A Singer’s Life: Foreign Languages
Je t’aime, T’amo, Ich liebe dich, Ya Lyublyu tyebya, Tha gaol agam ort, Te quiero, Wo ai ni, Anata ga daisuki desu, Ik hou van jou!
These are just a few ways to describe what I think of you, dear reader! ‘I love you’ is perhaps the most wonderful thing that anyone can say to another, and yet, if you don’t understand it, the interaction collapses. It is all very well to say that one would understand the context even if one couldn’t grasp the words, but that is not universal. You can say those words in many different ways, such that the listener could infer many opposite nuances. In the world of opera, where those words, in multiple languages, are sung to melodies of entirely contrasting types, one has to be aware of the context at the exact moment, to fully understand what is being said.
Many Italian operas scream “T’amo” on the biggest, highest, most upfront top note imaginable, with that big wide open vowel shining and thrilling in its warm splendour. In German, the narrower vowel “I” in “Ich liebe dich” produces a more refined sound, simply by its harmonics. The Russian “Ya Lyublyu Tyebya”, with all its liquid “Y” sounds, necessitates a more covered and intimate rendition. The French “Je t’aime” can be open, but can also, as in “Pelléas et Mélisande”, be murmured. It is in Mélisande’s very nature that she replies to Pelléas’ urgent prompting with “Je t’aime aussi” on a single low note, but it also fits perfectly, linguistically.
All the above is written as an introduction to a discussion about foreign languages, which is something which lies at the heart of most professional singers’ careers, both onstage and off. We spend most of our working lives singing in languages which are not our own, and many of us have spent years living and working in countries where English is not the first language. Therefore, a proper understanding of languages is an intrinsic part of a singer’s life, although sometimes it is not given the emphasis it requires. At the music colleges in Britain we are taught, sometimes well, sometimes badly, how to sing in foreign languages, but very rarely how to converse and cope with life in foreign countries. It is true that we are enormously lucky to speak the world’s universal language, English (yes, I know Mandarin is spoken by more people but not much outside China!). Certainly in educated circles, which are predominant in artistic life, almost everyone speaks a little English, but this is no excuse for not learning to converse and interact in the language of one’s colleagues and peers. In the world of sport, it is quite rare to find any British sportsman or woman, on the international circuit, who knows more than a few badly pronounced words in any language other than English! The situation in opera is better, but frankly not much!
For many years, I assumed that my Scottish compatriots were better prepared for life abroad, as our education system is more broad-based and gives us some knowledge of more subjects when at school. A Scottish 17-year old will have taken exams at a higher level in more subjects than his/her English contemporaries, and so the probability of at least one of those subjects being a foreign language is high. The drawback to this hypothesis is that the teaching of languages in Scotland was traditionally grammar-based, and so we learned to read and write in, for example, French, but couldn’t speak it. Nowadays, educational and political tinkering has resulted in far fewer language teachers and far less emphasis on the teaching of foreign languages. The ubiquity of English on the Internet and media, and a chauvinist viewpoint that other people will speak English and we don’t need to learn their language, has resulted in a population even less capable of conversing in a language other than our own than before. It simply doesn’t seem to matter to anyone in authority that we are now a nation (and I mean the whole UK here) which is almost exclusively monolingual.
On a day to day basis, this is probably not a problem, and most people who come to live in Britain will learn English and will be able to cope. You only have to go to any bar or restaurant in this country to find a waiter or waitress who is speaking quite decent English, but for whom it is clearly not their original language.
Most British people (and here we can include our American cousins too) only go abroad for their holidays, and usually to places where their every need is catered for in English. The idea that one might learn more than a few phrases for conversation is rarely considered, and so the problem is compounded. Therefore, when British singers find themselves booked to sing in a different country, they are already disadvantaged by this lack of comprehension in any language other than English.
I was very lucky that I had learned French and German at school and had some grounding in the basic foundations of those languages. As I mentioned, we were not really trained to speak or converse, but we had a grasp of the grammatical structures, and how that differed from English. Many of us who are now in their 60’s or older, remember being taught English grammar at school. Now, you may say that the main aspect of our language is that there are no rules, but this is a gross over-exaggeration. We learned to parse – how to construct a sentence and deconstruct it too! It was decided at the end of the 1960’s that this was a waste of time, and that free expression was ‘the thing’. This was, in many ways, an extremely good idea, and released students from an often stultifying study of our language. In so many other ways, however, it was a disaster, since if you do not understand the structure of your own language, you have minimal chance of understanding any other. In my opinion, this decision to abandon the teaching of English grammar was the start of the decline in teaching foreign languages in schools and universities, and has led us to this point in history, when fewer and fewer schoolchildren learn more than the absolute basics of foreign languages, and, worse, don’t care about it!
Is it any wonder that, having no concept of how English works, the idea of working out how another language is constructed must prove very difficult? None of the political parties over the last few decades have even begun to tackle this problem, and, sadly, the whole Brexit debacle reinforces the notion of the plucky Brit fighting alone against the treacherous Europeans with their funny languages and accents. I find it all profoundly depressing.
On a brighter note, let’s look at how to sing in “foreign!” As I say to my students, there is no shortcut to fluency in a foreign language. Whether you have a good ear, and can mimic the sounds of another language, or not, hard graft is the only way. However, it can be made more enjoyable if you go about it in a rational and orderly fashion.
Whenever I have to learn a role or a song in a language other than my own, my preparation is always the same. The trick is never to plunge in. This is the direct opposite of acclimatisation to water temperature, where the easiest solution to getting used to the water is to leap in and get it over with. Languages need a more subtle approach.
Let’s take an example. Say I am going to learn “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen” by Gustav Mahler, something I did this time last year, when I decided to sing some Mahler songs in a concert for the first time in my career. I knew the song, but the example holds for songs you don’t know as well.
The first thing I do is to go through the score, with a pencil, marking where every beat is in a bar. This system holds good for any music, either baroque with its fairly regular rhythms, romantic era music with a reasonably orderly number of beats, but often with a lot of give and take (rubato), and modern (20th/21st century) with its frequently mind-boggling changes of rhythm. If you go through the score, marking where every beat is, you cannot go wrong. You will always know, at any point in a bar, where the beat is. It seems utterly simplistic, but I maintain that this rather tedious work is the absolute foundation upon which we build every other aspect of our art.
Having marked up my score, I move on to the words. I don’t bother with the sound of the notes at this point, the pitch or the technical complexity. That can wait. I go through the text, firstly independent of the music. I look at the text as poetry, checking that the words are correctly printed (this can vary, and mistakes are frequent). Again this saves time later, as you don’t want to learn the wrong words at the beginning, as they are much harder to correct further into the learning process. Having vetted the text, I now sit down to translate it into English. If, as in our example, it is in a language I understand reasonably well, this is simply a question of finding the words I am unfamiliar with in a dictionary and working out the meaning. That is the literal meaning – the poetic understanding comes later. I usually have a translation in front of me, either in a book or online, so I can work out the nuances of certain words which might have several meanings. If the song is in a language I don’t speak, for example Czech, I use the translation in a more dynamic way, sometimes using a dictionary as well to clarify what each word means in its own context. This is naturally a harder and longer process!
Having established the meaning, I now start to work on pronunciation. Remember, I have not even begun to look at the melodic line yet! Being blessed with an ear that allows me to repeat more or less exactly what I hear, the pronunciation part is easier for me than some others, but you still need to know the rules for the particular language you are singing in. There are other complications with dialects and local variations. I remember years ago, I was singing some Sibelius songs for a broadcast on Radio 3. Although Sibelius was Finnish, these songs were in Swedish, but the differently accented Swedish spoken in Finland. I kid you not! Eventually, I found a Finn in a bar in Edinburgh to help me, but even then, there were one or two sounds which I simply couldn’t master. I will never forget the look on the face of another Swedish friend when I played a recording of one of the songs to him. A mixture of pity and amusement were to be found, as well as some measure of incomprehension. That I was singing a Swedish version of Shakespeare’s “Hey, Ho, the Wind and the Rain” sort of passed him by, but I am happy to say that this was really my only semi-failure in a 40-year career.
After working out the rhythm, translating the song and then checking the pronunciation, I will speak the words in the proper rhythm and at the correct singing speed. Only at this point will I start to learn the melody and the pitch, since, only now, can I begin to interpret the composer’s wishes. Not being a pianist, I learn the melodic line without harmony, but once I am happy that I know the notes and how to find them, I will, if it’s not too difficult or fast, get Fran to play the accompaniment in my music room. If the accompaniment is too complex, I will go to a specialist coach and work on it with him/her.
This process applies to operatic roles as well, although the longer ones will bring in a coach at a slightly earlier point. This can involve a certain amount of financial outlay, as a good coach will charge by the hour for their professional services. Big operatic roles can become very expensive. This is one of the hidden expenses of which the general public knows nothing, and which all add up. I wrote previously about the processes of preparing for a role, and how, since we are typically paid by the performance, months can go by with no income and lots of expenses. This means a very careful control over finances, because, although we are paid pretty well for performances, it can be a very long time between starting work on a role or a recital, and the first show. In the case of recitals, we will often have weeks and weeks of preparation, and the resultant expense, before we deliver one performance for which we are paid. I was extremely lucky to be married to a Chartered Accountant who was paid by the month, and who could tide me over lengthy periods of expenditure with literally no income.
Going back to our example of the Mahler song, and escaping from the grubby world of money for a while, let’s look at the last page and a half of “Ich Bin der Welt”. This is one of the most beautiful songs ever written, to deeply moving words by Friedrich Rückert (1788-1866), a fascinating man who wrote poetry in his spare time, his profession being a Professor of Oriental Languages, of which he spoke 30 or more. This song, one of several Rückert poems set by Mahler, is a bitter-sweet evocation of a man who has lived a long life and has no need any longer of the trappings of fame and wealth. He says that people may not have heard from him for a while, indeed may believe him to be dead. This does not bother him, as he is already dead to the world’s turmoil. The last lines - “Ich bin gestorben dem Weltgetümmel, und ruh’ in einem stillen Gebiet. Ich leb’ allein in meinem Himmel, in meinem Lieben, in meinem Lied” - are a profound acceptance of his existence. ‘I am dead to the turmoil of the world, and rest in a quiet place. I live alone, in my heaven, in my love and in my song’. These are not sad words, and this is not a sad song. Melancholy perhaps, but this quiet acceptance of his life is very moving, and obviously appealed directly to Mahler, a man who was hugely famous as one of the finest conductors of his time, but who slipped away to his alpine retreat every summer to compose music that was largely ignored during his lifetime, but which he knew would be his real legacy.
The whole song is very slow, and in 4/4 time, but by writing down where each beat falls, we see that within the bar the music moves at varying speeds. There are moments of timeless suspension, and moments when ideas flit across his mind. Towards the end of the first sentence, on the word “ruh”, the world seems to stop for a moment, and the singer can savour that glorious vowel suspended, apparently, in mid-air. In the next sentence, the very slow tempo yields to the quicker quavers of “meinem” which feel as if they are at a different speed. Their momentum leads on to the most delicious piano chord, which plays just before the final two vocal phrases and which, in the twinkling of an eye, tells us that the poet is at peace with himself and the world, and that we can take enormous comfort in this feeling, created by his love and his song.
What a privilege it is for us singers to be able to interpret the thoughts and ideas of great writers and musicians, and I hope this short essay has given you some insight into how we deliver our performances to you. Rest assured that all the time and effort we put into interpreting every song is the product of serious study and thought, although remember too that every performance is different, and we can vary our expression in that famous twinkling of an eye!
