THE LOST ART OF SINGING.

LESS than two hundred years ago Porpora did for the human voice what Guido of Arezzo did for music when he invented the modern scale. Music had always existed, rude instruments had always been employed: the voice was one of these rude instruments. But Porpora perfected the instrument; nay, he formed it of the raw material which nature yielded. Having once formed the instrument, a new art came into existence, a fine art, bel canto-an art with at least all the difficulties, demanding at least the courage, the patience and the long application which we expect in the study of painting, the piano, or the violin.

At this time music was changing its character, its realisations, by leaps and bounds. Mediæval music was giving place everywhere to modern music, which was becoming not only a fine art but the modern art par excellence. The arts of the ancient world had been architecture and sculpture; painting had been given us by Italy at the renascence of Europe; but music alone has accomplished since then what it had never accomplished before. The new requirements were evoking everywhere a corresponding progress in power over the material as a means of expression, the new perfection of instruments and the rapid developments in music acting and reacting on each other. It was not possible that singing alone should remain alien to this breath of new art; and indeed what a Mozart could perform on a clavichord and what a Liszt could perform on a Steinway piano differ less than the new singing differed from all that had gone before it. The most individual of all instruments, that which was at once instrument and executant, took part in the general awakening, and sprang into perfect life under the wand of Porpora.

And the sensation created was proportionate to the greatness of the event. People listened to the human voice, but it appeared to them that they were listening to a new instrument. The uneducated ear could not fully seize its beauty; even so cultivated a scholar as Abraham Tucker tells us in his work on Vocal Sounds that he could not appreciate one of the most exquisite of human voices, Farinello's singing appearing to him 'unnatural, and resembling 8 L

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rather the pipes of an organ'; and another perfect singer, Pacchierotti, was not admired in France. The voices of the choir of contraltos trained by Porpora, in especial, seemed 'strange and non-natural': but these unknown maidens in the free schools of Venice, from the mere loveliness of the method they had mastered, struck the musicians who heard them as greater artists than the great singers of the time, the greatest the world had seen till then. Dr. Burney, in his Present State of Music in France and Italy, published in 1773, says 'their performance was ravishing' and the singing of 'infinite merit,' perhaps superior to everything which could be heard at the chief operas; and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, that they had lovelier voices and were better singers than Faustina and Cuzzoni. William Beckford still seemed to hear' this wonderful singing when he wrote his Italy in 1834, and these 'glorious voices' made more impression on Goethe than any music he had heard. I had no conception,' he says, 'of the existence of such voices.' And what was the secret of this? The harsh, unblended, unequal sounds of the natural organ were gathered up by Porpora, and formed into an instrument having one diatonic voice, or colore, as the Italians call it. Respiration was made the basis of singing-chi sa respirare sa cantare-the breath which as a pedal sustained the notes, united the sounds. The school of Porpora did not die out; by it were formed all the great singers whose mere names carry a fascination with them-Farinello, Caffariello, Ferri, Gabrielli; and, later, Malibran, Catalani, Pasta, Grisi, Alboni, Boccabadati, Nilsson, Trebelli, Jenny Lind, Titiens, Patti; Garcia, Lablache, Tamberlick, Donzelli, Mario, Santley, Maurel. But from the first three things militated against this latest of the arts-its difficulty, its popularity together with the absence of trained criticism, and the rise of modern instrumentation.

Music is the most popular of the arts and the one which is nearest to us. First of the æsthetic pleasures in the order of time, it is yet the latest of the fine arts, and has developed with human development. Other arts have had their perfect epoch-have sprung in the compass of two or three hundred years like Pallas equipped from the brain of Zeus-but music has had no perfect epoch, it has kept pace with the human spirit, reaching in modern times the complex harmony of a Wagner, which speaks to the modern soul 'of all things which ever it did,' the music whose emotionalism, complexity and world-pain recall Jean Paul Richter's apostrophe: 'Away! away! for thou speakest to me of things which I have never known and shall never know.' We are all musicians, or we think ourselves so. The modesty which would make us hesitate to criticise the technique of a sample of architecture, sculpture, cr painting, has no place here, for the public judges of all music da maestro with no misgiving. It follows that it is not the best

which always pleases most. The taste for the oleograph, the inability to distinguish it from the old master (on the plane of artistic beauty, of mere beauty of technique) tells with still more insistence in an art which makes a stronger appeal to the general than painting. The musician, indeed, would not forego elements in his art which are his passport with humanity; but if music has nearly always something of the subject-picture in it, there is no reason why it should be the work of a bad artist working with bad materials. In the case of singing we have probably the most immediately moving of all the forms of artistic expression, and perfect examples can move the entirely ignorant in a way that great specimens of other arts may fail to do; it is therefore imperative if it is to survive among the belle arti that the public taste should be led by those who really understand the art they undertake to interpret. If only a painter can judge a picture, it is at least as true that only a singer can judge singing. But this is not the popular belief. Popular taste and popular sentiment have made of our modern singers not vocal artists but vocal artisans, vocal 'Jacks of all trades.' The public does not expect art, the trained organ, the voice which resembled the pipes of an organ; but in its place it asks for sentiment, and an amateur and untrained use of the voice which is thought to be vocal expression, so that a voice which does not provide us with adventitious effects is supposed to be inexpressive. We forget, or we have never known, that it is because the instrument is imperfect that it yields us this class of effects, while it is at the same time incapable of producing the only effects which would be legitimate. This absence of legitimate technique causes the young singer to mistake the real resources of his art, and he is supported in his ignorance by British sentimentalism. Popular taste in Italy may be saved by the necessity for passion in art, but there is no such safety-valve in the unbroken sentimentality of the English ballad. The ethical rather than artistic instinct which asks claptrap sentiment of the arts, which makes the 'gods' applaud a sound common-place sentiment in a theatre, and miss the only art in the piece, tolerates and encourages vapid sentiment in singers. I have heard a well-known singer's voice break in a song calling for passion. This is as though a painter were to make a smudge when he felt he could express no more by means of his art, and it ought to be resented in the same way. When the British public sees a favourite 'star' getting a spasmodic grip of a handy piece of furniture in order to produce her high note di bravura, its honest soul is moved at the supreme effort being made for its delectation. For the effort counts as part of the effect. It is listening to a star, so of course this is real singing; but the criterion is as primitive as that of the rustic admirers who shouted to their primo uomo, Hold it on, Steen,' lest the note being bawled from his throat at the risk of an apoplexy

should not last long enough to shame his rival in the village choir. When we sing with effort we may be quite sure we are singing badly. The divine in all art is like the still small voice'; the rushing and the tearing and the noise are not yet art. Not until the complex elements given us by the material have been reduced to a simple formula-a simple formula used by a master-is real art achieved; and when we look or when we hear we say, 'how simple,' and if we know we say, 'and how difficult.'

We seem a kindly and indulgent audience, but we do not know what to require of the artist. An artistic people often make a cruel audience, and if their æsthetic sense is not satisfied they hiss the bad art, because the due resolution of the phrase is to them an æsthetic necessity. In the eighteenth century, when music was most degraded in France, a poetaster spoke of sounds

Qui sont faux pour l'oreille, mais vrais pour le cœur.

The indulgent English audience has no artistic necessities to be outraged by the incompetent singer, who is generally sure of applause if his performance while false for the artist has been true for the sentimentalist. Meretricious ways of moving us must then be sternly discountenanced if we are to have art and not music-hall performances. What should we say of the violinist who snapped a string to express pathos or despair, and why do we tolerate the same class of expedients in the singer? So popularity wedded to spurious sentiment have combined to rob us of good singing. To-day we have either the declaimer or the diseur; we have no longer the cantante. We roar, scream, or warble, we talk or we declaim, we pour out sentiment and 'classical taste'-but we do not sing. We are all accustomed to voices completely strangled in the throat, with no resonance, no limpidity. Our baritones, it would seem, must burst a blood vessel when taking a sol, our contraltos have two voices-one below and one above the break of the voice.' What should we say to a 'new' Stradivarius which had the timbre of a 'cello for half its extension and blossomed out into violin timbre for the remainder? Has the cornet, which takes the solo part in an orchestra, one uniform voice, or three or four different voices, according as it sounds a low, a middle, or a high note? Are not the effects of all instruments obtained by greater and less intensity of sound, not by difference of structure and register? The vulgar idea is that vocal effects are obtained by inequality of production; but they are effects like those of our new Stradivarius, the effects of an imperfect string or an imperfect wind instrument. An art may die of too much popularity, and this moment has come when the cantante instead of interpreting great traditions to an audience waits upon their ignorance like some Latter-Day minister on his congregation.

Bettini (Trebelli's husband) used to say that no modern singer would encounter the good fortune which befell the singers of his day. We were all celebrities, and we trained the public ear.' People expected good singing as the Athens of Praxiteles expected good sculpture and the Italy of the cinque cento expected good painting. Not so nowadays. An artist' has as much chance of making his career with poor powers and poorer training as one of the great singers of the past. This fact alone is the death-blow to great art. The singer's audience, as it settles itself down to listen, hugs itself with the flattering assurance: 'I know what I like.' Curiously enough, this is held to imply some definite æsthetic criterion. Yet in what other art would such a criterion pass muster? Would it guarantee the farmer's preference for the oleograph on his walls? For the chance good singer, therefore, a hard fate is reserved: he sings before judges who know what pleases them' and are devoid of all criterion of the art they are to judge. It is amply realised that if we are not brought up to appreciate good taste in literature, in painting, in colours, in furniture, in architecture, in music, we shall have bad taste in all these things. Neither is it supposed that because I have been educated to judge a good picture I should therefore be competent to criticise the performances of a violinist. All these elementary principles, however, fade when we come to criticise the art of bel canto; there 'my love of music' is an infallible guide, and my instinct as to what pleases me' a more powerful solvent of merit than the traditions of a great art. Now these things are not a sufficient vade mecum for judging a singer. No public has sufficient art to judge for itself, and there are now not enough great singers to teach them. That which pleases them and that which accords with the traditions of the art have in this year of grace 1903 no chance of being identical.

Intelligent criticism is therefore at this moment one of the chief desiderata. If the singers do not know how to sing, the critics do not know either how they ought to sing, and the Press take no pains to select a critic; indeed they would have to search far and long to find one. I have before me a critic's opinion of a soprano who possessed clear and powerful upper notes' and 'forced her high notes.' One but not both of these statements can possibly be true; a clear and potent high note cannot be produced by forcing. Another critic says that an imperfect control of the respiration spoilt her singing, at the same time applauding the production of the mezza voce. A true mezza voce requires more perfect control of the breathing functions than any other call made on the singer. But when we read that on the same occasion she 'phrased with no ordinary skill,' our confusion is complete. With a sense of 'surfeited amazements' (as the Indian said of our English climate) we turn to an axiom of the great teacher Lamperti: 'It is impossible