The Bass Voice: An Endangered Fach

Can the bass voice be restored to its former glory?! There was a time when the bass voice represented one of the grandest ideals in singing: nobility, authority, breadth, depth, beauty, youthfulness, freedom, and verbal command. A true bass did not merely sound “low.” He sounded sovereign. The voice had column, resonance, roundness, and amplitude — but also legato, diction, elegance, and line. In this new episode of Vocal Reckoning, the first of a mini-series on basses and bass-baritones, we turn to seven great basses who remind us what the voice type once meant: Yevgeny Nesterenko Alexander Kipnis Nicolai Ghiaurov Cesare Siepi Samuel Ramey Kurt Moll Ferruccio Furlanetto These basses actually knew how to sing! They didn't bark, like the majority of contemporary basses. They did not manufactured woolly, swallowed, constricted, pseudo-dark sounds. They were singers of tremendous individuality who nevertheless shared the essential virtues of all great singers of the past: a free emission, a noble vocal line, clear language, imposing presence, and a sound that remained human, beautiful, and alive. The tragedy is that, as with every other voice type, the standard has collapsed — and with basses and bass-baritones perhaps even more dramatically. The modern operatic bass is too often reduced to a collection of mannerisms: artificially woofy production, constrained resonance, unstable or inverted vibrato (did anyone say Ryan Speedo Green?!), monochrome, swallowed “darkness” (à la John Rylea), and diction so blurred that language becomes incidental (have you ever understood a word uttered by Greer Grimsley?). We have gone from basses who could sing with grandeur and freedom to basses who too often merely impersonate depth. This episode is not nostalgia for its own sake. It is a reckoning with what has been lost: the difference between a naturally resonant bass and a manufactured growl; between noble darkness and vocal murk; between authority and affectation; between singing words and producing generalized operatic noise. When basses knew how to sing, the entire stage changed. So what happened? And can the bass voice ever recover its former majesty?