and dramatic singing reigned, of which Malibran, Pasta and Grisi were representative women, and Rubini, Lablanche and Mario representative men. The singers of this school preserved much of the vocal technique of the Handelian period, but superimposed upon it an energy, a vigor of accentuation and a largeness of tone which naturally obliterated some of the elegant finish of its details.
At the time when the revolutionary theories of Richard Wagner worked such radical changes in the character of the lyric drama, singing was hovering between the German style, which placed force and enunciation before beauty of tone, and the Italian manner, which strove to conserve purely superficial beauty and yet introduce dramatic appearance. Each school continued to use those set forms of aria which invited both composer and singer to offer an exhibition of either technique or expression to the audience. Wagner, by abandoning the set forms and endeavoring to fashion his operas as plays in continuous dialogue, threw out of his entire scheme the necessity for set exhibitions of singing, either florid or dramatic. His works became long sequences of recitatives, heavily orchestrated, and here and there broken by purely lyric passages, conceived rather in the arioso than the aria character. At this same period Meyerbeer, the most potent influence in the operatic world up to the time of Wagner's final triumph, was composing óperas with powerful and brilliant orchestration and many arioso passages throughout. Meyerbeer, however, strove to retain the more popular elements of floridity and the set vocal piece.
The result was that singing and the composition of music for vocal plays moved steadily toward the conditions existing at the present day. In Germany the study of beautiful tone and facile execution has been superseded by a search after volume of tone and forcible declamation of text. Florid music is neglected and the prolonged study of vocalizes, such as was essential to a command of the music of the Handelian era, has been abandoned. At Bayreuth, the home of the Wagner family, it is taught that the proper way to sing the music of Wagner is to lean heavily on all consonants and to study vowel sounds not as producers of beautiful vocal tone but with regard only for their conversational character. In short, the contemporaneous German School of singing is the last and extremest development of the literary idea in vocal music, the idea which lay at the basis of the early chant, but which was speedily superseded by the musical conception of the art.
In Italy the elegant and fluent style of the school of Rossini has yielded to German influence and in the search after truthful dramatic expression the young Italian school of composers has produced large quantities of music which demands of the singer no skill in execution, but merely abundance of rich and powerful tone, ability to sustain long and heavy phrases, and vigor in declamatory emphasis. The radical difference between the contemporaneous Italian style and that of Germany is that the former is founded upon a purely musical conception. The Italian seeks rather for splendor and mass of tone than for finish in treatment of the text. The French School, following the trend given to it by Lully and Rameau, continues to cultivate elegance and refinement of diction together with suave and fluent delivery of tone.
A modern development of singing is found in the field of the song, which form of composition assumed importance through the genius of Franz Schubert (1797-1828). His works combined melodic grace and fluency with poetic embodiment of the moods of his texts. The vocal technic and style of the Weber period more than sufficed for the interpretation of these songs. But in later years song became affected by the literary idea to such an extent that verbal emphasis overbalanced beauty of tone, and the most recent songs show a decided attempt to follow the lines of dramatic recitative as fashioned in German operas. Song singers, however, are able to devote more attention to pure beauty of tone than opera singers are, for the reason that the latter are obliged to sacrifice so much for the sake of mere volume.
It is almost wholly in features of style that singing has changed in the past hundred years. The theory of tone formation, and the conception of the voice remain the same now as they were in the days of Pasta and Malibran and they were the same then as in the time of Porpora and his celebrated pupils, Caffarelli and Farinelli. The physiology of the vocal organs is better known, but this knowledge has not disproved the correctness of the practise of the great teachers of 1700. The test teachers of the present time are those who strive to impart the principles taught by the schools of Bernacchi and Pistocchi, but the cultivation of the higher refinements of those schools has been discouraged by the popularity of loud and violent singing, the heavily accentuated declamation of the contemporaneous schools.
