A Singer’s Guide to Voices: Bass
It seems to me finally time to address the greatest of all voice types, the voice that can express the most emotion, the voice for all seasons, the voice of the Gods, MY VOICE! Oh sorry, typo there, the BASS VOICE! Which is also MY VOICE!
Over the last months, I have endeavoured to examine all the classical voice categories, and to try to explain to my readers what each voice can and can’t do. I have looked at how voices are measured and described, how they can relate to temperament and personality, and how composers have used these various voice types to express particular emotions and feelings. I have given examples of historical singers, and of friends and colleagues I have known. It has been my privilege over the last 40 years or so to know some of the finest singers in the world, to work with them, and to eat, drink and socialise with them. I have tried to show that these singers are just like everyone else in normal life but are also striving for an elusive perfection in their art and their performance, that sets them apart. To be allowed to make a living singing some of the most wonderful music ever written, while travelling around the world in the pursuit of this goal, is something which I celebrate every day, and it is a privilege that I do not take lightly. In my chapters about baritones and bass-baritones, I have tried to explain how I feel I do not fit into either of these categories. However, I also must admit that some people feel I don’t fit into the category of Bass either. Most archetypal basses have loud voices, and words like sepulchral, sonorous, booming and cavernous are often applied. Now my voice is by no means small, and I rarely have problems projecting over a large orchestra into a vast auditorium, but my peculiar talent has never been to go for the big voice effect. I suppose my twin loves of Lieder singing and baroque singing have combined to give me a variety of options in voice production which are perhaps unusual for a bass. Yes, I can belt out Wagner, Strauss and sometimes Verdi with the best of them, but I also take enormous pleasure in floating a pianissimo D or E flat in a song, or in singing a phrase in a Bach Passion which will touch a listener’s soul. I found it very intriguing, in a recent Facebook correspondence about Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, how many singer friends were obsessed with finding out how loud his voice was. For me, it was a subject of frankly little interest, as it was his quality that fascinated me, not his volume! This perhaps marks me out as an atypical bass, but again, that is maybe what makes me the performer I am. I always maintain that anyone should be able to recognise my voice, like it or loathe it, almost instantly, and that is a matter of which I am rather proud!
The solo bass voice, covering a range of roughly two octaves and a major third from a sepulchral low D to a brilliant high F sharp, is slightly higher than the equivalent choral bass, who is expected to sing in a narrower range from about E to E, with occasional forays above and below. Since the choral bass is actually at the bottom of a set of voices which combine harmonically, its use is predominantly as a grounding for what goes on above. The solo bass is largely used to convey nobility and authority in any operatic situation, and we tend to be seen as fathers, kings, gods, monks and judges. We are rarely given evil characters, since with some notable exceptions the villains are usually baritones, using the dark quality of their voices in tandem with their sometimes abrasive upper range to cut through the orchestral texture. We are almost never given romantic roles, this being the domain of the tenor, with his mellifluous top notes and suave sensuality. In a career of over forty years, I have never actually kissed anyone romantically on stage. Occasionally, we get a character suffering from unrequited love, but that love is usually a forlorn hope. I am racking my brains to think of any romantic bass roles. I suppose Figaro in Mozart’s opera gets the girl at the end, although the role is often sung by a baritone, with the bass singing Dr Bartolo (my role), another comedy/father figure! Bottom, in Britten’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, has a vaguely romantic situation with Tytania, although the ass’s head gets in the way a bit! And, er, that’s all folks!
The nearest we get is in some of the Buffo roles in Italian and, rarely, in German, comic operas, typically as the old roué who is tricked by the cute soprano, who is secretly in love with the tenor.
Mention of the word “buffo” reminds me that, in my chapter about bass-baritones, I neglected to write about that stalwart character, originally springing from Commedia dell’arte, the Buffo Bass. I have only sung one of these roles, Don Magnifico in Rossini’s ‘Cenerentola’, back in 1979 when I was at Guildhall, and I was not remotely interested in singing any more of them. It is, however, a well-defined and popular voice type, which I should have written about before. Characterised by a lack of beautiful legato singing, by mesmerising fast word play, and fitting into a range covered by that useful/annoying category, bass-baritone, it is a vocal style that can be absolutely marvellous to watch and listen to, and has been the basis of many fine careers. I suppose the afore-mentioned Dr Bartolo in ‘The Marriage of Figaro’ is the nearest I have come to a buffo part, but it really is a more typical bass part. In Rossini’s ‘Barber of Seville’, the same character, Dr Bartolo, earlier in Beaumarchais’ Figaro story, is a proper buffo bass, and the “real” bass role is Don Basilio. In my youth, the peerless Paolo Montarsolo was the king of the buffi, and more recently, the excellent Alessandro Corbelli has taken on the mantle, although not exclusively a buffo. As I have written before, this genre is not one that appeals to me, but I appreciate the artistry.
So, we have the bass voice – not a romantic lead, and rarely an out and out villain, but a voice much loved by composers through the ages, particularly for conveying nobility and fatherly love. I have played dukes and kings, gods and wizards, and fathers and uncles, all roles which have required a mixture of beautiful legato singing and a certain honeyed, mellifluous sound which should never be shouted. One of the first lessons I learned from the wonderful Scottish bass, Bill McCue, was to sing within myself, and never to push my voice. One is often asked to sing quite loudly, and indeed one of the problems of being a bass is that the orchestration around us is frequently rather lush. However, we should always remember that beauty of tone is almost always expected of us, and you can’t find beauty by shouting! I can’t say how many times my voice has been described by reviewers as “sonorous”, but it is always satisfying, as sonority tends to preclude over-singing.
Having said that basses are rarely villains, I should just mention one or two roles that are fabulously evil. I always enjoyed singing Hagen in Wagner’s ‘Götterdämmerung’, along with Fafner and Hunding, roles where evil is innate. I have mentioned before in these chapters that I always wanted to sing Claggart in Britten’s ‘Billy Budd’, the incarnation of evil on board the HMS Indomitable. Sadly, I was never cast in the role, but it is a wonderful and rare example in opera of a character who, although full of self-loathing, nonetheless takes tremendous pride in his own nastiness. In this paragraph of bass roles which are against type, I must also mention the great bass roles for Mephistopheles, that Satanic character created by Goethe as Faust’s nemesis. Gounod, Berlioz and Boito are but three of the composers who envisaged Mephisto as a bass, for which we are truly grateful! One of the greatest concerts of my career was as Méphistophélès in Berlioz’ ‘La Damnation de Faust’ in Canterbury Cathedral. Only singing Death in Ullmann’s ‘Der Kaiser von Atlantis’ in Sarajevo the year after the Bosnian War ended, has given me more visceral pleasure in performance than that night in the great English cathedral. It is an absolutely fabulous role, but extremely difficult, both in tessitura and emotional contrasts. Huge earth-shattering cries are interspersed with honeyed teasing, requiring both subtle, half- whispered legatosinging and great declamatory outbursts. The Gounod character is more melodramatic, more pantomime villain, but none the worse for it!
It has been both a pleasure and a privilege to sing so many of these bass roles over the years, and perhaps now might be a good time to look at a few of them. In my student days at the Guildhall School, I sang Seneca in Monteverdi’s masterpiece, ‘L’Incoronazione di Poppea’ in an excellent production by Tom Hawkes. This is maybe the first major bass role in the history of opera, and it is a joy to sing, even though he is dead by half-way through. This, incidentally, is often the fate of the bass in opera, either to be bumped off early in the action, or not to be required until near the end, as deus ex machina! Ah well, at least we get more money to sing less!
There are several fun roles for bass in Handel operas, mostly subsidiary, but challenging none the less, and there is one which has played a big part in my career. Polyphemus, the Cyclops, in ‘Acis and Galatea’ has come up over and over again and remains one of my favourite roles. I first sang it in the Midsummer Opera production by Alan Privett, originally in a garden in Ealing, but subsequently all over Britain and in Luxembourg, including my only ever performance in the Edinburgh Festival Theatre. I sang it at the Salzburg Festival, in the Mozart arrangement with Barbara Bonney and Trevor Pinnock, then in Ottawa, again with Trevor (and Jamie MacDougall), and then at the Halle Handel Festival. I sang it in Italian, in Handel’s much earlier version, ‘Aci, Galatea e Polifemo’, in Leipzig, including the famous aria “Fra l’ombre e gl’orrori”with a range from low D to top A (perhaps the widest range of any aria for bass in the repertoire) with the estimable Chursåchsische Capelle Leipzig, an ensemble with whom I also sang solo Handel and Purcell recitals in Schloss Rheinsberg and the Handel House in Halle.
By the time, we get chronologically to Mozart, the bass becomes more important in the plot. My favourite Mozart roles have been Sarastro in ‘The Magic Flute’ and the Commendatore in ‘Don Giovanni’, a high priest/ruler and a father-figure/ghost, along with Doctor Bartolo, a comedy villain turned into a sympathetic father-figure. Sarastro, although having dubious views about a woman’s role in society, is a noble figure with some lovely music to sing. As the Commendatore, we get to have a sword fight, be wept over by buxom women, re-appear as a statue in a graveyard, and then take part in one of the finest scenes of all opera, starting with the great line; “Don Giovanni, a cenar teco m’invitasti, e son venuto!” (Don G, you invited me to dinner, so here I am!). It is truly magnificent music, and I was lucky enough to play the role multiple times, especially in Jonathan Miller’s production at ENO.
As I have alluded to previously, I never felt I was particularly well-suited to Verdi roles, but one of them became a mainstay of my early career, Monterone in ‘Rigoletto’. In a way, this is somewhat strange, as the role is for a man around the age I am now, a mature man with a grown-up daughter. I sang it predominantly in my late 20s and early 30s, made up with lines on my face, grey hair and a limp! It is a small role, but extremely significant in the plot, and very dramatic, with big high notes and the fateful curse, which terrifies Rigoletto, and indirectly seals his fate. I only sang the main bass role, Sparafucile, once, but it was fun to play, especially the first scene with Rigoletto, when he explains that he is a professional assassin.
The other Verdi role I sang most often was Pistola in ‘Falstaff’, Shakespeare’s Ancient Pistol, who is very involved at the beginning, but becomes less important as the opera progresses. I got through a few books in the dressing rooms waiting for my last act appearance! Fortunately, I was able to sing Falstaff, the title role, a couple of times, in Germany and Canada, since, although it is a baritone role, it fitted my later career voice perfectly. I only wish I had been able to sing it in Britain, as I think I would have surprised a lot of people here.
Puccini was famous as a composer of genius, but one for whom the bass voice was an afterthought. There are very few bass roles of even secondary importance, but I have sung most of them. One of my first was Colline in ‘La Boheme’, which is a super part for a young singer. I sang it at Scottish Opera in my late 20s, in a very good old production, conducted, bizarrely, by Norman del Mar (an accomplished Strauss expert of the older generation). I still have the plastic herring we used on tour when fresh fish was unavailable (he has to come in with a herring for the penniless students in Act 4, singing “un’aringa”, if you need context!).
A couple of years earlier, I had sung the Sergeant of Archers in ‘Manon Lescaut’, my debut with Scottish Opera in 1982, premiered at the Edinburgh Festival. Many years later, I was able to sing the main bass role, Geronte di Ravoir, possibly Puccini’s best bass part, in Nancy, Geneva and Opera North. I sang the tiny role of Sciarrone in ‘Tosca’, but at least it was with Domingo at the Paris Opera at the Bastille! A slightly bigger role is Il Talpa in ‘Il Tabarro’, which I sang in Lyon, and the decent role of Simone in ‘Gianni Schicchi’, another of the Trittico operas, took me to Opera North and the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.
The one that got away is Timur, the old blind exiled king in ‘Turandot’, which, along with Geronte, is the best of Puccini’s bass roles. I was supposed to sing it recently, but Covid intervened and so have my back problems, and it remains one for the “nearly” catalogue. It is actually rather a good part, showing what Puccini might have done if he had not been obsessed with sopranos and tenors!
Having been obsessed myself from an early age with Richard Wagner, his music has been a source both of contentment and frustration for me throughout my career. The frustration comes from the roles I didn’t sing, notably Gurnemanz in ‘Parsifal’ and King Mark in ‘Tristan und Isolde’, but the contentment factor is more powerful. From my early 30s, when I sang Fafner and Hagen in ‘The Ring Saga’, Jonathan Dove’s brilliant reduced version of ‘The Ring of the Nibelungs’ with CBTO, and Pogner in ‘The Mastersingers of Nuremberg’ at the London Coliseum with ENO, Wagner has been an important part of my life. When I was asked to sing Wotan in the Longborough Festival, again in the Jonathan Dove version, I fulfilled a dream I never imagined I could achieve. I could not have sung the role in its entirety in the full version, since it lies too high for too long, and is too heavy for my voice, but the score that Mr Dove came up with fitted me wonderfully well. To be able to sing Wotan’s fabulous music in ‘Das Rheingold’, ‘Die Walküre’ and ‘Siegfried’ was an honour and a privilege beyond compare, and I am deeply grateful to Longborough for giving me the chance. Not long after the Longborough Ring, I was able to sing the full role of Fafner in Limerick and Birmingham with the National Youth Orchestra of Ireland, in concert performances, conducted by Alexander Anissimov, which were the first in Ireland since 1913. What an experience that was, with a fabulous cast and an orchestra of teenagers who created a sound of utter majesty and brilliance.
I spent a marvellous summer in Seattle in 2009, working on the full Ring, in the magnificent production there, understudying Fafner and Hagen. I never got to sing on stage, but the experience was fantastic, especially as the Siegfried understudy was Jay Hunter Morris, who went on to be the Metropolitan Opera’s Siegfried of choice. So I can say that I sang weeks of rehearsals of ‘Götterdämmerung’ with the Met Siegfried, and indeed killed him with my spear!
My final foray into the operas of Richard Wagner was at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden in the new production by Kaspar Holten of ‘Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg’ in 2017, conducted by Sir Antonio Pappano with Sir Bryn Terfel as Hans Sachs. I sang Hans Folz, one of the Meister, and also understudied Pogner, and had the privilege of singing the whole of Act One with full orchestra, when the original singer was ill for a stage rehearsal. What a thrill that was!
It is no surprise that the composer whose music was most influenced by Wagner, Richard Strauss, wrote several fabulous roles for bass. This stroll through my roles, in the previous paragraphs of this article, has been an attempt to show the many facets of the bass repertoire, through the medium of my career. Consequently, Strauss figures highly in this story, with roles such as Truffaldino in ‘Ariadne auf Naxos’, Baron Ochs in ‘Der Rosenkavalier’, Peneios in ‘Daphne’ and La Roche in ‘Capriccio’. I have written at length about several of these roles, but I must mention Peneios here.
‘Daphne’ was premiered in 1938 at the Semperoper in Dresden, with a libretto by Joseph Gregor, based on the mythological figure of Daphne from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. It was originally part of a double bill with ‘Friedenstag’, but, although it remained a one act opera, its dimensions outgrew the plan. However, its length remains problematic, as it is not ideally long enough for a whole evening’s performance, but actually it packs so much into its score that one never feels short-changed at the end. It has not just one, but two, absolutely fabulous tenor roles, Leukippos and Apollo, both breathtakingly high and difficult. The role of Daphne is demanding, and the two subsidiary roles of Peneios, Daphne’s father, and Gaea, her mother, are marvellous, one a fine bass part, full of warmth and authority, the other a deep contralto, similar to Erda in the Ring. It is rarely performed, mainly due to the difficulty of finding two suitable tenors, but I was lucky enough to be cast in a concert version in the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London in 1990, conducted by Norman del Mar. Teresa Cahill sang the title role superbly, and we had the luxury of Kenneth Woollam as Apollo and Justin Lavender as Leukippos. I was joined by Hilary Summers as my wife, a singer I was later to record Britten’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ with a few years later. It remains one of the best concerts I ever sang in, and the audience was thrilled, loving the final scene when Daphne is transformed into a tree. These late operas by Strauss, written in his old age, sadly tainted by their association with the Nazis (although he himself was no Nazi), are remarkable for their lyrical qualities and some truly stunning music. Peneios is a great role for bass! The definitive recording, conducted by Karl Böhm, the opera’s dedicatee, from 1964, is brilliant, with James King and Fritz Wunderlich as the two tenors at the peak of their powers. The only caveat is that the role of Peneios was sung by Paul Schöffler, who had been a very fine Heldenbariton, but aged 67, his voice was shot to pieces! Nonetheless, I encourage you to get the recording, as it is mostly superb.
The 20th and 21st centuries have seen some great bass roles created, and it has been my privilege to sing many of them. Arkel (Debussy’s ‘Pelléas et Mélisande’), Bluebeard (Bartok’s ‘Bluebeard’s Castle’), Swallow (Britten’s ‘Peter Grimes’), Theseus, Snug and Bottom (all in Britten’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’), Death (Ullmann’s ‘Der Kaiser von Atlantis’) and the Ghost of Hamlet’s Father (Brett Dean’s ‘Hamlet’) are just some of the fine roles I have sung, demonstrating that opera is not all about tenors and sopranos. Its public image, particularly in this country, focusses so much on those two voices that one might think that we don’t exist, but we are there, every night, providing the solid base of every show, often grabbing just a little bit of the limelight.
I wouldn’t say that we are unsung heroes, since we sing a lot, but a roll call of the best reveals some of the greatest singers of all time, who deserve celebration. I myself have known several very fine basses personally, notably Gwynne Howell, Robert Lloyd, John Tomlinson, Richard van Allan, Bill McCue, Brindley Sherratt and Matthew Rose, and have heard Kurt Moll, Nicolai Ghiaurov, Boris Christoff, Martti Talvela, Sam Ramey, Ruggiero Raimondi and Hans Sotin. Earlier favourites on recordings would include Gottlob Frick, Franz Crass, Cesare Siepi, Ezio Pinza and Feodor Chaliapin. Other readers will have their own favourites.
I’m glad I am a bass. I can’t imagine being a tenor, or even a baritone, as neither suit my character, I feel. I have no desire to spend hours singing high notes or pursuing women (well, er, hmm……), or being the unlucky one in a love triangle, or finding magic swords or rings or Holy Grails. I’ll stick with a bit of honour and nobility and the chance to sing some lovely music.
