Michael Spyres can be considered as the model of the 'researcher' singer, who investigates his vocal extension and timbral variables shaping his tenor range. The American tenor, born in Mansfield, Missouri, in 1979, has explored all the singing possibilities that a male high has reached in the whole history of opera performance, from the Baroque era to the late 19th century. He has gone so far as to not only perform Heldentenor roles - Tristan above all - but even singing them on the Wagnerian stage par excellence. This will happen this year, at the Festspiele in Bayreuth: Spyres will perform the role of Siegmund in Valkyrie.
Spyres started out artistically as a great Rossini interpreter, following the footsteps of the great baritone singers of the Rossini-Renaissance, above all Chris Merritt, and gradually moved on to the French Grand-Opéra repertoire, before embarking on a long journey through time that led him to experiment with the innumerable possibilities offered by his admirable vocal skills. He performed the arias of Lully to those of Rameau to the Baroque of Handel, passing through the Neapolitan school of Leonardo Vinci, Sarro, Porpora and Piccinni, the Bolognese Mazzoni, Hasse, Vivaldi and the forgotten Gaetano Latilla. Of course, the American tenor could not fail to traverse Mozart and Beethoven's Fidelio before tackling the Italian bel canto champions Donizetti (especially the French operas) and Bellini. Spyres actually doesn't stop at the early 19th century and lavishes himself in a cavalcade of baritone and tenor arias that goes all the way to Korngold's Die tote Stadt (whose protagonist Paul was played by Richard Schubert, a Wagnerian tenor born artistically as a baritone).
As can be deduced from his recordings, Spyres is a rare example of an experimentalist singer, never static not only in his choice of repertoire but also in the stabilisation of his voice, always changing timbral colours in the daring ride over octaves that appear to be never-ending. The American artist 'searches' for the voice. He was 'officially' born a baritone, but, following the footsteps of his illustrious predecessors of the 18th and 19th centuries, he was not satisfied, rising to the tenor's chair to impart lessons in reckless and dangerous virtuosity without forgetting a phrasing that is always expressive and fluid, elegant and never superfluous, supported by crystal-clear diction.
Where to stop after all this wandering, which has not even spared the classics of the international repertoire Gounod and Bizet? Verdi? No, Wagner. The maturation of the high-pitched male voice that with Gilbert Duprez arrives at the definition of 'tenore di forza' (strong tenor) does not lead Spyres to Verdi's melodramatic repertoire, but, we might say, projects him to the latest technical and interpretative variation of the Wagnerian 'heroic tenor'.
Spyres launched a few years ago a project of thematic recitals (Erato label) aimed at demonstrating the vocal complexity of the 'tenor', a range rich in musicological implications that dates to the days of polyphony and that in the 17th century entered the elite of operatic vocality. Overshadowed by the glittering season of the castrati, Spyres decided to revive the splendour of the 'tenori assoluti' (absolute tenors).
His effort lies above all in demonstrating how the perception of vocal ranges during the baroque, classicist and pre-romantic eras was in no way comparable to the contemporary one. The tenor range was not to be understood strictly as the highest range of the male voice but was to be approached as the 'primo uomo' (first man) contended with several times with castrato roles. The two albums Contra-tenor and Baritenor prove how Spyres' voice is technically a powerful and malleable medium of expression that can ascend both towards the vertigo of the extreme high high note (recalling the sublime art of early 19th century tenors from Giovanni Battista Rubini to Adolphe Nourrit) and the baritone depths (in the manner of the great Rossinian Andrea Nozzari).
Spyres does not invent a repertoire, but brings back arias performed by performers who, as the American singer himself writes in his album notes, were able to interpret tenor and baritone roles, reinforcing a tradition that, before the advent of 19th-century melodrama, saw tenors settled on central (more baritone) textures with high peaks, reinforced with the falsetto technique. In the Contra-tenor album, the listener can perceive how the high and low pitches were the prerogative of voices that, recalling medieval polyphony, could rise towards the altus (high) or bassus (low). Spyres recalls the original function of the tenor, the polyphonic voice that literally held (from Latin "tenere") long notes of the cantus firmus against (contra) which the embellishments prerogative of the contratenor altus (alto) and contratenor bassus (bass) were developed. One must not forget the discantus, the highest part of the soprano voice.
Pierre de Jélyotte (French haute-contre expert in the repertoire of Lully and Rameau), Angelo Amorevoli (baritenor who inaugurated the extreme virtuosity expressed in Hasse's Arminius ), Gregorio Babbi (known for his elegant but also virtuosic style), Anton Raaf (Mozartian par excellance and first Idomeneo) are some of the names that Spyres mentions in the notes to the Contra-tenor album to demonstrate how the vocality of the great tenors of the 18th century was amphibious, i.e., able to range from high to low with extreme ease, and how the baritone voice was not yet recognised as such but how this middle voice was the prerogative of the virtuoso tenor. Above all Jean-Blaise Martin (1768-1837): a "tenore grave" who only later, in the 19th century, was defined as an acute baritone and then coined a particular type of voice called 'Baritone Martin'. In the equally rich notes to the Baritenor album, Spyres mentions other great singers who performed both purely tenor and baritone roles during their careers without any particular difficulty: Manuel Garcia, the tenor Almaviva in Rossini's Barbiere but also the baritone Almaviva in Mozart's Nozze , the baritenor Rossini's Otello and the more serious Don Giovanni, as well as Mécene Marié de l'Isle who in 1840 created the impervious role of Tonio in Donizetti's La fille du régiment except for later singing both the part of Arnold (tenor) and Guillaume (bariton) in Guillaume Tell.
Michael Spyres' latest album, In the shadows, serves as a possible landing place after a long journey through the complex tenor vocalism that, in his last CD, comes with Richard Wagner. The vocal experimentation shown in the two previous albums now turns to a more historical and hermeneutic perspective focused on that tenor timbre that in Wagner will appear in the guise of the Heldentenor. This new album is dedicated to an interesting retrospective of arias from operas that constituted Wagner's cultural and aesthetic coté. In the Shadows (Erato) is a recital that contains arias by Méhul, Meyerbeer, Auber, Rossini, Beethoven (Fidelio), Spontini, Weber, Marschner and Wagner (printed in red on the cover to remind us of the project's ideal objective).
To quote just one example: not only was Norma appreciated and conducted in Riga by Wagner himself, but also Etienne Méhul's Joseph, a now-forgotten opera, was proposed by the young Kapellmeister to Latvian audiences. Spyres reads these intrusions into the French, German and Italian repertoire of the first decades of the 19th century as a training ground for the tenor vocality that was about to sublimate into Wagner's heroic characters, without inventing anything, but following a line of research rooted in the very birth of the Heldentenor.
Spyres does not only perform arias from operas known or conducted by Wagner, but also works such as Rossini's Elisabetta Regina d'Inghilterra, by then out of the repertoire in the years when Wagner was coming to the fore. These musical experiences help the listener to get to know the cultural and musical contest of the 1840s during which Wagner attended the Parisian musical environment and wrote his first operas. The choice of Leicester's aria is justified by the notes written by the tenor himself to introduce the following aria by Adriano from Meyerbeer's Il crociato in Egitto. Rossini's hero is seen as a proto-romantic example of a heroic tenor who, with Andrea Nozzari as Leicester, will initiate the Neapolitan Rossini season that will be a source of inspiration for the young Meyerbeer who will become famous in Italy in 1824 with Il crociato at the Fenice in Venice. The aria written for the Brescian tenor Gaetano Crivelli, creator of the role of Adriano and which Spyres interprets with the aria Suona funerea, contributes to further contextualising the cultural and singing panorama that was preparing for the arrival of Wagner's Heldentenor on the stage: less baroque virtuosity, burnished colour with descents into the baritone range but with easy high notes, expressive declamatory capacity of the poetic text that in Wagner will increasingly become a narrative and psychological element.
But beware, in Wagner's shadow, could not miss Pollione's cavatina from that Norma that the German composer so appreciated because of the tragic force expressed by Bellini, but also the solemnity of the Spontinian characters not only of the Vestale but also of the German Agnes von Hohenstaufen, one of the possible precursor opera of Rienzi, or the much vituperated (but studied by Wagner for Rienzi) exemple of grand-opéra.
Spyres' path appears at first glance to be disconcerting: not only the album In the Shadows but also the two previously mentioned records present the impressive variety of the repertoire touched by the American tenor who only arrives in the last cd at Wagner, although in the album Baritenor authors following chronologically the Wagner era were sung. And yet, according to a perspective that seems to read history as a complex web of underground rivers that reveal themselves at crucial and decisive junctions to indicate future fates but also to illuminate the Vichian historical ebbs and flows. Spyres now arrives at Wagner after a long wandering (backwards and forwards in time) and this is another proof that the German composer did not rewrite the Drama in music from scratch but that in him the past inheritance has left a semantic distillate with multiple aspects that will continue to shine in the future. One of these was certainly the new way of managing lyrical voices.
Heldentenor: this is the tenor that emerges from the shadows played by Spyres. A heroic tenor as defined by Wagner himself in reference to Joseph Tichatschek (1807-1886), a Bohemian singer who would create the roles of Rienzi and Tannhäuser, who was also appreciated as Florestan in Fidelio, in the Weberian Max in Freischütz, but also in several roles in Meyerbeer's grand-opéra. Like Spyres, Tichatschek follows a path that arises out of belcanto school! It would not seem possible, yet the Bohemian's maestro was Giuseppe Ciccimarra, the first interpreter of, among other roles, Iago in Rossini's Otello or Goffredo in Rossini's Armida. At the end of his career, the Italian tenor went on to teach in Vienna and among his pupils there was Tichatschek, whom both Berlioz, who heard him in Dresden in 1843 in his Requiem, and Wagner described as 'heroic'. Speaking of Wagner, the German described the Bohemian singer as follows during the preparation of Rienzi 's premiere in Dresden on 20 October 1842: 'Not even for a moment had the dark and demonic background of Rienzi's nature, which I had unequivocally emphasised at the decisive points of the action, distracted Tichatschek from accentuating the bold and jubilant character of his heroic tenor performance ' (Richard Wagner, La mia vita [My Life], edited by M. Mila, 2 vols, Utet, Turin 1953, vol. 1, p. 318).
This information linking Ciccimarra's Italian bel canto to the first Heldentenor truly seems to close the circle of Spyres' project that comes to Wagner. The American tenor also presents a beautiful performance of a forgotten title of Wagner, but significant to set the last tile before the great scenes of Rienzi and Lohengrin. Arindal's aria from Die Feen, Wo find ich dich, wo wird mir Trost?, is presented as a directly acquired inheritance from the Weberian romanticism of Freischütz or Heinrich Marschner's forgotten Hans Heiling, which also inspired Wagner in the composition of the Valkyrie and specifically in the Grundthema of Brünnhilde 's appearance to Siegmund, with due differences.
At the end, Spyres' journey becomes part of a true ideal training session for the tenor vocal range: a voice that had to face the complex and dazzling season of the evirati cantori, affirming a timbre dedicated to the high-pitched but also to the grave and burnished baritone sound, to the impervious exercise of coloratura as much as to the expressive but no less demanding declamato singing, up to the heroic demands of Wagner's drama. The voice presented by Spyres becomes a travel through time, touching with hand (and ear) the many musical possibilities offered to the tenor voice. So now we can say it: tenor is not simply the highest range of male voice but is much, much more.
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