This question came to me on watching the 1981 movie Diva, for the umpteenth time, at the local arthouse cinema (screening that movie is a bit of a tradition with German cinephiles on special occasions, such as this year’s new year’s get together of the local arthouse cinema cooperative).
A plot point is that opera singer Cynthia Hawkins (played and sung by Wilhelmina Fernandez) only performs live recitals and refuses to do recordings; which leads to a pirated recording figuring in the plot.
In the last scene the other main protagonist plays his pirated recording of her inging Ebben? Ne andrò lontana to her, on an empty stage, and she says that she had never before heard herself sing.
Is that point believable? I imagine singers who do not do recordings, anyway record themselves singing occasionally and listen to the recording in order to know how their voice sounds to others (your own voice sounding very much differently to yourself than to others).
Or is this not a thing, and perhaps even something that singers who only perform live do avoid, for fear of spooking themselves?
(Note: While I looked up things for this post I noticed that Wilhelmina Fernandez died last year at the age of 75. RIP. She was 33 years old when I first watched Diva. How time flies…)
definitely a thing in the voice training I’ve had. Maybe some who are really old school would insist they can learn it just with the teacher listening, but that leaves out any personal modification they might want to do.
Regardless, they’ll never actually make any money if they refuse to be recorded, so it seems unlikely any would. You have to sell your craft outside the opera house to make it at all.
That said, not listening to or watching to your own work is a not-uncommon thing for many creatives.
Robert Mitchum appeared in over 110 films and television series in a career that spanned the 1940s to the 1990s. He claimed in a TV interview I saw that he had never watched a single movie in which he appeared. He was a rather cranky character and perhaps he was just being contrary, but he said that making a movie was the most interesting part of the process for him and he had no interest in seeing something once it was completed.
Elizabeth Zharoff, AKA The Charismatic Voice on youtube, is an opera singer and vocal coach. Her channel is about vocal analysis (think of it as a very technical ‘react’ video), typically focusing on mainstream music. However, in a rare video, she covered one of her own performances.