No nation need have much difficulty in producing a race of Wagnerian
singers. With the single exception of Handel, no composer has written
music so well calculated to make its singers vocal athletes as Wagner.
Abominably as the Germans sing, it is astonishing how they thrive
physically on his leading parts. His secret is the Handelian secret.
Instead of specializing his vocal parts after the manner of Verdi and
Gounod for high sopranos, screaming tenors, and high baritones with
an effective compass of about a fifth at the extreme tiptop of their
ranges, and for contraltos with chest registers forced all over their
compass in the manner of music hall singers, he employs the entire range
of the human voice freely, demanding from everybody very nearly two
effective octaves, so that the voice is well exercised all over, and
one part of it relieves the other healthily and continually. He uses
extremely high notes very sparingly, and is especially considerate in
the matter of instrumental accompaniment. Even when the singer appears
to have all the thunders of the full orchestra raging against him, a
glance at the score will show that he is well heard, not because of any
exceptionally stentorian power in his voice, but because Wagner meant
him to be heard and took the greatest care not to overwhelm him. Such
brutal opacities of accompaniment as we find in Rossini's Stabat or
Verdi's Trovatore, where the strings play a rum-tum accompaniment
whilst the entire wind band blares away, fortissimo, in unison with the
unfortunate singer, are never to be found in Wagner's work. Even in an
ordinary opera house, with the orchestra ranged directly between the
singers and the audience, his instrumentation is more transparent to
the human voice than that of any other composer since Mozart. At the
Bayreuth Buhnenfestspielhaus, with the brass under the stage, it is
perfectly so.
On every point, then, a Wagner theatre and Wagner festivals are much
more generally practicable than the older and more artificial forms
of dramatic music. A presentable performance of The Ring is a big
undertaking only in the sense in which the construction of a railway
is a big undertaking: that is, it requires plenty of work and plenty of
professional skill; but it does not, like the old operas and oratorios,
require those extraordinary vocal gifts which only a few individuals
scattered here and there throughout Europe are born with. Singers who
could never execute the roulades of Semiramis, Assur, and Arsaces in
Rossini's Semiramide, could sing the parts of Brynhild, Wotan and
Erda without missing a note. Any Englishman can understand this if he
considers for a moment the difference between a Cathedral service and
an Italian opera at Covent Garden. The service is a much more serious
matter than the opera. Yet provincial talent is sufficient for it, if
the requisite industry and devotion are forthcoming. Let us admit that
geniuses of European celebrity are indispensable at the Opera (though
I know better, having seen lusty troopers and porters, without art or
manners, accepted by fashion as principal tenors at that institution
during the long interval between Mario and Jean de Reszke); but let us
remember that Bayreuth has recruited its Parsifals from the peasantry,
and that the artisans of a village in the Bavarian Alps are capable of a
famous and elaborate Passion Play, and then consider whether England is
so poor in talent that its amateurs must journey to the centre of Europe
to witness a Wagner Festival.
The truth is, there is nothing wrong with England except the wealth
which attracts teachers of singing to her shores in sufficient numbers
to extinguish the voices of all natives who have any talent as singers.
Our salvation must come from the class that is too poor to have lessons.