The magic roundabout
Fritz Spiegl
The Grand Tradition: Seventy Years of Singing on Record 1900 to 1970 J. B. Steane (Duckworth £10.00) At the present galloping rate of progress, with lunatics, self-publicists, and Moog knobtwiddlers all joining the ranks of legitimate composers, seventy years is a long time in the history of music. On the other hand, one would have thought that the human voice had, remained pretty constant. But styles aria fashions change, and gramophone reproduction is getting even more faithful, so a detailed history of the last seventy years of singing 011 record was long overdue. It is our good fortune that this task fell to John Steane, a noted scholar of Elizabethan literature as well as of music, rather than to one of the many Hi-Fi enthusiasts whose reading is restricted to gramophone catalogues and who pepper their sentences with, words like "wow" and "flutter" and "tweeter, and evoke in me a frequency response that is decidedly Lo. (I'd like to get my hands on hitil who coined the latest idiot abomination "quadraphonic" when he meant "quadrophonic," if he meant anything.)
Mr Steane is immensely knowledgeable, and displays the kind of learning which can't be taken from other people's books, or based On existing research. He must have listened to thousands of recordings, and discusses thern with insight and affection, in a style which is both readable and entertaining. Yet he is not uncritical: for example, he finds the voice of Moreschi (the last castrato-soprano to be mutilated in the service of the Sistine Chapel and the only one who survived long enough to have left a recording) "sadly comical".
In the past, before radio and gramophone made the voices of famous singers available to everyone, adulation of the singer-idols was based largely on hearsay. Comparatively feW could go and hear Galli-Curci in a concert, and few, until the 'thirties, had gramophones. Nevertheless, everyone agreed that she was a great singer because everyone else said so. The myths that sprang up round singers' gleefully encouraged by their agents, led to a new breed of music lover: the undiscriminar; ing canary-fancier, the music lover less fonu of music than of singers. The breed is not yet extinct.
Not many weeks ago people fought over twenty-five pound tickets to hear an ageing, diva give yet another farewell recital; an° came away from the Royal Festival Hall with the radiant look of worshippers who have just experienced a vision at a shrine. Critics Were almost unanimous in their praises. My taste, and judgment may be undeveloped; but found a subsequent recorded broadcast of the, event curiously deficient in the qualities expect in a great singer, even at the end of her career; and the whole performance unpleasingly mannered in style. But then, one who grew up in orchestras may well be listening for the wrong things: if' for instance, a first bassoonist were to pitchf his notes with the carefree approximation 0 some of the most celebrated basses and hal+ tones, he would soon be out of a job. (Oh but no; I can't be that ignorant. Am I not able t.°
dine out on having given a certain school; master his first concert engagement, on 23 June 1953 he was billed as "J. ShirleY' Quirk, baritone" and his fee was three guinea5
— and subsequently persuaded him to take up singing professionally?)
During the twenty-one years which have elapsed since 1953, taste as well as technique has changed. It was Coronation Year; Everest had just been conquered but the four-minute ,thile was yet to be run. Both feats have since oeen repeated and bettered. Singers, too, seem (to me at any rate) to have improved immeasurably in matters of interpretation, expression, taste, and above all technique. Or could I be simply fashion-brainwashed (like the people who hobble uncomfortably around on five-inch platform soles, convinced they're looking good)?
Am I alone in now finding that the beloved Kathleen Ferrier, heard again after ten years, sounds curiously 'boiled', in the Butt tradition,
not a patch on Janet Baker? Similarly, the iarnous Sutherland 'mad-scene droop' — singing a fraction below the note to express extreme grief — strikes me as a little tiresome 110,.‘v that everyone's doing it. And even the art
vocal embellishment, which some of us dared advocate in Third Programme talks in
'fifties ("hasty meddling", said the Daily elegraph critic) was soon to be over-revived and made to sound artfully artificial rather an artistic. (In this connexion I remember Citing as an example of good taste in unselfcOnscious ornamentation the recording of piu andrai made by Sir Charles Santley, ,the baritone ,whose debut was in 1848. I'm uelighted that Mr Steane approves of him, and ?Ms it "a skilfully interpolated scale passage 0 a low . . . a very pleasant and acceptable embellishment.") Going back further, many people now find even the great Elisabeth Schumann a little arch and coquettish, her playful scoops and her characteristic taking-away of the tone on nigh notes predictable and just that much 9yerdone. For, alas, no amount of recording tidelity can convey her personal magnetism ,and radiance, or indeed Kathleen Ferrier's. (4vers of 78's and of nostalgia may be hurst and offended, but for taste, intonation, Musicianship, control and technique I prefer our own Elizabeth Harwood any day. When I add to this list John McCormack ,and confess that to me he sounds as if he had 'Qvers of 78's and of nostalgia may be hartu aaarling meee") and that DameClara Butt's anous recording of Land of Hope and Glory Li will decide the approximate length of each . Kindly follow me") makes me laugh, I stand revealed as an ignorant philistine. Or do I? Perhaps the Golden Age of Song is always the present? It depends on which school of thought you belong to. Criticism is notoriously subjective. , George Bernard Shaw, seventy years ago, L'inented "Oh, where has fled the art of singing today?". Yet today many people hold UP seventy-year-old shellac discs on which rather feeble piping can just be discerned ander gales of needle-scratch, and say "They don't make singers like that these days." Nor 110 they mean to invite the reply "And a 1°,2dy good job, too . The Grand Tradition: is an expensive book unt a fascinating one and will surely be henceforth the standard work on the subject; With, one hopes, smaller follow-up volumes :vi.,erY year or two to bring it up to date. (The .sence of singers like Barry MacDaniel and 4nomas Hemsley is noteworthy in this book, ?nd others are constantly springing into ,421_1e.) Perhaps record companies will co:Mate with large numbers of re-issues of the ngers mentioned? Then we can make up our c'Wn minds. It is a beautifully produced book, carefully Proof-read, with only a few noticeable rinisPrints among hundreds of foreign titles: ots of pictures, too.
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