The Singing Flute, Fantasies for Flute on Opera Arias

Description

The flute is one of the instruments closest to the human voice, and, at the same time, one of the earliest instruments crafted by the human being. Indeed, whoever has seen a child spontaneously blowing into a bottleneck or an empty pen knows that the instinct to blow into a pipe is deeply ingrained in our curiosity and musical sense.
The flute and the human voice, as said, have much in common. The main traits of this likeness are two, of course: on the one hand, they both work with breathing; on the other, they are both melodic “instruments”, predominantly suited for monody. Both of these self-evident remarks, however, need some qualification.
Breathing first. It is true that breathing animates both singing and flute playing, but not in the same fashion. The most evident difference is the capability of advanced flute players to practise circular breathing, i.e. a complicated technique by which an uninterrupted flow of air is channeled into the flute, allowing for very long legato sounds to be played without breaks. This technique is not applicable to singing. Thus, generally speaking the breathing needs of both flutists and singers are similar, and they determine the shape and articulation of musical phrases; however, the two performing techniques do not map perfectly onto another.
Monody, second. Here both forms of sound production can advance claims to polyphony, but in a radically different fashion. Professional flutists at times are keen to play complex transcriptions of works with an inherent polyphony, such as, for instance, Bach’s solos for unaccompanied violin. Here, the flutist creates the illusion of polyphony by playing extremely quick acciaccaturas (i.e. notes as short as possible) which are perceived as almost simultaneous by the listener. As a result, hearers are tricked into believing that a genuine polyphony is taking place. Such a technique is normally not used by singers, although – besides polyphony proper, which requires more than one singers – there are special techniques which allow a singers to produce more than one sound at the same time. The most notable example of this is diphonic singing, practiced by Mongolian traditional singers. But this technique is normally not employed in the Western “classical” tradition.
There are also other differences, perhaps even more noteworthy than those hitherto cited. The most remarkable one regards pitch range. The flute’s lowest notes are roughly coincident with the low notes of a soprano singer. But its upper range vastly exceeds that of all human singers, so that the flute is endowed with some extra sounds outside the compass of the human voice.
And another regards the use of some particular techniques of sound articulation and production, so that, for instance, some staccato repeated notes which are commonly produced by flutist are hardly matched by a singer.
On the other hand, of course, singing normally involves a text, and this is missing from most flute works (not from all, since some contemporary composers require to “speak” through the flute, but, once more, these are liminal territories).
Given these similarities and differences, it is also to be said that the transcription from the human voice to the flute is one of the easiest to make and most successful to hear. If a flutist takes a soprano aria and plays it “as it is”, the result is likely to be highly satisfactory and probably beautiful. The flute’s round and mellow tone probably will not make the listener regret the absence of the lyrics. However, these at times are really important for a thorough fruition of music, since skilled composers aim at achieving a perfect consonance between the text’s content and the music setting it.
The lamentable absence of lyrics, though, is not an unsurpassable flaw in flute transcriptions from operatic arias. In fact, one thing is to play with a flute a little know sixteenth-century madrigal, another a Verdi or Rossini aria. Firstly, the madrigal is likely to be much more tightly and closely bound to the lyrics than a nineteenth-century Italian aria. Indeed, several critics of Italian opera claimed that it failed to achieve that perfect union of lyrics and music, and that it used the text rather as a “pre-text”, as a foundation on which to build a purely musical construction. In those cases, the delight of listening to such music arises mainly from “the notes” themselves, and not much is lost if the text is omitted. Secondly, regular concert goers and music enthusiasts will have probably heard the transcribed aria in its original version more than once. So, they will project onto the textless music the lyrics they know very well.
And this brings us to the genesis of works such as those recorded here. In the main, they belong in a vast and today largely neglected repertoire of arrangements, fantasias, potpourris after operatic themes, played by virtuosi of practically any instrument in the nineteenth century. Opera was taking Europe by storm in the Romantic era, especially in the Latin countries, and particularly in France and Italy. Opera-going was one of the favourite pastimes of both the nobility and the bourgeoisie. Enthusiasm and quarrels were equally ignited by the famous operas and their performances. Within a few days, or even less, from a great opera’s debut, people were singing, whistling, playing and repeating its tunes throughout the cities; and this brought the most famous melodies down to all social classes, even those which were least likely to attend a “real” operatic performance. In the meanwhile, in the bourgeois salons, countless evenings were spent playing or attempting to sing the most successful arias; amateur or more skilled performers engaged with the operatic repertoire. At a time where means of sound reproduction were either inexistent or unreliable and very expensive, the only possibility for reliving the experience of opera was to play it or sing it at home.
But between the famous singer performing on the operatic stage and the unskilled amateur navigating his or her way through the perils of a complex cavatina, there was a field left open for professional instrumentalists. These were touring virtuosos, who earned their living by performing throughout Europe and, at times, America, and who played both in private salons of the aristocracy and upper bourgeoisie, and in concert halls. (In both cases, and particularly in the latter, they would normally participate in “miscellaneous” soirees, in which purely instrumental pieces were juxtaposed to sung arias, to opera transcriptions, to vocal chamber music works such as Lieder, and so on).
And here we must insert a specification with respect to what has been previously said. Whilst it is perfectly possible, and also very rewarding, to play on the flute the vocal part of an operatic aria, this is not what normally happened on such occasions, or what actually happens in most pieces recorded here.
The Fantasias presented in this Da Vinci Classics recording, in fact, do employ the tunes of famous arias excerpted from Mignon, Carmen, Mosè or Traviata, but they weave them in such a way that no aria is played in its entirety, and that all are woven together by means of virtuoso passages.
In fact, just as some operatic aria used the text as a pretext, so did many instrumental virtuosi use arias themselves as pretexts. Their ultimate goal was to impress the audience with their skill and ability, both in obtaining a “singing” tone, and in performing exceedingly difficult brilliant passages. A piece made only of virtuoso passages is normally called an Etude. And it is and was rather uncommon to perform Etudes in public, with the exception of some masterpieces such as those by Chopin or Liszt (but here too, complete performances of a set of etudes were exceedingly rare in the nineteenth century. One could play an Etude here and there to add piquancy to their recital). In fact, a recital entirely made of purely technical passages would be unbearable for both the performer and the listeners. It is, if the metaphor is allowed, like in professional ice skating. The purely technical passages, such as toe loops or leaps, are interspersed with free moments, which allow the athlete to recover some energy, the public to relax, and also the display of the athlete’s elegance in his or her movements. Similarly, a virtuoso will probably favour pieces in which their capability to be expressive can also be shown. Still, not all virtuoso performers were also composers of genius. Not all were able, like Paganini to name one, to create beautiful melodies besides passages of extreme technical complexity. So they very frequently drew from the inexhaustible mine of ready-made tunes which was opera. It also offered an advantage: since music listeners delight in hearing and re-hearing a tune they know and love, the operatic composer was doing, in a manner of speaking, the spadework for the virtuoso, who built on the safe foundation of an opera’s popularity.
Thus works such as those recorded here were created. They include pieces by great flute virtuosos such as Paul Taffanel, who is considered as the founder of modern flute technique, or Borne, whose Fantaisie brillante sur Carmen is one of the best-known virtuoso pieces in flute literature, and which has successfully survived the disappearance of many other operatic potpourris from the concert stage. Morlacchi was also a famous conductor, who tried to establish his career in Germany, and therefore entered the harsh rivality and opposition between German and Italian concepts of music in the nineteenth century. Other works recorded here are closer to the original, rather than “patchwork” examples of operatic fantasies. In Gluck’s Orfeo, the Dance of the Blessed Spirits is actually a beautiful flute solo, and in the other two works (Lensky’s aria and Saint-Saëns’ Mon Coeur) the approach is sensibly different and less characterized by that brilliancy found elsewhere. Together, these works invite the listeners to a journey in time, and bring them to the unique atmosphere of bygone soirees.
Chiara Bertoglio © 2024