I wonder if Janis Joplin could have done Wagner.
Opera isn’t just loud. If that was all it was, then people would hate going to concerts with blaring speakers. It is piercing, and specifically designed as such.
The human voice can’t actually sing louder than an orchestra. It’s hard enough for an entire choir to do so. So, instead, opera singers singin a way that produces resonances at pitches above the fundamental (the main pitch)–pitches that the orchestra doesn’t use.
But it still as loud as it can be. And that requires making alterations to how you normally use your voice in order not to cause damage. That strong vibrato that a lot of people don’t like: that’s kinda necessary–it means you are extremely relaxed. If you don’t relax the smaller muscles in your throat and such, the high pressure air you need can strain them and cause damage.
Heck, even that piercing sound I mentioned happens to be produced from more relaxation. It gets those muscles out of the way, allowing you to use your vocal tract for resonance. This not only produces the piercing tone, but can make the fundamental pitch louder with less effort.
I think it would be quite interesting to hear an opera performed today with more Broadway sound. That sound is also designed to be used often without hurting the singer, but it has the advantage of microphones to make it louder, and using a smaller orchestra that is off stage (often in a pit), making it quieter.
Many other types of singer just basically do vocal protection: they do things that would be damaging if you do it all the time, but then they take care of their voice the rest of the time. They may even do complete vocal rest the day of the recording (other than warmups and such).
Personal note: I actually tend to like opera tenors in general and some basses and contraltos and even mezzos. I don’t tend to care for sopranos, though. They tend to sound too light yet loud. And the physics mean it’s hard to understand what the words.)
One of my music professors in college told us that, while many English-speaking operagoers don’t understand the Italian lyrics, it doesn’t matter. He got ready to play a selection from *Messiah, * by Handel. He said, “This is in English, and I don’t think you will understand it as well as you think you will!” He was right. Fortunately, the recording was published along with the textbook ( which I kept after the course ended) so I could read Handel’s lyrics, at least.
Just a reminder: it’s subjective. The appreciation of a work of art, but also the production of it.
So much of popular culture is style. Performers in a certain genre learn what’s popular and copy performances that came before them. How else to explain the Beatles talking with their Liverpudlian accents off-stage but sounding more American in performance?
It does make genuine change within a genre very slow…
How else to explain? They learned how to do it, that’s how. If you ever heard any recordings by Herman’s Hermits you notice that THEY did not hide their British accents. And remember the Dick Van Dyke Show episode about Kolak and walnuts? Danny Thomas and Mary Tyler Moore used British accents…
A large part of it is just down to how spoken sounds are produced and perceived. So says linguist David Crystal, anyway. In an old blog post of his he addresses the question of people supposedly “losing their accents” when they sing, and actually gives some counterexamples of this from none other than the Beatles.
(snicker)
“The Messiah – text by The Bible, additional dialogue by Georg Frederic Handel.”
Lay off. Or at least, give a citation–chapter and verse.
You are going off on a tangent.
Sorry, didn’t mean to be a tease. Only giggled because reminded of the urban legend about the credit on the 1929 film Taming of the Shrew: “By William Shakespeare. Additional Dialogue by Sam Taylor.”
Oh, I get it. 
One thing that can happen with operatic sopranos is that some of them will do a sort of tour de force with how high they can get their pitch. You end up with something so high that even the lower harmonics are getting close to the upper limit of human hearing, and getting into the range where they’re hard to hear. So all that’s left is the fundamental, and so what you hear basically just sounds like sine-wave beeps. And this will be even more so in recording, since most encoding techniques don’t make much effort at reproducing sounds so high up. It’s impressive, sure, but it doesn’t actually sound good.
That’s usually only for one segment of one song, though.
I don’t think this is the full explanation, though, because people who dislike grand opera with full modern orchestra also tend to dislike period performances of earlier operas, using much smaller and quieter orchestras.
And IME those people also tend to dislike art song with single-instrument accompaniment, too.
I think there’s just something about the style of vocal “art music”, whether it’s opera, song cycles, or whatever, that some people simply don’t enjoy.
I remember the classical music radio station in Cleveland when I was growing up having a rule about “NO SOPRANOS before 11 AM.” Everyone needs coffee before having the Night Queen’s arias sprung on them.
And I wonder whether Hildegarde Behrens could have done Piece of My Heart.
As a rough analogy, think of the noises the women make in so much of today’s pr0n. Someone out there must enjoy it.
I want to hear some auto-tuned opera.
I think it’s really interesting that Beethoven’s *Ode To Joy *is perhaps the most the most identified and loved piece of classical music ever, yet has operatic lyrics that many if not most people don’t even know exists. Because the music can stand without it, and often does.
I have to admit I’m confused by this. Are you saying that most people are unaware that it’s a choral piece? I find that unlikely. What exactly are “operatic lyrics” in this context? It’s a poem by Heinrich Schiller. Nothing operatic about them. Can you clarify what’s “interesting” about this tidbit and what it has to do with this thread?
Yes, I’m saying that many people don’t know it’s a choral piece. I have heard many more recordings of it without the lyrics than I have with them, and I expect that’s very common. “Operatic lyrics” are what I call lyrics that are sung by opera singers, of singers who sound like opera singers.
Of course I could be wrong. But aside from classical music aficionados, most people’s exposure to the music is from references in pop culture. Didn’t one of the Die Hards use it, as an example?
I think it’s probably futile to try to determine how many people are aware of what, but I was referring specifically to “most”, not “many”. I’m sure “many” people aren’t aware of many things, including the existence of Ode to Joy at all. I expect that “most” people, even given the surfeit of orchestral-only recordings, have still heard the thing as originally written. (Speaking of movie uses, Clockwork Orange uses it with words. Sung terribly, but sung.)
I think your definition of “operatic lyrics” is misleading at best. Why not just call them lyrics? Otherwise we’re in a world where as soon as an opera singer sings any words, they’ve become operatic lyrics. Operatic lyrics are lyrics written for an opera. Any other usage muddies the language.
I’m still not sure what any of this has to do with the subject, which is why some people dislike operatic singing.