Heart to Heart: Expressive Singing in England, 1780-1830.(Review)

Heart to Heart: Expressive Singing in England, 1780-1830. By Robert Toft. (Oxford Early Music Series.) Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. [xv, 198 p. ISBN 0-19-816662-1. $60.]

Robert Toft's book on performance practices in eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century singing may be the first to treat a wide variety of performance topics in a single monograph. Although the author limits himself to English sources pertinent to the period 1780-1830, his informative and fascinating look at vocal practice could very likely be extended to the Continent, since some of his sources are English editions of works by Italian and French singing masters. Toft relies heavily on singing treatises but also includes information from contemporaneous letters and newspaper articles, especially performance reviews. Perhaps the most revealing information comes from singers' annotations in scores (both published and in manuscript) and from treatises on rhetoric.

Chapter 1 offers abundant detail about the different manners of expression suited to four styles of singing (church, chamber, concert, theater), according to which singers varied their delivery in terms of rhythm, accent, tone quality, and ornamentation. Perhaps most interesting is the discussion of the role of rhythmic alteration and ornamentation in the different styles of recitative. The second chapter ("Discovering the Proper Manner of Delivery") offers some surprising information about how singers approached the expression of sentiment, or even a phrase or word. More than one contemporary writer describes something akin to the Stanislavsky method of acting: singers were urged to imagine actually being the person they were representing in a song, and to capture the proper emotion "by endeavoring to recall any similar situation in which we ourselves may have been placed" (p. 15, quoted from Richard Mackenzie Bacon, Elements of Vocal Science: Being a Philosophical Enquiry into Some of the Principles of Sin ging, ed. Edward Foreman [Champaign, Ill.: Pro Musica Press, 1966], 74-75]). Toft also identifies a characteristic approach of Italian singers to word expression: unlike their English counterparts, they tried to express individual words in a literal fashion, a practice resulting in sudden transitions of dynamics and vocal color.

In chapter 3, Toft discusses the adaptation of vocal sound quality as a means of expression. Singers did not strive for continuous beauty of sound; one writer suggests that "[t]he greater the passion ... the less musical will be the voice that expresses it, because the tones of violent passion are by no means melodious" (p. 23, from Maria Anfossi, Trattato teorico-pratico sull'arte del canto... [ca. 1840], 69). Toft also describes four different kinds of vibrato recognized by the authors of treatises, emphasizing that no author condoned the continuous, obvious vibrato heard most often today. In addition, singers were trained not to blend the registers of the voice into one homogenous tonal quality, but to cultivate the emotional effects created by the different registers.

The fourth chapter deals with phrasing anti its relation to rhetoric. Most contemporary authors equate ...