Mark Twain IV (subtitled, "This is Where Twain was Wrong")

In his "unauthorized autobiography" which, as you by now know, is very dear to me, Twain complains of inexperienced writers who want to be published immediately, without paying the proper dues.

Not even the most confident untrained soldier offers himself as a candidate for a brigadier-generalship, yet this is what the amateur author does. With his untrained pen he puts together his crudities and offers them to all the magazines one after the other -- that is to say, he proposes them for posts restricted to literary generals who have earned their rank and place by years and even decades of hard and honest training in the lower grades of the service.

However, I respectfully poing out that Twain's next sentence is completely wrong.

I am sure that this affront is offered to no trade but ours.

Twain gives an imaginary example of a singer with no experience, wishing to sing second tenor in a Metropolitan production of Lohengrin.

[The manager asks the singer,] "Have you ever studied music?"

"A little -- yes, by myself, at odd times, for amusement."

"You have never gone into regular and laborious training, then, for the opera, under the masters of the art?"

"No."

"Then what made you think you could do second tenor in Lohengrin?"

"I thought I could. I wanted to try. I seemed to have a voice."

"Yes, you have a voice, and with five years of diligent training under competent masters you could be successful, perhaps, but I assure you you are not ready for second tenor yet. You have a voice; you have presence; you have a noble and childlike confidence; you have a courage that is stupendous and even superhuman. These are all essentials and they are in your favor but there are other essentials in this great trade which you still lack. If you can't afford the time and labor necessary to acquire them leave opera alone and try something which does not reqauire training and experience. Go away now and try for a job in surgery."

This is where Twain was wrong. This happens every single day at the Metropolitan. Not the last paragraph -- no one at the Met, or in New York City -- has the time to give that sort of advice.

Tenor Extremes

Connoisseurs like to name Caruso, Gigli, and Schipa as their three tenors. For me, I need to regress even further. Alessandro Bonci, Fernando De Lucia, and Giuseppe Anselmi are the three tenors who take me back to an era where the worst singers sang better than the best singers of today. If that sounds like an extreme statement, you've evidently never heard Anselmi's 1907 recording of Quando le sere al placido, or De Lucia's 1904 Ecco ridente in cielo. This singing isn't just "a little bit better" than the singing on today's stage. It's the difference between Coq au Vin and chicken nuggets.

Last week I happened to hear Anselmi sing Tosti's once-famous song Vorrei (a recording I'd forgotten I had). Perfect vowels, perfectly coordinated with long, effortless breaths -- this is singing of a world other than ours (a nicer one).

I was broken from this spell today by a friend who e-mailed me a YouTube clip of one Stephen Costello, singing Tombe agl'avi miei. I was curious about this tenor who, someone claimed, recalls the "Golden Age." To me, it recalled something from the Bronze Age. The notes above the passaggio were wide open and scooped up to in José-Cura-esque fashion. How do singers like this find their way onto major operatic stages? And the answer is: because there's no one else.

Teaching voice is like building a Neogothic cathedral. The technology is out there, somewhere. And there must be people out there, somewhere, who know that technology. But good luck finding them. Good luck finding someone who could do what the architects of Ste. Clotilde in Paris did in the 1850s. And good luck finding a voice teacher who teaches something that bears even a passing resemblance to voice technique. One more generation of this and the singing industry is going to be like the washboard manufacturing industry.

And yet people ask me, "Why don't you go to the Met?" Because the singing is so horrible that if the very best singer at the Met called you on the telephone, the feet of the birds perched on the telephone wires would itch.