Authors: Clive James
The centrifugal effect of the Nazi regime in Germany scattered the best brains of Europe all over the planet. Exiled to faraway New Zealand, the philosopher Karl Popper developed his argument
that there could be no such thing as universal fixes – that the most that society could or should hope to do was to correct specific abuses. This perception surely applies to a united Europe:
speculation about what utopian goals it might achieve counts for little beside a firm grasp of what it sets out to avoid – any recurrence of the internecine conflict that was already ancient
when Athens fought Sparta and that reached its hideous apotheosis in the Second World War. In the middle of the twentieth century, it had become plain for all to see that Europe’s glories
– justly renowned even when they had to be rebuilt stone by stone – were merely its structure. Beneath them was the infrastructure – a network of burial mounds linked by
battlefields – and it stank of blood. Hegel said that history was the story of liberty becoming conscious of itself. European history has culminated – at last, and in our time –
with Europe becoming frightened of itself.
As happens so frequently in human affairs, fear has accomplished what neither reason nor culture ever could. Cultural unity was no illusion – had it been one, Hitler would not have been so
eager to dispel it – but cultural unity had not been enough. When the musicians played for Mengele in Auschwitz, it did not mean that art and civilization added up to nothing, but it did mean
that they did not add up to everything. Beside the broken bodies of the tortured innocent, the life of the mind was felt to be irrelevant – as, indeed, in any forced comparison it is.
To make sure that no such forced comparison happens again is the task in hand. It is not an easy one. In place of the conquerors’ fevered dream of a Europe united by the sword, the
peaceful commercial republics of the New Europe make do with such cultural manifestations as the Eurovision Song Contest – a kitschy classic that every year draws a huge television audience,
whose more sophisticated members amuse each other with jokes about how dumb it is. The jokes keep changing. For years, Norway’s songs reliably lost (‘
Norvège . . . nul
points
’); then they started winning. More recently, much derisive hilarity has attended the earnest efforts of Turkey. Between laughs, though, the less sophisticated but more thoughtful
viewers should take heart: there was a time when the Turks stood at the gates of Vienna and bristled with the armed intention of getting into Europe by less tuneful means.
What the snobs are really afraid of is a United States of Europe that mirrors what they imagine the United States of America to be: an agglomerate dissolved into homogeneity, a consumer society
consumed by mediocrity, or, at best, a mindless mimicry of Euro-savvy in which a dauntingly exact copy of Michelangelo’s David presides over Forest Lawn’s departed Angelenos and an
actual-size Parthenon wows visitors to Nashville. But they are wrong about America, which is more than that; and they are wrong about the New Europe, which, as the millennium looms, bids fair to
attain a last, unprecedented, and very welcome greatness, through a just peace. Talk about your
new
!
New Yorker
, 28 April and 5 May, 1997
If you love music, you can’t be tone-deaf: the only reason you can’t hold a tune is that you haven’t got the notes. More than a year ago, this was one of the
first things my singing teacher Ian Adam said to me when I edged through his door like a dental patient. Ian Adam is famous within the showbiz world for his ability to turn actors into singers so
that they can star in musicals and thus do what actors like to do best – stunningly reveal a hitherto unsuspected talent. Ian’s lack of fame outside the showbiz world is due not just to
his innate modesty, but to the touching reluctance of the stars in question to concede that the hitherto unsuspected talent was ever less than fully formed. Yet almost invariably the talent was
scarcely there to be suspected before Ian Adam helped them reveal it, or – in the majority of cases, but let’s keep that a secret – supplied it in its entirety.
The latter is certainly what he is doing for me. I was never an actor, but still less was I ever a singer. In the forty-five years between the demoralizing month in which my once pure alto voice
broke and the blessed day I slunk up to his door in South Kensington, there was hardly a tune I could carry, with the possible exceptions of the first phrase of ‘Che gelida manina’ (all
on the one note) and selected fragments of Cole Porter’s ‘True Love’ (written specifically for Grace Kelly after it was discovered that she had the vocal range of a mouse trapped
under a cushion). I couldn’t even sing ‘Happy Birthday’ successfully. With the arrogant humility of the wounded animal, this was the first thing I confessed to my new mentor, and
he began the necessary soothing process by saying he was not surprised: ‘Happy Birthday’ is actually quite hard – something about the interval leading up to ‘birthday’
in the third line being impossible to manage if you haven’t got the notes in between. ‘But that’s why you’re here, dear boy. Now let’s breathe.’ And he started
showing me how to breathe.
Learning how to breathe was the nominal reason for my attendance. I had been told by several musical people that some singing training might help stave off a problem with my speaking voice which
was starting to show up with advancing age. When I go to market in television, my speaking voice is the only thing I’ve got to sell. Nobody stays tuned for the bewitching symmetry of my
features: if I can’t address the audience in my trademark effortless drone, I’m a dead duck, and I had begun to notice that after a two-day studio rehearsal for a big show, when I got
to the taping session on the second evening I was a bit short of puff, and hoarseness threatened. A hoarse effortless drone could be a switch-off.
Having been assured that the antidote lay in diaphragm breathing, and that this was something only a singing teacher could teach, I fronted up for the cure, and in no time started feeling the
benefits of breathing deeply for the first time in my life. The secret is to get all the air out by pulling your diaphragm in, and then, by letting your diaphragm out, filling your lungs entirely
with brand-new air. If you breathe with only your chest, the way most of us do all the time, you’re running on just the top half of a fuel tank, and the bottom half might as well contain
marsh gas. The technique is soon learned, although it takes years, starting young, to master it completely. (Any of those three tenors can take on a full load with a single twitch and you
won’t even see it happen unless you’re ogling his abdomen instead of the soprano’s cleavage.) But you don’t have to be that good. After your first week of proper breathing,
your teacher has already established the basis on which he can start cleaning up the mess you made of your singing voice after it broke. Women don’t have the same problem, but they, too, have
to learn to breathe properly if they want to add a few soaring notes above the squeak they always thought they were stuck with, and the main reason they squeak is that there isn’t any air
coming out, because they haven’t taken any in.
You will have guessed already that behind the nominal reason there was a real reason. Wanting to be Jussi Björling or Giuseppe di Stefano and sing all those wonderful arias into the adoring
face of Victoria de los Angeles or Maria Callas – that was a dream. But just wanting to sing a pretty popular song – that seemed a real, legitimate possibility, except that it was
impossible, seductively near yet cruelly out of reach. After four bars of my ‘Strangers In The Night’ strangers were talking about noise pollution. And now here was this kind gentleman
telling me it didn’t have to be like that. Yes, I
would
be able to sing those golden standards and even a few carefully selected arias too. But first I had to realize the crucial
importance of the magic word ‘support’. He pointed to my nether regions. The focus of the whole business, he explained, is not up there in the head and throat, but down there behind the
scrotum. With singing, the standard military exhortation in times of danger applies in all cases: you have to keep a tight arsehole. The only tension should be in your tripes, not in your gullet.
Try to sing exclusively from the throat and you’ll bust a gut.
Clenching the fundament as you expel your full tank of clean air upwards over the vocal chords, you support the voice. That way, the few notes you’ve already got won’t crack or slide
about, and you are creating the opportunity to add new ones on top of them. The initial work of augmentation is done through vocal exercises. Ian has perfected a set of these which are niftily
designed to circumvent your perennial expectations of failure by springing on you by surprise the missing note he has decided you are just about ready to hit. When you first hit it, it sounds
lousy, but this is the precise point where he reveals himself as a master psychologist. Well aware that a honking klutz like me dreams of unfurling shimmering skeins of melisma in the upper
register like Tito Schipa, he knows that the main psychological inhibition is the fear of sounding less than perfect. He convinces you that when you hit the note in any form, however horrendous,
the job is already done.
The rest is just the mechanical work of lifting the roof of the mouth, keeping the lower jaw back, hoiking it up at the sides, flattening the back of the tongue, maintaining the support, and so
on
ad
seemingly
infinitum
. Just all that, but lesson by lesson you can hear the new note sounding more natural. Flatteringly – and, wonder of wonders, believably – he
assures you that it sounds far less forced than any notes you’ve already got. Meanwhile he is already helping you build the next note up the scale. Again it starts off sounding like an alley
cat in a trouser-press, but week by week that dreadful noise is climbing higher and higher, the new notes underneath it are becoming usefully available, and the repertoire of melodies that remain
recognizable, even while you murder them, is steadily increasing.
Of Ian’s psychological strokes, the masterstroke is to slake your clandestine ambitions by giving you a few of your so-long-dreamed-of
chansons
and arias right from the jump, so
you can take something home to sing in the bathroom. (If the bathroom door starts caving in under protest, you can always test your new stuff out in a deserted park on a rainy day.) Knowing by
heart every decent melody that has ever been written in any genre, he knows exactly which ones to pick that will fit your burgeoning range without straining it too much at the top. (It
doesn’t hurt to strain it a little, just to go on reminding yourself that there’s a note up there you can soon have, as long as you remember that it can’t be had by wishing, only
by work.)
After the first few weeks I was making something better than a cry for help out of Donaudy’s pretty lament, ‘O del mio amato ben’, and in less than three months I could hit all
the notes of Fauré’s gorgeous ‘En Prière’, even if most of them were
sans
overtone and the desired legato line showed a few rough welds at the joints. Best
of all, inside four months I had my first aria, ‘Prendi l’anel ti dono’, a surefire showstopper from
Sonnambula
. Sounding challenging enough to chill the blood, but in
fact far more easily negotiated than ‘Dancing in the Dark’, it was cunningly designed by Bellini so that the tenor, with minimum effort and maximum parade of daring, could bring the
house down. All I brought down with it was the bathroom, but I was singing an aria!
But, as Ian kept on patiently explaining, it’s seldom the
tessitura
that makes things tricky: more often it’s the intervals. A lot of good stuff is written entirely within
the stave, but a song can demand only a narrow range and still flummox you by the jumps you can’t make from one note to the next without grinding to a halt, consulting your mental tuning
fork, and starting again. While never precisely forbidding the project, he pointed out that my self-assigned task of getting on top of the ‘Flower Song’ from
Carmen
was asking
for trouble. After one unsolicited hearing he pinpointed where the trouble was, but didn’t tell me until I figured it out for myself. My own candidate for the most ravishing of all tenor
arias, a love-letter to enslave Circe, the ‘Flower Song’ is a relative doddle throughout except for a vicious booby-trap in the seventh line: in ‘De cette odeur je
m’enivrais’, the interval between the two last syllables is a killer. I went on killing myself with it in private for about six months before he told me the cruel truth. I was trying to
sing the consonants ‘vr’ instead of the vowel ‘ais’. When he got me to sing the syllable without the consonants I could hit it with ease. ‘Practise that for a while,
dear boy, and you can fudge the consonants in later. It’s
admirable
how much you care for the words – you really are
amazingly
sensitive to language, it’s a
privilege to hear you speak on the television,
so
articulate – but if you try to pronounce the consonants too accurately when you’re
singing
you’ll have trouble
jacking your gob open to do the vowel. We have to be a bit
ruthless
.’
Going light on the consonants is a very good general trick for joining up those scary little black dots at the top of the stave. All trained singers, no matter how illustrious, use it as a
crutch. It’s the reason why their consonants, during the bravura bits, tend to sound like Henry Kissinger’s. Even Björling, probably the greatest tenor after Caruso, sang in French
as if it was his native Swedish, and sang in Swedish as if he was half drunk. (A lot of the time he was, but that’s another story.) Joan Sutherland got through her entire career without
uttering very many consonants at all. Often she turned a whole aria into a cadenza, and if you’re still looking for an argument-winning reason to prefer Callas for the title of top diva of
the modern era, you could suggest with some justification that Callas sang the words, whereas Sutherland sang only the music. And we singers don’t sing just to make a nice noise, we sing to
give back to the language the wings it lost when the angels fell.