The voce faringea — the forgotten art of the bel canto tenors

Heights beyond the reach of modern tenors

Many tenor roles in the operas of the primo Ottocento have an exceptionally high tessitura — often with notes well above C5 or D5. The best-known example is probably Arturo’s arioso Credeasi misera from Bellini’s I Puritani, which is composed up to F5. Normally, such passages lie beyond the vocal compass of modern tenors; roles like these therefore not only raise the question of how tenors in the early nineteenth century coped with such tessituras and extreme high notes, but also touch on historically informed performance practice, the aesthetics of Western classical music, and how singers today might perform such roles in an effective and vocally healthy way.

A forgotten register concept

The so-called voce faringea offers an answer to these questions. Essentially, it is a forgotten historical singing practice used to extend the upper range of the voice; the falsetto, typically heard as a weak or feminine sound, is modified by the singer into a vocal quality that is more tenoral and powerful. During the period of its employment, the resulting sound was considered homogeneous with that of the lower registers and no longer perceived as a falsetto vocal colour. In an exemplary fashion, this register mechanism mirrors a pre-Romantic vocal ideal of sound clearly divergent from those prevalent today.

Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century vocal-pedagogical literature employed varied, confusing and even contradictory terminology for the different voice registers; most pedagogues, however, agreed on the particular aesthetic merits of the two principal registers — chest and falsetto. In addition, some vocal treatises of the era mention a third register mechanism that tenors could employ to particular artistic advantage. It was often described as an intermediate register, or a special mechanism connecting falsetto and chest register, and was perceived as a mixture of the two — often called voix mixte. Vocal maestri and physiologists used many further terms for this mechanism, including head voice, falsetto or fausset, voce mezzo-falso or middle falsetto, Schlundkopfregister, feigned voice, voix sur-laryngienne and voix pharyngienne — pharyngeal voice, or voce faringea.

The term pharyngeal voice was coined by the English singer and vocal pedagogue Edgar Herbert-Caesari in his article “The Pharyngeal Voice” for The Musical Times and in his book The Voice of the Mind (1951). Herbert-Caesari explains that it translates the Italian voce faringea and was used by exponents of the old Italian school solely to describe a peculiar tonal quality produced by a distinctive mechanism, cultivated for more than three hundred years. The tenors of the Rossini–Bellini–Donizetti period were taught to sing with voce faringea — very carefully mixed with both the falsetto and the chest register — a method that enabled them to sing their highest notes with ease and brilliance.

In accordance with formerly prevalent vocal ideals, at least according to the historical written sources, these tenori di grazia did not produce their high notes with dramatic force but with elegance and suppleness. And yet the special technique they employed to produce notes considerably beyond C5 with absolute security and facility — and with every gradation between pianissimo and fortissimo throughout the range — gradually fell into obscurity.

What the ears of the time heard

Two witnesses among many describe the mixed register of the tenors — its ease, its power, and how little it resembled what listeners expected of a falsetto.

1837 — the turning point

During the second half of the nineteenth century the vocal tradition of these great tenors went out of fashion, and a new, more dramatic vocal ideal took hold. Musicological scholarship attributes Gilbert-Louis Duprez’s interpretation of Arnold in Rossini’s Guillaume Tell — first in Lucca in 1831, but far more consequentially in the Paris revival of 1837 — as a primary catalyst for this development. Duprez sang his high C, the famous ut de poitrine, not in the traditional falsetto-dominant mechanism of the celebrated tenori di grazia Adolphe Nourrit, John Braham or Giovanni Battista Rubini, but in the modal (chest) register — much as tenors do today.

The term voce faringea has been chosen here over other historical terms in order to avoid confusion and unwarranted associations with the modern falsetto, as well as the misconceptions surrounding various other labels.

The physiological evidence

Observations by vocal pedagogues, medical doctors and physiologists — documented in vocal treatises as well as physiological and anatomical writings of the early nineteenth century — are particularly revealing with regard to the training of the vocal registers within the operatic tradition of the time. Many authors stress the importance of specific muscular adjustments in both the vocal tract and the larynx for producing the “mixed” voice. Francesco Bennati, an ENT specialist at the Paris Opera and himself a trained singer, was able to study the physiological differences between the registers in himself and in the finest singers of his day. He and other maestri and physiologists identified a contraction of the pharynx through lateral approximation of the pharyngeal walls in the region of the isthmus faucium, together with a narrowing of the aryepiglottic space, as requirements for producing the mixed register.

Lepelletier de la Sarthe illustrated this constriction of the pharyngeal space in the voix pharyngienne — the French term for voce faringea — as observed by Bennati. In addition, an increase of the vibrating vocal-fold mass through a finely coordinated adjustment between the thyroarytenoid (TA) and cricothyroid (CT) muscles, and a strengthening of glottal adduction, were named as the physiological basis for developing a falsetto tone into the mixed voice.

Reconstructing a lost art

The aim of my artistic research has been the artistic and scientific reconstruction of this long-forgotten type of singing, known in its time as voce faringea. The work rests on an interdisciplinary combination of artistic, experimental practice with musicological, acoustic and physiological research. My own voice served equally as mediator between the disciplines and as research object, tool of experimentation and objectifying instrument.

I was able to present and document the findings both scientifically, in physiological-acoustic studies, and artistically, with my interpretation of the extremely high tenor role of Arkenholz in Aribert Reimann’s opera The Ghost Sonata at the Frankfurt Opera in January 2014. My central goal has been to rediscover these specific qualities of vocal sound and to open new perspectives on the historical performance practice of the vocal literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The doctoral project Die voce faringea – Rekonstruktion einer vergessenen Kunst was completed with distinction at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz in October 2014.

The acoustic and electroglottographic evidence behind this reconstruction — spectrograms, EGG signals and audio examples that let you hear the voce faringea next to the counter­tenor falsetto — is presented on the Analyses page. The written results are collected under Publications.