I’ve been able to sing Gounod’s Ave Maria since a child. We have it on a Christmas album. And I used to pick up on foreign languages in songs at least, rather quickly.
Somewhat more recently, I taught myself to chant the Pater Noster and sing the Sanctus and Agnus Dei. I had the songs in Latin (easy to find on the internet). And I simply copied the tunes I heard in RC Church all my life.
I’d never say that I spoke Latin. But it’s a beautiful language (esp. Church Latin). And I know a little about it.
Not really: my exposure to Latin is via classical literature. One should be able to learn to speak Latin like any other language, though. There are basic textbooks written purely in Latin (same technique as for learning French, modern Chinese, etc), for example
There are quite a few different pronunciations of Latin, by the way. Mostly differences in consonants. There is Catholic Church Latin, which I have sung in many many times as a member of a church choir and as a cantor. I also learned a somewhat different pronunciation when I sang in Latin as part of a symphony choir (Palestrina etc.). My daughter-in-law teaches Latin and many of their friends are also Latin teachers – they teach a different pronunciation again, purporting to be Classical.
And then, when the diocesan choir went on a European tour and sang a Mozart Mass in the Salzburg Cathedral under the direction of the choir master there, he gave us a crash course in AUSTRIAN Latin the night before. Yikes. He was the kind of music director who tears his hair in despair.
I’m sure there are many others. Latin is my favorite language to sing in, even before Italian. All the vowels are in the front (contrast all the swallowed vowels in French) and the consonants are crisp and not guttural (contrast German). I’ve performed in all these languages and Latin is the most natural for singing.
Back when I was in middle school (7th and 8th grade, about ages 12-14), one of the plays we did was The Sound of Music. Some of the “chorus” parts were nuns, who were sometimes singing old Latin hymns and chants in the background. They were naturally curious about what they were singing, and I ended up being the one who translated for them: This was before I had any Latin classes, but I was able to pick up enough from cognates and from being steeped in Catholic culture (even post-Vatican 2) to figure out most of it.
Another anecdote: I’ve had a number of friends who spoke Spanish as their first language, and they’ve all tried to teach me to roll my Rs in Spanish words, to no avail. But then one day I was saying something in Latin, and realized that, when speaking Latin, for some reason rolled Rs felt perfectly natural, and I was doing it without thinking about it (though I have no idea if that’s “correct”, for any of the many standards of Latin pronunciation). But it’s still very hard for me in Spanish.
This is something we had to do as a vocal major in college. You obviously couldn’t learn the language, but you were expected to be able to translate the text. Sure, many included a poetic translation, but, in order to emote properly, you were expected to look up what each word actually meant.
I’m glad I already had experience with that. I was never all that good at learning language vocabulary, but I always loved looking up words and doing rough translations, as well as reading about grammar and pronunciation. (The pronunciation was another reason we were encouraged to look up words in other languages, just in case we hit on an irregular word. It’s why we had to learn IPA.)
I was under the impression (reading Gerald Moore, etc.) that vocalists do invariably learn German, Italian, and so on, for how can they properly emote and do justice to the material without feeling it? I have no information specifically about Latin, though.
My understanding is that what we learned in college was often the beginning of such for singers, not the end point. It wouldn’t be practical for us to fully learn all the language we may actually sing in. Our classes for each language were more an introduction to that language. Sure, we’d learn some words and grammatical concepts, but we’d be nowhere near fluent enough not to have to look up words.
The classes were very practically focused. For example, we learned to roll our Rs in French (rather than the typical back R) because that was was done in the more traditional style songs we’d sing in operas/choir/etc. We didn’t learn about how ending vowels are sometimes elided in Italian, because such would always be indicated on our score by the number of syllables. We learned “shteel-eh nacht,” not “shteel-uh nacht,” because the former is (my attempt to describe) the more traditional pronunciation of “Stille Nacht.”
We had at most a semester to learn enough to sing in any particular language. And we were already leaving out languages like Spanish—partly because of the lack of traditional Spanish songs in our canon, and partly because it’s a language more of us were expected to already know to some degree.
I don’t think my choir teachers knew the languages we would sing in super well. They knew enough to make it sound good. We wound up singing in Polish, Swedish, and other languages not so often covered. We didn’t want to miss out on some very well written pieces of music, even if we couldn’t sing them as well as a native speaker.
Here’s a great example of Latin chanting – the Credo, sung by the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge.
The choristers learn Latin from the age of eight, so they sing with meaning, understanding every word. You can hear the difference it makes.
The words are correctly pronounced (with Anglican Latin pronunciation), correctly emphasised according to the meaning, the vowel quantities are right, etc.
Next to English, Latin is the language they sing in most, and they sing at six services a week in normal times, with different music each day, so they get a lot of practice.
The chant is fast, and the piece is long without repetition, sung with unaccompanied voices. The text dates from the 4th century, and the setting is from the 17th century.
(Recorded live in a chapel service, so there’s some background noise.)
As a 7th grade girl in Catholic school, our first period of the day was going down to the attached church to act as the choir for the daily requiem mass. I only remember the first line.
