The Voice (well, mine)

"I am a walking, living, breathing biohazard". Since I have this cold, this is what I keep saying to people around me at work, as a warning, between two coughs or two sneezing fits. This is my new great unknown line. It is too late anyway: I caught it there from someone else, who knows, and now everybody is catching it. I was not the only one sniffing and coughing today. At least it will be gone for me. Eventually. I have to confess that I do find the time long.

There is one aspect of a cold I always find difficult to deal with: what it does to my voice. I sound like a raspy, croaking toad. And it means one thing I don't like at all: I cannot sing, or cannot sing much. I remember when I had big bad colds and was learning opera, and was forced to stop singing for days or weeks. It was so darn frustrating. Claudine (my singing teacher, more about her here) would not let me sing the moment I started coughing badly. She sent me back home once or twice because of a bad cough, ordering me to preserve my voice. I don't sing anymore, I mean I don't learn to sing, but I do sing for fun and even when I sing only for myself (I pretty much always sing for myself now) I find it difficult. When I was rehearsing for a play, I used to always catch a nasty cold at some point, that was keeping me voiceless for a week, a bit before the dress rehearsal. I used to panick of course, and drug myself with cough syrup, all osrts of medicine and have a diet high in garlic and orange juice. I do not have the same feeling of urgency now, but it is still the most unpleasant aspect of a cold.

Singing without an audience

I discovered recently that I am not the only person alive who loves opera in... well, in my working place. A senior colleague is also really into it (I mentioned her once before, actually, she calls me Guillermo and thought I look too serious). I learned it last week and we chatted about it, she learned that I actually used to learn opera. I guess there is nothing to be overtly enthusiastic about: she is from a generation where opera is not passé. As an opera buff in my thirties, I am a living anachronism.

Anyway, today she asked me to sing in front of my colleague, whatever I wanted. My manager seemed less than enthusiastic about the idea. I politely refused. I don't like the idea of being a singing canary, but I don't think it was the proper time. I sang once at work in another lifetime and I did feel sometimes that both the pupils and the teaching staff thought I was weird. I love to sing, but it has to be spontaneous. I rarely sang in front of an audience, by any practical means I never really performed in front of an audience. Claudiiine is the one who heard me most of the time. It is something I would love to do, to perform on a stage, even for a few arias, like I do with acting. But for the right audience, not so colleagues could have a good laugh.

Dinnertime conversations

So I went to that dinner yesterday, in an Italian restaurant, with my friends from the acting course. Not all were there, but it was a very nice evening. We barely had time to know each other before and after class, so it was lovely chatting to them and learning more about everyone. And also, of course, making yourself known.

As I was expecting, the staff was mainly Italian, so I did said a few words in Italian, enough to make them believe that I knew much more of the language than I do. So they learned about my Italian experience, they learned about the reasons why I wanted to do acting (which is actually similar to theirs, more on this below) and they even learned that I sang opera. Because, see, the next course will be very voice orientated and it appears that there might be some singing in it. One of them was hesitant about this as he thinks he is not much of a singer and he asked me "Could you sing?". I answered not only that I could, but that I did. It will be great to mix two of my greatest passions.

So it was a great evening. It is strange to discover that your own motivations mirror the ones of my fellow actors. We all wanted a more active social life with people sharing the same interests, we all wanted to express our creativity and many of us wanted to confront some kind of shyness. Oh, and we all feel reinvigorated after a class.

Getting back to singing, I thought I would end this post with an aria. It is one of the few Mozart arias I sang learning with Claudine Côté. It is Non piu andrai from Le Nozze di Figaro. I chose it because I always thought it was a physically demanding aria, that used to leave me breathless and dizzy.There is a physicality in opera just as there is one in acting. I will blog about it one day (if I haven't already and forgotten). Until then, I leave this aria here, as my mind is on Italy, acting and singing.

A duet from Don Giovanni

I want more music on this blog and since this post I think I might colour Vraie Fiction with more Italian. This is maybe Mozart's most famous duet, from my favourite opera (of course I mean the immortal Don Giovanni). When I was studying opera with Claudiiiiine, she gave me lots and lots of material from Mozart, because I had asked her (at my mother's request) and because I think there was a lot of great music for baritone.La ci darem la mano was among it. It is the only duet I ever sang, once or twice with a student of hers, but most of the time with her. Even if it was just during class, singing such a duet with a professional soprano was really fun. Sadly, I never had time to master it enough to sing it in public. It is interpreted here by Samuel Ramey and Dawn Upshaw.

Musique pour une superbe journée d'avril

Bon, je n'ai pas encore téléchargé les photos de Montréal, mais j'ai songé mettre ici un peu de musique qui pourrait être considérée comme circonstantielle. La circonstance: il fait beau, pas tout à fait chaud mais bon, on est en avril, et je vais sans doute célébrer ma fête ce soir (donc, je vais sans doute faire un gâteau). Tel que promis, je vais mettre ici une pièce de musique peu connue. J'essais d'aller dans l'inusité. Qui ici a déjà entendu du Lully? J'ai pour la première fois entendu Amadis alors que j'étais enfant, un jour de printemps, mais je ne rappelle pas s'il était pluvieux ou splendide comme aujourd'hui. Certains airs me sont restés en tête depuis ce moment, surtout celui que je mets ici. Je n'ai jamais vu l'oeuvre au complet, mais ma prof de chant (la très chère "Claudiiiine") m'a déjà enseigné Bois épais, peut-être l'un des arias les plus connus.

Apparemment, Amadis (lisez le livret ici) est une tragédie lyrique, je ne suis pas trop sûr de la différence entre ça et un opéra, mais bon, ça se rapproche assez pour l'amateur philistin que je suis. Alors, voilà, je vous donne un peu de Lully, pour une journée magnifique:

Musing on Don Giovanni and Mozart

I put that song on this blog before, I know. I thought I would put it again. I have been listening to Mozart's operas a lot these days. I have a long history with Mozart, as a listener and later on as an (amateur) opera singer. I was in Austria on a trip with my family during the 200th anniversary of his death. We spent the next year or so listening to Mozart, then for years my mother listened and listened to it, enough for me to get an overdose by the time I was twenty. I got sick of him and his music.

Then, years later, when I started studying opera, I asked my teacher to get me some Mozart arias to sing. It was partially at the request of my mum who wanted to hear me singing her favourite composer, partially because I wanted to reconciled with his work. She gave me a few songs, including Deh vieni alla finestra. I quickly became a Mozart aficionado again, especially of Don Giovanni, which I rediscovered through its arias. They are beautiful, but the opera in itself is brilliant (one of my favourite), animated by a fascinating character. I hope to reflect on it and on him one day (a little bit more about it here). I have a few regrets in my life, not becoming a professional baritone is one of them, just like having never performed an opera onstage. If I had ever become opera singer, Don Giovanni would have been my role. I don't mean that I would have become famous for my interpretation of him (my voice is too weak I think), but it would have been the role I would have never got tired of singing. I decided to put Deh vieni alla finestra here again, because it was this aria that subrepticely brought me back to Mozart. I have decided to put it here sung by Samuel Ramey.

Apologies to Mozart's Girl for not responding to her award yet. I hope this post will help me be forgiven.

An anecdote about The Phantom of the Opera

I discovered yesterday something quite interesting: one of the versions of one of my favourite silent horror movies, The Phantom of the Opera, has my former opera teacher as the singer in the soundtrack. The Phantom of the Opera, Special Collector's Edition, which is maybe the most easily available high-quality versions of the classic movie in the UK (according to this guy, a Phantom buff), used a score interpreted by I Musici of Montreal, with the voice of Claudine Côté for the songs (mainly Faust arias),which was originally used back in the early 1990s. I loved that version, even though I only knew Claudine by reputation then. You can find more about it here.

With my love of horror stories and my love of operas, I was bound to discover the story. I first came to the Phantom through Gaston Leroux's original novel, rather than any cinematic version, or the Andrew Lloyd Webber's cheesy, marshmallow musical (which I used to like, but not anymore). It is a shame that the musical is now its most famous version, because the novel was a great read and the 1925 silent movie was both a very faithful adaptation and an entertaining, terryfying horror flick. The novel also made me discover Faust.

So yes, I love The Phantom of the Opera, but I wanted this post to be more about Claudine than the Phantom. Getting info about the silent movie made me remember that I once was friend with her, which makes it weird to see her name on Amazon or imdb. Back when she did the soundtrack, she was quite a famous soprano in Québec, having sung with Pavarotti right after she graduated. Now she is criminally underrated. When I started university in Montreal, I was looking for a new singing teacher (well, "new", I had only started a few months earlier) and got Claudine's phone number through a friend (small world, but it is true that she was from Saguenay like myself). She was living close to my flat, she was a respected singer, so she was the obvious choice. It was nice to do something different than literature and it was really a great hobby. Since I knew close to nobody in Montreal, the lessons cured me for any feeling of loneliness. Claudine taught me quite a lot and it is in great parts thanks to her that I still have a pretty good singing voice and a relatively good Italian pronunciation. She was also a great person to talk to, always smiling and enthusiastic. And a cat lover. She loved cats so much, she was adopting half the alley cats in her neighbourhood. She even saved the animals of a pet shop near her place when its building went on fire. So she was a generous person too. (And thinking about it, my wife would love her, as she was also an almost vegetarian for ethical reasons). I still remember her tone of voice when was calling me, always starting the conversation with "Bonjour Guillaume, c'est Claudiiiiiiiine", with the "i" prolonged, I think it was due to her line of work. She had gained an "accent chantant".

So I only have nice memories of her. I never got into contact with her after the three years it took me to do my degree in Montreal. I left for England in 1999 and never managed to get in touch with her after that. It is a shame really, as she was important to my artistic/dilettante life at the time. But hey, I can still listen to her, I can even find her voice here in England. So not all is lost.