What’s in an Opera Star’s Voice? Talent, Training and Technique

Opera singing is an art for the opinionated. Vocal aficionados do battle no less furiously than sports fans, hurling thunderbolts of hyperbole and scrutinizing every trill, tempo and high B flat. Was this note in tune? Was that one soft enough, loud enough, pure, expressive, tasteful or dramatic enough? What did that hint of strain portend for the tenor’s future? How does this diva compare with opera’s glorious past?

All this expertise can leave the casual listener wondering what the knowledgeable are talking about. To eavesdrop on the intermission chatter at the Metropolitan Opera--or to log on to an opera newsgroup--is to enter a vortex of jargon, emotion and ancient memories. The way one soprano turned a phrase half a century ago can still loom over a performance today.

Informed opinions about voices are subjective, yes, but they are not arbitrary. Great singing, according to a broad if unscientific sampling of singers, teachers, managers, record executives, opera company administrators, vocal coaches and critics, consists of some specific ingredients that can be mixed in all sorts of inventive ways.

Singers are successful to the extent that they can satisfy an array of incompatible demands. They possess powerful personalities and the self-abnegating ability to be absorbed into a role. They surrender to the emotional momentum of each performance, yet manage to keep their personal distress from impinging on the fragile physicality of singing. They impersonate passionate, disheveled people, and do so with rigorous self-control. They command the power to blare out a chain of high Bs and still maintain the lightness to caress a lullaby. They must be versatile and yet sing each role as if it were written in their native style.

In the beginning is the voice. It can be trained and grown like a climbing vine, but it must possess two inherent qualities: volume and beauty.

Any world-class singer must be able to fill the cavernous spaces of a modern opera house with a sound that is loud but rich and unstrained. “You want to get maximum resonance for minimum work,” explains Brian Zeger, an accompanist and vocal coach. “Anybody can get a loud noise by screaming, but after five minutes they’re hoarse.” For the true virtuoso of volume, singing fortissimo is like lifting a cardboard pickup truck: It seems impossibly easy.

But the point is not just to make the foundations tremble. Singers can learn to project, rather than bellow, so that even a tiny murmur can be heard in the back row. The soprano Renee Fleming has the world’s most audible pianissimo, a bright particle of sound that she sends hovering around the audience like a firefly at twilight. Mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli lacks a heavy-artillery instrument, but she sings with such focus and clarity that she never leaves listeners cupping their ears.

Beauty is a highly contingent quality, which depends not just on the beholder but on a whole infrastructure of custom, prejudice and practicality. The Italian lyric tenor--a term that applies to the national origin of the music, not the singer--is generally expected to have a tone that is bright, light and trumpeting, with a metallic ping like Luciano Pavarotti’s. Most singers begin their careers by finding their Fach--the range and character of a voice and the collection of suitable roles--and venture beyond it only in cautious steps.

But these categories are flexible too, and Placido Domingo, for one, has nearly covered opera’s spectrum, from the callow, open-voiced Tamino in Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” to the weighty self-tortures of Ghermann in Tchaikovsky’s “Queen of Spades.” Voices get heavier, thicker and darker as they get older, and many light sopranos who begin by singing the adorable Mozart “-ina” roles eventually graduate into more dramatic fare.

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It is, however, the tension between the category and the individual that makes for unforgettable singing. The qualities of generic vocal beauty--a rich, smooth tone, intimations of untapped power, a palette of subtle hues--all matter less than a singer’s sonic fingerprint.

If great voices are born, fine singers are made. They acquire their craft slowly, with monkish discipline, and they can still be considered fledgling at 30. The masters of this trade memorize thousands of pages of music, learn to pronounce flowery verse in a handful of different languages and can vault easily from soft to loud and from high to low without any audible lurch. They know how to keep the rhythm buoyant even in a tragic scene, so that an aria becomes steeped in grief, not lassitude. They twirl their voices in pearly strands and gilded trills, or, as the style requires, link legato notes together in smooth, liquid phrases.

Technique is also a repertoire of tools to deal with every contingency. Most opera singers discover the slogging frustration of getting through an off night, but the best ones don’t let the audience in on the experience. There were times in her prime, says Marilyn Horne, that she could sail through an opera and take her final curtain call feeling as if she could take it from the top again, right away. But that didn’t happen often. “The number of times in a year when an opera singer really feels good and feels like singing, you can count on the fingers of one hand,” Horne says. More often, “the voice isn’t coming easily. The subconscious isn’t going to do it for you. You’ve really got to work hard.”

Technique extends beyond the stage, as well. The voice depends on the proper functioning of two tiny strips of flesh in the throat, and to maintain them in good health, singers wage a constant war of attrition against a flock of invisible enemies: bacteria, dry air, the demands of overeager impresarios, severe emotional disruptions, age.

Yet while singers try to keep their own tumult at bay, they must plunge into the fictional passions of the characters they play. They are actors, after all. Many insist that the instant they walk out of the wings, their grip on reality loosens and the fantasy of opera enfolds them.

That teetering between self-hypnosis and cool command is the central paradox of live performance. The greatest opera stars, says pianist Zeger, have “an internal emotional commitment to the moment. But as a singer, you have to take that emotional reaction, which can be very genuine, and redirect it into a lyric form. You don’t want the character’s emotional crisis to become your physical crisis.”

The golden era that opera enthusiasts of a certain age are always invoking was also a time when opera barely qualified as theater. “In the ‘20s, opera was really just costumed concert,” says William Mason, general director of the Lyric Opera of Chicago. “They would do an opera once. Singers brought their own costumes, shoes and wigs, and they stood down front and sang.” Even later, the stars of the ‘40s and ‘50s believed acting was optional.

Maria Callas, with her lithe figure and flamboyant characterizations, jettisoned the stationary style, and eventually forced the art form to adapt. She came of age with television, which would not tolerate the pillar-like singer but demanded something for its viewers to view. In recent years, the ubiquity of titling systems, which feed the audience line-by-line translations, has brought the words to the forefront of the opera experience.

A few superstars--notably, Pavarotti--get by on voice and musicality alone, but the standards have changed nevertheless. Opera has become a more visual, more literary form, and singers have had to adapt.