Comments (3)

• I think Warwick Fyfe should remain proud of his accomplishment in this great, but vexing work by Schoenberg. I am pleased that he has put his finger on the issue that I raised in my review. His explanation of how he came to his interpretation of speech-song in last Friday’s wonderful Gurrelieder is enlightening. But is it sufficient? The question remains of what a performer, or conductor, should do faced with Schoenberg’s required ‘speech-song’. It is an even more central issue in Schoenberg’s more frequently performed Pierrot Lunaire (1912). My point is that the choice of how speech-like, or song-like, affects the way listeners perceive the tone of Fyfe’s passage. Personally, I hear the section for the Speaker, otherwise known as the Narrator, which leads into the work’s culmination, as having a keen parallel to that other architecturally crucial passage of reportage in Gurrelieder, the (fully sung) song of the Wood-Dove, with its tragic tone, at the end of Part I. I guess I was expecting a more ghastly tone, at least in the earlier parts of Fyfe’s passage, ‘the summerwind’s wild chase’. That said, Schoenberg himself was inconsistent about what he expected of, or accepted in, performances of the half-dozen of his works using this speech-song technique. A role of the reviewer, also known as the critic, is dispassionately to raise and foster debate of such questions of interpretation and reception.
  Posted by Malcolm Gillies

  20 March 2024
• I have never known a composer to issue a manuscript with musical notation that they expected to be dismissed. In Schoenberg's score, the Sprechgesang is entirely annotated. In other words, the score is written with vocal inflections. When an actor is hired, he follows the direction of the note patterns, using the manuscript as a visual aid. He is limited because his instrument is his acting, not his actual voice, and while his voice is part of that instrument, he isn't a singer. An opera singer is unique in that when we are in ‘fighting shape’ vocally, our speaking voices do not sound like other people's speaking voices. You can hear us across the room because we resonate in such a way as to be heard in very large rooms, without amplification. If the part of the speaker in the Gurrelieder was meant to be uniquely interpreted without instruction, it would be written as text and not as musical notation. Yet the work is written with notes for every syllable in the score. In operas where there exists text set to orchestration - for example, Carmen, Macbeth (Lady Macbeth's aria ‘Vieni t'affretta accendere’) or Candide - the text rides over the staves on the page or in between them without cues other than the words being set within the measures for timing. This score is not written like this.
  
  Artists have long conversations about what Schoenberg wanted Gurrelieder to sound like, and most recordings aren't all that satisfying, to my ear. Warwick Fyfe has a considerable Helden-baritone. He could not ‘talk’ it in what you might consider a normal speaking voice if he tried. He isn't employed to produce a ‘normal’ conversational sound. He is a Wagnerian opera star. If you take a look at his head, he has bone structure for great resonance. One could take exception to his sort of voice being used for the work, but Maestra Young chose him for the role, and I believe she made an excellent artistic choice. She is exquisitely capable artistically. So is Warwick Fyfe. Mr Gilles, you are right that Sprechstimme is worth an academic discussion, but when you call out an artist and dispute his actual sound, a sound he makes that fills opera houses, you are criticising something that Fyfe cannot change about himself. Nor should he ever try. That sound he makes is one that people pay good money to hear. When they see him in a line-up, they are assured that the performance will be one of high artistic integrity.
  
  I suggest that you take a look at the actual score before forming an opinion about how the speaker should be interpreted. It should help.
  Posted by Christina Henson Hayes

  20 March 2024
• Firstly, they hired an opera singer, me, to do the Sprecher. Not an actor. Secondly, Schoenberg wrote all the speaker’s notes. Presumably he didn’t do this for fun with the expectation that NO attention would be paid to the pitches as notated. But decisions have to be made because baritone/bass singers cannot reach the top notes as written (except in falsetto) and even performers who can - actors, tenors, women - don’t stick to the notes. At least I can’t find a recording where anyone does. There are as many distinctly different versions as there are performances. The recorded legacy is no clear guide. It is not like being asked to sing an opera role where the fundamentals of what is expected can be assumed - perfect technique, optimal sound, maximum resonance, expressive use of text. Instead, one is confronted with an open-ended task and a lack of certainty as to what the conductor will welcome. Which brings me to my third point: Simone Young LIKED what I did. And frankly I’d trust her judgement over yours (or mine for that matter). In every one of the several rehearsals, she required adjustments from me, but my approach of combining some pitch accuracy where possible with maintaining the trajectory rather than the pitches of phrases where those pitches were out of reach seems to have been welcome. I was VERY proud to have been able to modify over the course of rehearsals what I’d initially brought to her in such a way as to win her approbation. And yes, I did use my opera voice because it’s a shame not to, and I figured they had hired an opera singer for a reason. I don’t know how long it took you to write your review dismissing my efforts as parodic, but I can tell you that the abovementioned open-endedness of the task and my search for a version that would make sense both for me and the work cost me months of effort - quite a disproportionate amount of thought and time for such a short contribution. And for a minute there I was proud of myself.
  Posted by Warwick Fyfe

  18 March 2024