"Why do the Met singers wobble, wobble, wobble?
While the good singers stay back home?"
(Apologies to Noël Coward- from Sail Away)
People often ask me about voices with too much vibrato. What causes it? How can you cure it? I have encountered many wobbles in my 60 years of working with singers and there can be various causes for this phenomenon. To me, a voice with a big wobble is a voice crying for help. "Let me out of here!"
Any voice that is pushed can develop a wobble. Trying to sing beyond the natural scope of the voice is never a good thing to do. Maria Callas developed a famous wobble later in her career that was so wide you could drive a truck through it. She was a fabulous actress with a fine instrument, but she insisted on trying to sing everything from Wagner to Lucia. I don't think that she ever really knew what she was doing technically.
While singers back in the 30's and 40's often sang both soprano and mezzo-soprano roles, they didn't push their voices to do it. Dusolina Gianinni, a wonderful soprano from that period whom I met in Seefeld, Austria in 1968, would sing Norma one night and Carmen the next. Singing in European opera houses, which are generally smaller than the Met, a voice can produce a free sound that carries to the back of the hall without screaming. The orchestra at the Met is almost always too loud. One singer against 85 or 100 instruments is not a fair balance unless the orchestra pipes down once in a while or the singer is Birgit Nilsson. When the late Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, who studied with me for the last twenty years of her life, was singing the role of Didon in Berlioz's Les Troyens at the Met, I attended numerous rehearsals as well as several performances. I asked her if she felt that she had to push her voice to be heard in that room. She said that she didn't. She just sang as she always sang and the orchestra got out of her way. If you try to do 'Anything you can do, I can do louder', you'll never win.
A current basso at the Met produces a wobble that gives us exactly four wobbs per beat. Now that takes practice! (A wobb is the singular of wobble in my personal dictionary.) Bassos tend to vie with Met sopranos in the field of wobbling. Most tenors and mezzos keep in in check for some reason.
The current crop of sopranos I hear at the Met these days almost all have wide vibrati. When I think back to previous generations of sopranos like Kirsten Flagstad, Helen Traubel, Rose Bampton, Leontine Price, Zinka Milanov, Arlene Auger, Montserat Caballe, and others, even with large voices, the vibrato stayed within reasonable bounds. (I heard all of these singers live, by the way.) It's almost as if today's crop of Divas think that this is how an 'opera singer' should sound. My dear friend, the late, great Lucilla Udovich, had an enormous voice with a perfectly mellow vibrato. Try to see and hear her video of Turandot in the production from the Arena di Verona with Franco Corelli as Calaf. Now that's singing!. Lucille and I did concerts together some years ago which was a wonderful experience for me.
Different sizes of voice may vary in the amount of beats per square inch when in comes to vibrato, but when the vibrato is the first thing you notice, something is wrong.
Poor health and low energy can also produce a wobble. If one is physically weak, it is often difficult to summon enough energy to produce a steady tone. There is a fine line between using enough energy, through a well-taken inhalation, and pushing the voice.
Age does not necessarily bring on a wobble if one stays in good health. I find it is more apt to be inattention to the way one releases the sound that produces a wobble. Sitting on a note rather than seeing it move. Yes! Seeing it! For you must be able to see your sound as it moves away from your body. This is an image that every singer should try to develop.
On the other hand, a voice with absolutely no vibrato is also a problem. Every healthy voice has some degree of vibrato, depending of the size of the instrument. Vibrato is produced by the movement of the involuntary muscles that operate the vocal cords plus the passage of air through them. To achieve a vibrato-less voice, it is necessary to hold the muscles of the throat to stop these involuntary motions. In time, this can lead to a serious vocal problem. For a while, early music singers, sopranos especially, went out of their way to produce a straight tone. This is what Anna Russell termed 'the pure white English piercing soprano'!
When Lorraine Hunt came on the scene in the 80's with her recordings of Handel operas from Harmonia Mundi, she demonstrated that music of this period could be sung beautifully and in style with a rich, natural sounding vibrato.
To learn more about wobbles, you can read 'I wonder as I wobble' in my book Sing On! Sing On!, published by ESC Publications of Boston MA, and available through my website http://www.hburtis.com/
