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MEANINGS OF VOCAL EXPRESSIVITY
IN MUSICAL DRAMA
Anda TĂBĂCARU HOGEA1
1. Director, PhD, National Opera of Bucharest
Anda TĂBĂCARU HOGEA – artistic director at the National Opera of Bucharest, manager of the Experimental
Opera and Ballet Studio “Ludovic Spiess”. Graduate of the Music Conservatory “George Enescu” of Iasi, Department
of Musicology-Composition (1986) and of the Academy of Music of Bucharest, Department of Musical Theater
Directing (1995), PhD in music. He staged over 40 operas, operettas and musicals at the Romanian National Opera
of Iasi, Brasov Opera, the Musical Theatre “N. Leonard” – Galati, National Operetta Theatre “Ion Dacian”, the
National Opera of Bucharest. He collaborated as an artistic director with Hiroshima Opera Ensamble (Japan), he
held workshops in Japan and France. He toured in Germany, Austria and Switzerland with the team of the Romanian
National Opera of Iasi. He composed original music and illustrating musical pieces for the “Alecsandri” National
Theatre and “Luceafarul” Theatre for Children and Youth of Iasi. He collaborated with Accademia Teatro alla Scala
in Milan within the European project studiOpera (2009-2012). He received directing prizes (The Show of the Year
2000 award – “Mephistopheles”, by Arrigo Boito), prizes for original music (“Sunshine” performance – 2005), VIP
Galas Award: “Contribution to the Development of Lyrical Art – the Opera and Ballet Studio “Ludovic Spiess”,
Order of Cultural Merit in Knight rank – category “The Art of Performance“, offered by the President of Romania
(2004 – Bucharest).
e-mail: [email protected]
Abstract
Within the development of the lyric genre, musical
logic pursued the sense of the word, the relation between
the word and the sound becoming, in opera music, the
main nucleus of musical drama analysis, in the context of
knowing the epochs, styles and schools that had generated
them. The shaping in the musical frame of the psychological
climate of the characters has been realized by opera
composers within the triad music-text-plot, and by singers,
within the frame of vocal expressivity development. Vocal
expressivity can be defined as a blend between vocal
technique, voice quality and the art of acting, being the
result of a profound analysis of the performer, orchestra
conductor and director on the relationship between word,
musical phrase and stage action. In the opera development
as genre, vocal expressivity constantly remains the main
means of exploitation of musical drama that all score
belonging to the lyrical genre contains.
Keyword: vocal expressivity, musical drama, lyrical
performer, vocal technique.
International Journal of Human Voice
In European culture, opera holds a special
place, being considered right from its inception
the most complex genre that joins singing,
instrumentation, stage action, fine arts, choreo­
graphy, cinematography, and, more recently,
video special effects – yet the human voice
remaining “the vital force of stage expression”1.
Combining music with other arts has been a
constant necessity in the earliest period of music
history, when the show was identical to the rite,
involving full participation on behalf of both the
actor and spectator, and taking then the same
path, with distinct periods: ancient Greek tragedy,
the Medieval show (liturgical drama and
Commedia dell’Arte), the Renaissance show, the
Baroque ballet and opera performance, the
romantic lyrical melodrama, the musical drama,
the instrumental theater.
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Anda TĂBĂCARU HOGEA
The new musical-dramatic genre, defined by
the French musicologist René Dumesnil as the
“synthesis of poetry and music in a sung, played
and staged drama”2, rediscovered the expressive
meaning of the word. The musical structure
resulting from song interference and declamation
is characterized by a strong intonational
dependence, rhythmic and formal to the literary
text. Thus, the relationship between word and
sound became, in opera music, “the main nucleus
of the dramatic and musical analysis in the
context of knowing the ages, styles and schools
that have created them”3. In the development of
the lyric genre, the musical logic has followed
the sense of the word, that has gained a greater
or lesser importance within the musical-dramatic
body of the phrase, considered horizontally
(vocal line), vertically (harmony, polyphony)
and expressively (dynamics and agogica). Even
from the simple and natural melopeea of liturgical
drama one can notice the intention to provide
declamation with a special expressive weight,
although within the limits imposed by the
austerity of the religious ritual. Composers’
intention to emphasize the characters’ features
and translate their feelings by singing began to
manifest itself with the highlighting of the
content’s specifics, from the solemnity of
Antiquity inspired topics to the idea of poeticmusical truth, from pure virtuosity to mimicking
speech modulation. In Baroque music, the song
and ornaments become the conveyers of the
emotional message, the word remaining only as
a support function in launching voice virtuosity.
In Classicism, according to the balance and unity
proposed by the age itself, word and sound tend
to become partners, contributing substantially to
characters’s illustration as well as to the pace of
the action, especially in Mozart’s opera creation.
Romanticism finds in the word the force of
dramatic musical expression, within the proposed
action of the libretto, an further on, in the
contemporary era, the word starts being uttered
in rhythmic declamations.
The deepening of characters’ psychological
issues expressed through melody, harmony,
orchestration, dynamics and agogic occurred in
the creation of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
Endowed with a special theatrical sense, Mozart
180
focused his attention, beginning with the opera
The Marriage of Figaro, on the one hand, on the
librettos with a strong literary substance and a
complex structure, and on the other hand he
achieved a perfect balance of all voices, setting
and diversifying the types of voice in the sense
of shaping typical performers for each vocal
category. Due to its constant concern for the
relationship between theater, music and stage
action, Mozart expanded singers’ vocal
expression possibilities, as well as the integration
of this expression in a more complex musical
drama. As René Leibovitz notes in Histoire de
l’Opéra, drama and music work at Mozart in a
hitherto unprecedented connection4.
French lyric drama from the second half of
the nineteenth century concentrates literary –
musical expression in arias and recitatives.
French language, having a different musicality
than Italian language, required a special treatment
of the lyric genre. The sung poetry of lyrical
drama called “mélodie” – basically, an alternation
of recitative and melodic phrases of type arioso
– preferred by composers Charles Gounod, Léo
Delibes, Georges Bizet and Jules Massenet –
favored a particular focus on vocal expressivity
within the music-text-action triad. Spontaneity,
and especially text naturalness and sincerity of
the song have led to a very special treatment of
the female parts in the French lyric drama:
Margareth, Mignon, Manon, Mireille, Leila,
Lakmé, Carmen.
The shaping within the musical frame of the
characters’ psychological climate, as well as the
pursuit of the poetic idea of the libretto idea
gained new meanings in the creation of Italian
opera composers – Bellini, Donizetti, Rossini,
Verdi. Aesthetics of Italian opera is based on the
singable song. Giuseppe Verdi does not abandon
this method, but rather perfects it, finding in his
musical language the appropriate expressions for
the characters’ great spiritual tensions in the
dramatic action, thus underlining the idea that an
opera composer, through his theatrical sense, is
bound to always find means capable of producing
maximum expressive intensity in both the action
and the characters. From a vocal point of view,
and yet not leaving the singing aside, Giuseppe
Verdi, especially in his period of maturity and
volume 1 • issue 2 July / December 2012 • pp. 179-182
MEANINGS OF VOCAL EXPRESSIVITY IN MUSICAL DRAMA
continuing until his last creations, sought new
means of expression, getting even as far as verist
melodic exclamations, seeking more and more
to eliminate the conventional and artificial from
the art of lyric performance. Indications such as:
con forza, terribile, freddamente, sollenne, cupo,
dolcissimo, ironicamente, con violenza,
accompanying the vocal line, always follow the
theatrical logic of the characters’ moods. These
indications provide the performer, the orchestra
conductor and the director with a clear guideline
of the musical and theatrical picture within the
stage framing, a guideline to be followed on both
audio and visual levels.
Verist composers (especially Puccini)
continue the theatricalisation process of the lyric
genre, the opera form being engendered by its
very content, and the thorough and extremely
numerous indications for vocal expressivity
continue to reveal most obviously the characters’
features.
Musical drama as conceived by Richard
Wagner gave opera completely different
dimensions regarding the poetic elevation of
stage thinking, by a single artist’s creating both
the libretto and the music and by the reevaluation
of the vocal-instrumental relation. Human voice
coalescence with the musical instruments, the
conceiving of the orchestra as a collective
character – like the ancient Greek tragedy
commentator chorus – has led to the reconsi­
deration of opera as a genre, to the increase of
its syncretic character and the rethinking of the
word-sound relation. For Wagner the opera
libretto notion “includes the idea of ​​action which
automatically also comprises the idea of ​​musical
construction, or, better said, the musical
construction based on specific requirements.”5
For this reason, the musician must also be a poet
in order to achieve the perfect symbiosis between
word and sound. The new approach to poeticalmusical language in the lyrical genre imposed
the replacement of the old style of singing
convention with another convention, i.e. the
sung declamation, that follows the general line
of speech. It thus results obvious the poetcomposer’s concern to constantly follow
throughout the entire score the idea that music
should be born out of the spoken word and that
International Journal of Human Voice
it must not draw attention upon itself but in as
much as it would be the most plastic expression
of a specifically determined feeling in the literary
text. In this regard, the director Adolph Appia6,
admirer of Wagner’s conception of musical
drama, supported the idea of ​the dialectic merger
between word, music and drama (WORT-TONDRAMA), considering that music is unfolding
in time and that the music-scene relationship is
equivalent with the time-space relationship. So,
music time must always have a correspondent
within the stage space.
This evolution in the opera composers’
thinking triggered a substantial interest from the
part of opera singers, conductors and directors
for vocal expressivity, both in terms of a most
powerful emphasizing of a character’s features
as well as in deepening the relationship with the
other characters in the course of the musicaldramatic action. Acheiving a vocal expressivity
as close as can be to the composer’s intentions
generates interpretive performance. According
to Stanislavski’s definition, in opera, the word
means what, and the music means how7. The
design of the melodic phrase determines its logic
and vocal expressivity supports the emotional
logic. The major difference between the art of
the dramatic show and that of the lyric show is
that the primary means of communication in
opera is singing while in theater is speech.
Musicologist Alfred Hoffmann notes that “in
everyday life, people do not communicate by
singing, but the spoken language. So at the basis
of opera, there lies a convention one must admit
from the very beginning, when one approach this
field”8. This convention typical of the lyrical
genre began to preoccupy the directors,
conductors and scenographers of the twentieth
century, in the sense of scenic visualisation of
music in unitary ideas that go far beyond the
stage of illustrating it.
Vocal expressivity can be defined as a blend
between the science of singing, voice quality and
the art of acting. Manuel Garcia said, in his
treatise on singing9 published in the first decade
of the twentieth century, that ornaments were
developped as by themselves to achieve “spiritual
tones”. The treatise structure comprises a first
part dedicated to vocalizations, and a second part
181
Anda TĂBĂCARU HOGEA
dedicated to the “word joint with music”. In his
turn, Raoul Husson analyses in the extensive
study The Chanted Voice the expressive vocal
technique10 and its efficiency in expressing what
is characteristic and significant for rendering the
composer’s and librettist’s intentions. The
discovery through expressive vocal technique –
used as a means and not an end – of various
possibilities for voice coloring, the pronunciation
quality, the finding of the appropriate vocal
colors for emotional states (stimulant or
depressive) of the character of the dramatic
action are the means by which the lyrical artist
becomes an opera actor. The interpretation
variety and quality of an opera score depends
largely on the actor‑singer’s ability to render by
means of his/her voical ​​
expressivity the
composer’s poetical-musical idea. In his work
The Work of the Director and Actor in the Opera
Theater, the great director Boris Pokrovski
mentions that it is not appropriate for the
exercises of voice piching and emission of sound
to gain an importance of their own, but to become
a means of expression, a suple device of rendering
intentions in interpreting the score and of creating
“authentic dramatical-musical characters –
genuine as well as deeply adequate to the
conception of the composer”11. Therefore, vocal
expressivity is the result of a thorough analysis
of the performer, conductor and director
regarding the relation between word, musical
phrase and stage action, as well as the main
means of exploitation of musical drama that all
score belonging to the lyrical genre contains.
182
Endnotes
1. Encyclopedia of Music, Fasquelle Publishing House,
Paris, 1958, vol. II, p. 325.
2. Dumesnil, René, Opera and the Comic Opera,
University Press of France, Paris, 1961, p. 5.
3. Arbore Ionescu Anghel, The Staging of Lyric
Performance, Musical Publishing House, Bucharest,
1992, p. 105.
4. Leibovitz René, The history of Opera, Bouchet-Castel
Publishing House, Paris, 1957.
5. Wagner, Richard, Community Genius, Translation by
Carmen Păsculescu-Florian, Musical Publishing House,
Bucharest, 1983, p. 31.
6. Adolph Appia (1862‑1928), Italian director and
scenographer. He was particularly concerned with
putting Richard Wagner’s operas on stage, also
displaying on a theoretical level his ideas on the
theatrical architecture in his work Die Musik und die
Inszenierung (Music and the Putting on Stage), issued
in 1899. He was against Naturalism on the stage,
emphasizing the function of light and chiaroscuro.
He preferred the non-figurative space, anticipating
Abstractionism.
7. Stanislavski K.S., My life in Art, translation by
I. Flavius and N. Negrea, The Russian Book Publishing
House, Bucharest, 1958, p. 454.
8. Hoffmann Alfred, The way of the Opera, Musical
Publishing House, Bucharest, 1960, p. 5.
9. Garcia Manuel, Traité complet de L’art du chant,
Heugel et C. Publishing House, Paris, 1911.
10. Husson Raoul, The Chanted Voice, Translation by
Nicolae Gafton, Musical Publishing House, Bucharest,
1968, pp. 214-215.
11. B. Pakrovski, The Work of the Director and Actor in
the Opera Theater, in volume “Art of Musical
Interpretation”, Musical Publishing House, Bucharest,
1960, p. 73.
volume 1 • issue 2 July / December 2012 • pp. 179-182