Why do we sing what we sing?
Sometimes, of course, it is ok to want to sing an opera aria or a lied simply because you find it beautiful.
But sometimes you should try to work a bit harder to understand and do justice to the music and the lyrics that you are singing, and sometimes you even have to justify why exactly YOU are singing these songs, how you - in your body, at your age and with your experience - can infuse something into the music.
The questions are many: who is singing this song - who are you when you are singing? Where are you when you sing it? To whom do you sing it? Why do you sing it?
Right now, I have one student - a soprano - singing Schumann's Frauenliebe und Leben, and one student - a mezzo - has chosen a couple of songs from Schubert's Winterreise.
The first choice is an obvious one: Frauenliebe und Leben for a soprano. But it also raises challenges: The cycle is full of intense, deepfelt, honest emotions of love, sensuality, longing, happiness and devastating loss. To go into these emotions is in itself an enormous challenge. But on top of that - to which degree are the poems and the music colored by the social and emotions conventions from the time it was written, and can that possibly be done by a "modern" woman.
The second choice is a more unconventional one - Winterreise sung by a woman? It is not without precedence: Christa Ludwig and Brigitte Fassbaender, among others, have recorded the cycle. But still - even though the cycle deals with general, existential questions, it is still a HE singing it, so how should a female singer approach it? WHO is singing? Why? And for whom?
And completely by accident, as I am working with these two students, I come across a thought-provoking article and a new recording.
The wonderful soprano Joyce DiNonato has recorded Winterreise. Her approach to it is to read the poems from a book, as if she is reading the left-behind letters of a man gone to pieces. Without doubt, it is a performance interpretation that also colors the way she is singing the music.
The article is by the soprano Carolyn Sampson, who discusses why to perform Schumann's Frauenliebe und Leben at all? These poems are about a woman that sees her whole life through the prism of her relationship to a man. Without him, there would be no songs. How can a modern performer relate to that and justify that? Have you ever thought of it this way, young student? (Or - older teacher, for that sake??)
These are - in different ways - two wonderful and thought provoking examples, showing that the basis of interpretation can be so much more than beauty. There are musical layers, literal layers, historical and sociological and psychological and religious and sexual layers. It is not a small responsibility or a small work to dive into this, but it can give both the performer and the audience so much more if we are willing to take the jump!
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