Issue 26 - December 2024
How singing art song differs from opera
When icicles hang by the wall
And Dick the shepherd blows his nail
And Tom bears logs into the hall
And milk comes frozen home in pail,
When blood is nipp'd and ways be foul,
Then nightly sings the staring owl,
Tu-whit;
Tu-who, a merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.
When all aloud the wind doth blow
And coughing drowns the parson's saw
And birds sit brooding in the snow
And Marian's nose looks red and raw,
When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl,
Then nightly sings the staring owl,
Tu-whit;
Tu-who, a merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.
-William Shakespeare (Love's Labour's Lost, Act V, sc. ii)December is upon us, dear readers! ❄️ As much a season of yule and warmth as it is a season of seeking refuge from Canada’s bitter cold. What better time to dive into music and poetry? To get you in the mood, this season’s issue brings you into the minds of three of Canada’s finest interpreters of art song: bass-baritone Philippe Sly, soprano Mireille Asselin, and tenor Michael Schade. Each of these world-class artists spends this issue musing on what it means to them to interpret art song and how it differs from the rest of their artistic practise (including that 🐘 in the room - OPERA).
Following these explorations, pianist Michele Wong (currently pursuing a DMA at New York’s prestigious Juilliard School) introduces us to the young American composer Jacob Weranek’s Three Poems cycle, which Wong recently premiered with the Canadian mezzo-soprano Stephanie Bell.1
Happy reading!
— Sara Schabas, editor
NB: If you enjoy this issue, please consider donating to support the Art Song Foundation of Canada’s bursary programs for young Canadian singers and pianists.
The habit of song by Philippe Sly, bass-baritone
It's a sunny day along the Venetian Lagoon. We've been walking all afternoon and the cicchetti we devoured seem awfully far away. "But what is actually going on?" Alasdair continues. "What do you mean?" I retort, a little confused. "What is happening when you sing a song? What are you doing?" Silence... I am struck dumb by Alasdair's question. "In a play or an opera, a character has his motivations and actions,” Alasdair continues. “The actor or singer must ask the question, ‘what do I want’ and ‘how will I go about achieving it.’ There is no such framework in song." Put another way; the stakes at play for the narrator are not fundamental to the audience's appreciation and understanding of the song.
Why hadn't I asked this question before? After all, I had been performing recitals as a classically trained singer for a good ten years. Perhaps it is something we take for granted. A song is a song, people sing them all the time; to our little ones as they fall asleep, on our drive to work, at the top of our lungs at midnight surrounded with tipsy grinning faces. In these moments do we stop and think to ourselves, "Hmm, how should I interpret this song?" No, we launch into it and we let the song guide us. It is a habit. We simply know what a song is because it is something we all do. In this same way, I took for granted how precisely a song works.
When we listen to someone sing or sing ourselves, it is as though the simple act of singing has its own innate drama; as if we were suddenly plugged into the vein of a deep and mysterious spring.
My mother tells this story: The principal of my kindergarten called her in. "I'm concerned about your son, Philippe. He has the habit of constantly leaving class to go to the bathroom, but he does so to sing... and this every day!" My mother simply replied, "Let the boy sing."
There was wisdom in my mother's response. For me, singing became a process of both self-discovery and recognition. I say recognition because it is often through music that we "re-cognize" our own emotional depth; a kind of act of remembering that simultaneously changes us. This is a fundamental feature of song.
The impact of my first listening to Mahler's second symphony was unmistakably of this category. Mahler's reality became my own, as if my dreams had suddenly flooded my waking reality and forever altered its landscape. Then suddenly, Mahler turns to the sung lyric, "O red rose, man lies in direst need, man lies in direst pain..."
It is no coincidence that Mahler turned to lyric poetry at the climax of this symphony. The marriage of word and music has a heightened expressive power. In song, sentiment and symbol are bound into a dance, each relying on the unique gestures of the other. Like lovers tenderly (and not so tenderly) intertwined, this marriage of lyric and melody also has its tensions; a kind of tango where one must yield as the other expands. Differences in rhythm and emphasis deeply enrich the whole of the song. It’s not a match made in heaven, it is one made on earth.
When Alasdair asked, “How does one sing a song?” my answer should have been, “How does one read out a poem?”
How often do you read a poem aloud? As a child I would sing anywhere and whenever I pleased (my colleagues at the opera house will exasperatingly report that I still do). As an adult however, I will more often turn to poetry for that special connection. Poetry is a learned habit. It was passed on to me by an individual whose love for the form was intoxicating. He would say, "Philippe, I need you to love this word, otherwise the poem doesn't hold."
It takes a certain generosity to declaim a poem. Most of us will read a poem every now and again, some of us may even listen to one. It does not seem in our habits to recite them aloud to ourselves let alone to others. It is a loss. Like classical music, oysters, and whiskey (in that order), one's appreciation for poetry needs to be learned.
Or does it? It took me a good three years and countless evening rehearsals on Oxford Street to appreciate the distilled barley brew. However, the first time my mentor Michael McMahon had me read out verses of Goethe with him the connection was made. No gradual conditioning was needed. I immediately recognized that if I was generous with the poem, if I breathed into its colours, if I leaned into its contours and let myself be sung by its inherent rhythm, the poem would sing back.
So how does a song work? As a singer I'm bound to satisfy the unique expressive qualities of the poem and the musical line. The poem gives birth to the music, the music is the medium in which the poem breathes, and the breath is the bow with which the singer ignites and engages our imagination.
Philippe Sly, a French-Canadian bass-baritone, is celebrated for his performances, both in opera and in recital. His operatic career includes notable roles at the Paris Opera, San Francisco Opera, and Wiener Staatsoper. As a recitalist, Sly has toured extensively in North America and Europe. Frequent collaborators include pianists Michael McMahon, Olivier Godin, and Julius Drake, as well as guitarist John Charles Britton.
Du holde Kunst by Michael Schade, tenor
NB: An extended version of this article can be accessed at this link.
What makes singing Lieder and recitals so special and different? It is that you have to be a kind of “all-rounder” to really understand how to pass the passion of this intimate type of performance genre, not only to audiences, but also to the next generations of singers.
My greatest mentor, the late Austrian historical performance guru and world famous conductor, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, once told me, “Music is the umbilical cord that connects us with godliness.” I have never met another person in my life that was so dedicated, not only to performing beautiful music, but to basing his performances on the knowledge of what the score asked for, the history of the composer and of what other composers and artists of the same given period were saying (in other words, researching sources), and the historical research on the instruments that a composer had available to him or her at the time. The amazing thing though, for me, has been, that even though he was one of the greatest scholars of music, Nicholas Harnoncourt was the Germans call ein Bauchmusiker. In other words, an instinctive, creative musician, whose music is at the end of the day expressed through the gut feeling of what feels right and what is wrong.
When you truly follow your gut, when you are truly passionate about something, the more you delve into your passion, the more it becomes part of your life - as an expression of yourself and your soul.
We musicians have one of the great honours in life: that our hobby is our passion, and our passion is our work. The more music becomes part of one’s life and the deeper one delves into the history of what it is that we do, the more we can feel and see music’s relevance to the present, bringing out the greater truth of any given piece.
I often say that the world needs art song like the world needs prayer or faith. We may think we don’t need it for most of our lives, but we eventually need to be reminded of what is important. Faith and art song go hand in hand. This applies especially when life is born or at the beginning of a budding and loving relationship where you pray that the one that you seek in love actually notices you. When in love, one can write entire poems about a flower and find momentous musings about the smallest of things with hope that the loved one may notice you.
As I have grown into the life of being a singer, I’ve realized evermore that with each of the Lieder I sing, I meet a new part of myself. I learn along the path of life with each of the poems I’ve sung and these words are actually my dear, dear friends. I need nothing else but a view out the window, a walk-through a park, a train or plane ride, all to realize that I’m not ever alone. I can always call up one of my friends - each of which has incredible insights into life and the ability to gently make me feel humbled and teach me something about the future. They are such awesome friends that they even take away the pain of missing my children and my wife when on the road (even if only momentarily)!
If I can summarize what art song means to me, it is that it’s the essence of singing.
Why? Because it is an art form comparable to making a great sauce in the world of cooking. You start with a lot of goodness and you have to boil it way, way down and reduce it to a minimum to get to the core taste of it and find its real value. The core of humanity is, at the end of the day, the truth which shines through one’s soul. Being an all-round singer means that you have to try to always communicate the truth. Yes, even in the large scale of opera performances or the concert setting of oratorio performances. Then, one must really hold onto their heart to be able to delve down and make that reduction be something special in art song or Liederabend performances.
I am honoured to have been allowed to live a life of delving into the art and friendship of so many Lieder. It is my great hope that the next generations will share the joy of this art format. That they will make friends with the poems and share the ideals and the truth of life in “Liederland,” which at the end of the day, is all about singing from the heart and telling the truth; giving the audience the chance to feel their own hearts and their own truths! That’s what faith is: feeling and seeking your truths.
It is all a bit of a calling and the more you listen to that calling, the more the flutters of the nerves of am I good enough? go away and are replaced with the joy and certainty that you may just help someone achieve a better moment in this world.
Du holde Kunst, ich danke Dir dafür!
The tenor Michael Schade is an Officer of the Order of Canada and was named a Kammersänger by the Austrian government in 2007, the first Canadian to receive this honour. He currently lives in Vienna where he is a professor at the Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst and artistic director of the Internationale Barocktage Melk.
The pilgrimage of art song by Mireille Asselin, soprano
Art song was my first vocal love and in many ways my gateway into an operatic career. I remember fondly my discovery of Debussy and Fauré’s songs, specifically their settings of works by Verlaine. I was in high school, and the combo of angsty poetry written by a young, tormented man, and the gorgeous, melancholy music to which it was set seemed like a revelation. Singing them was my safe space in which to process and release the emotions I had bottled up inside. For a shy, bookish kid like me it was akin to therapy. An artistic pressure release valve. I loved it, and it made me love singing.
Opera came later, the natural progression of things as I aged and that repertoire became available to me. With it, I tackled the next great set of challenges: developing a vocal technique that would stand up to large orchestras, focusing on acting and stage craft to push past my entrenched shyness and inhabit characters with full abandon. In so doing, I also fell in love with opera.
Performing opera often feels like a superhuman feat. The stamina, focus, intense preparation and output of energy… it can have you riding high once the race has been run! But the most personal and challenging creative act I do in my career remains the art song recital. In opera, I am cast in a pre-existing project. In recitals, I build the project from the ground up. Opera is this great, big, amazing machine with lots of creative input coming from all corners. Art song is profoundly personal and exposed, with just you and your pianist or other collaborators baring your souls on stage. No costumes, no artifice, just art.
In many ways, crafting and singing a good recital program is still my primary form of therapy. I can spend days upon days thinking about a theme or idea which feels important to me. I then give myself over to the research process – I read poetry, I listen to great recordings, I pull dusty scores off my shelves and get lost in the stacks of a music library. I call mentors and friends and get their ideas, talk to them about love or loss or remembrance or grief or motherhood and the songs that are their touchstones through those things. Then comes The Great Organizing Of Thoughts! What do I want to say? How do seemingly unrelated works connect or provide commentary on one another? How do I balance things? And of course, what does my collaborator think about all of this?
Some projects have helped me process the loss of a loved one, some allowed me to express patriotism or joy, some have just been bits of whimsy… but each recital has marked a moment of growth in my life, and I felt like I emerged from each with a greater understanding of myself and of my place in the world.
If opera is like running a marathon, then art song is a pilgrimage. And I am so grateful for both.
Canadian soprano Mireille Asselin has been deemed “a treasure” by the Toronto Star. She enjoys a diverse, international career spanning concert, opera and recital work, including leading roles at the Metropolitan Opera and numerous recital and recording projects.
Jacob Beranek’s Three Poems (2024) by Michele Wong, pianist
This past year, I had the opportunity of premiering a song set by Jacob Beranek with the Canadian mezzo-soprano Stephanie Bell on her Juilliard degree recital. Beranek’s set uses poetry by Bridges, Wordsworth, and Keats, and the texts muse on beauty and its role in our lives. In the composer’s own words, the first song “describes the creative reaction to beauty”, the second “explores the reaction of wonder, and the third “transcendentally sums up the two prior songs: ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all you know on earth, and all you need to know.’” As beautiful as the music itself is, perhaps the most profound beauty present in the set is the craftsmanship that emerges between the lines – the care given to every shape, every harmony, and every nuance in the texture reveals the beauty of the creative process itself, not just the finished result. The song set pays tribute not just to the beauty we observe around us, but the beauty we strive to create. Collaborating together on the set was a moving reminder about the best part of being in the art song world: how composers, poets, performers, and ultimately listeners all share for a brief yet impactful moment our individual longings for what is beautiful and true, and thus experience a powerful instance of unified creativity through it that cannot be equaled any other way.
Michele Wong is an NYC-based collaborative pianist and chamber musician currently pursuing her doctorate at the Juilliard school. Passionate about art song, she has participated in programs such as Songfest, SourceSong, and the Schubert Institut, and worked closely with composers including John Harbison, Jake Heggie, and Ben Moore.
Editor’s note: Readers, do you have a little known song cycle you’d like to share with the Art Song Canada community? Write to us at info@artsongfoundation.ca to be featured!