# Fake Darkness vs Real Darkness (all voice types)



## BalalaikaBoy (Sep 25, 2014)

apologies in advance, this thread is inevitably going to ruffle a few people, but imo, it is a necessary topic, be it a controversial one.

with that out of the way, I should disclaim, none of this means you can't enjoy the performances of said singers or even that they sounded like this all throughout their career, only that, in the given clip, they are a bad example.

in any event, I tried to stick to relatively clear examples, since, imo, there are singers who simultaneously possess some level of real and fake darkness (Ewa Podles and Leontyne Price come to mind)

coloratura soprano

fake darkness: Diana Damrau





real darkness: Elvira de Hidalgo





lyric soprano

fake darkness: Anna Netrebko (hot take: her true voice is coloratura soprano and she depresses it to sound deeper)





real darkness: Mary Costa


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## BalalaikaBoy (Sep 25, 2014)

spinto soprano 
fake darkness: Joan Sutherland. I should note here that I'm doing my best to avoid going after singers super late in their career, as I don't think it's fair to expect a 70 to function on the same cylinders as someone half their age, but in this case, it's....clear laziness, so I'm willing make an exception. that's what happens when you press the voice into lower keys so you can add more high notes (ie, something she had 100% control over, as opposed to, say, a weakening diaphragm). she should have just sung soprano roles in their normal key and left out the interpolated high notes. 





real darkness: Martina Arroyo





fake darkness: Jessye Norman





real darkness: Kirsten Flagstad


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## NoCoPilot (Nov 9, 2020)

Huh, I thought you'd be talking about this.


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## BalalaikaBoy (Sep 25, 2014)

mezzo

fake darkness: Marilyn Horne





real darkness: Elena Nicolai





contralto

fake darkness: Marie Nicole Lemieux 





real darkness: Marie Powers


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## nina foresti (Mar 11, 2014)

NoCoPilot said:


> Huh, I thought you'd be talking about this.


I really enjoyed this small interruption. Thanks for posting it.


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## BalalaikaBoy (Sep 25, 2014)

leggiero tenor

fake darkness: can't find any (most have little desire to sound dark)

real darkness: Alfredo Kraus (specifically early career)





lyric tenor

fake darkness: Leopold Simoneau





real darkness: Roberto Alagna (yay! finally a modern example!  )


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

BalalaikaBoy said:


> leggiero tenor
> 
> fake darkness: can't find any (most have little desire to sound dark)
> 
> ...


You and I have very different ears.


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## amfortas (Jun 15, 2011)

I don't usually think of Jessye Norman having to fake anything. But what do I know?


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## MAS (Apr 15, 2015)

Sorry, I really don't get what you're trying to say.


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## Seattleoperafan (Mar 24, 2013)

I can't be objective about Joan Sutherland. I love her mature voice but you would think it poorly produced. I am a bit of a groupie. So sue me LOL I also am crazy about Marilyn Horne's low notes, but most people here don't like her even though back in the day she was highly lauded. Jessye Norman's voice was much much better and had more of a forward placement when she was big as a house. She herself said she had a dark voice by nature.


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## BalalaikaBoy (Sep 25, 2014)

Woodduck said:


> You and I have very different ears.


in fairness, he wasn't the best example, I was kinda desperate not to have ONLY singers from 40+ years ago. my first pick was Beniamino Gigli


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## BalalaikaBoy (Sep 25, 2014)

amfortas said:


> I don't usually think of Jessye Norman having to fake anything. But what do I know?


tbf, she is singing a spiritual here, but as far as opera singing goes, that would qualify as artificially darkened crooning. muddy middle register, constricted lower register, upper register lacks clarity and ping.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

BalalaikaBoy said:


> in fairness, he wasn't the best example, I was kinda desperate not to have ONLY singers from 40+ years ago. my first pick was Beniamino Gigli


I was referring to Simoneau. There's nothing fake in his singing.


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## amfortas (Jun 15, 2011)

BalalaikaBoy said:


> tbf, she is singing a spiritual here, but as far as opera singing goes, that would qualify as artificially darkened crooning. muddy middle register, constricted lower register, upper register lacks clarity and ping.


And here I've thought of her as this force of nature. We learn something every day.


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## The Conte (May 31, 2015)

Thanks for posting this, it's a good basis for an interesting discussion. Putting to one side the fachs that have been assigned to the singers in this thread, I think two questions are at the fore here. How can you tell the difference between a singer with fake darkness and one that has a naturally dark voice? And are there singers that have fake brightness?

My answer to the second question is yes, there are. Some singers aren't singing with their natural voices and are instead putting on a voice which isn't theirs. This can result in all sorts of unnatural colours including overly bright sounds as well as swallowed dark ones. I know this because it was something I did myself and came about because I had a teacher who liked darker voices and wanted me to create a dark sound. (I also had an odd way of trying to put on an accent when I sang in foreign languages.) I found the key to correcting this fault was to concentrate on the vowels and make sure that they were pronounced correctly and clearly (as in enunciated well, not clear as in tone colour). Early singing teachers emphasised the need to sing pure vowels - that is correctly pronounced, clearly enunciated vowels without distortion as they found that this was the key to bringing out the student's natural voice. When the vowels are pure, then the tone is natural. The answer to the first question now becomes obvious. A singer is using his or her natural voice when the quality of the vowel is pure.

In the examples above most of the 'fake darkness' is a symptom of bad diction due to distorted vowels. The prime example of this is Sutherland who was known for her bad diction and it is interesting to note that her pre 1960 voice was brighter, as well as more connected to better pronounced vowels. However, I don't agree with the findings of some of the examples. Damrau's vowels could be clearer, but we have heard far worse, whereas the example of De Hidalgo isn't a model of diction either and whilst she has a wonderful chest register that she isn't afraid to use, her voice is actually quite bright in that excerpt. The Netrebko/Costa and Norman/Flagstad examples make the point well. Sutherland is an excellent example of vowel distortion and resulting unnatural voice, but Arroyo sounds quite bright in the clip chosen of her (and her diction is good, without being excellent). Simoneau and Alagna were quite different tenors and in these videos the former doesn't sound dark to me at all, whereas Alagna does, but I wouldn't judge his version as being more vocally accomplished than Simoneau's. When it comes to Horne and Cernei, it's the second of those two who sounds less natural to my ear. I also note that this Horne clip has been used to show how wrongly nasal her singing was, but it's very difficult to compare the vowels of one singer singing in French and another in Italian. French is a more nasal language and the vowel sounds in that language don't have the purity of their Italian counterparts, nor do they translate well to being sung more in line with the five main Italian vowels.

N.


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## Seattleoperafan (Mar 24, 2013)

BalalaikaBoy said:


> tbf, she is singing a spiritual here, but as far as opera singing goes, that would qualify as artificially darkened crooning. muddy middle register, constricted lower register, upper register lacks clarity and ping.


Now you are much more knowledgably on these matters than me, Balalaikaboy, but I have always heard that really great singers like Ponselle, Nilsson, Ferrier, Flagstad all have speaking voices that match their speaking voice, hence a natural sound production. To my ears Jessye Norman with her stilted baritone still spoke with the same type of tone that she sang with. Now I am first to say I know squat about proper vocal producion, but I heard someone make that point once and it made sense.


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## nina foresti (Mar 11, 2014)

Seattleoperafan said:


> Now you are much more knowledgably on these matters than me, Balalaikaboy, but I have always heard that really great singers like Ponselle, Nilsson, Ferrier, Flagstad all have speaking voices that match their speaking voice, hence a natural sound production. To my ears Jessye Norman with her stilted baritone still spoke with the same type of tone that she sang with. Now I am first to say I know squat about proper vocal producion, but I heard someone make that point once and it made sense.


Have you ever heard Corelli's speaking voice?
Or even Kaufmann's for that matter?


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## Seattleoperafan (Mar 24, 2013)

nina foresti said:


> Have you ever heard Corelli's speaking voice?
> Or even Kaufmann's for that matter?


Nina, sorry no. I guess there is a hole in my argument..


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## Revitalized Classics (Oct 31, 2018)

Seattleoperafan said:


> Now you are much more knowledgably on these matters than me, Balalaikaboy, but I have always heard that really great singers like Ponselle, Nilsson, *Ferrier*, *Flagstad* all have speaking voices that match their speaking voice, hence a natural sound production. To my ears Jessye Norman with her stilted baritone still spoke with the same type of tone that she sang with. Now I am first to say I know squat about proper vocal producion, but I heard someone make that point once and it made sense.


I remember reading that John Culshaw -the producer at Decca Records- was surprised when he spoke to Kirsten Flagstad because he thought her speaking voice resembled that of Kathleen Ferrier, then just recently deceased.

Thanks to Youtube we can make the comparison,
Ferrier in interview (1949)





Flagstad (1952)





Both have rather lovely, mellow speaking voices which complement what we know of their singing.


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## Bonetan (Dec 22, 2016)

Seattleoperafan said:


> Nina, sorry no. I guess there is a hole in my argument..


I don't think there is. For Kaufmann's speaking voice to match his singing he would have to speak like Kermit the Frog. It's one of the clues that tells me the darkness in his singing is fake. I think Corelli's speaking voice aligns with his singing. I don't hear anything artificial in either sound.


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## Seattleoperafan (Mar 24, 2013)

Revitalized Classics said:


> I remember reading that John Culshaw -the producer at Decca Records- was surprised when he spoke to Kirsten Flagstad because he thought her speaking voice resembled that of Kathleen Ferrier, then just recently deceased.
> 
> Thanks to Youtube we can make the comparison,
> Ferrier in interview (1949)
> ...


Kirsten's speaking voice is on pretty much the same pitch as the contralto Ferrier. Both have lovely alto speaking voices. When Flagstad and Ponselle tested their voices against each other in a theater with witnesses they did so from the bottom to the top and the bottom of Ponselle's voice is very low indeed. Ponselle was just slightly less big than Flagstad's pipe organ of a voice.


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## Revitalized Classics (Oct 31, 2018)

Bonetan said:


> I don't think there is. For Kaufmann's speaking voice to match his singing he would have to speak like Kermit the Frog. It's one of the clues that tells me the darkness in his singing is fake. I think Corelli's speaking voice aligns with his singing. I don't hear anything artificial in either sound.


I think I remember you saying that Leonard Warren's voice was artificially darkened?

There is an interview here I had not heard before where, to me, there is quite a big difference between his speaking voice and the singing voice we would recognise from records





Normally I would say there is not so much discrepancy: Gobbi speaks like Gobbi sings, Pavarotti sounds much like himself, Gigli's speaking voice was very sweet etc etc. I suppose Giuseppe di Stefano's speaking voice was quite low, particularly when he was older...

I remember being surprised by this: an interview with Mario del Monaco speaking. I was all set to hear a big _booming_ speaking voice...


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## Bonetan (Dec 22, 2016)

Revitalized Classics said:


> I think I remember you saying that Leonard Warren's voice was artificially darkened?
> 
> There is an interview here I had not heard before where, to me, there is quite a big difference between his speaking voice and the singing voice we would recognise from records
> 
> ...


Yes, you remember correctly! And that Leonard Warren interview is the one I use to make the point. Quite the discrepancy.

Wow! That MDM interview is indeed surprising! But after reading about all the wacky things MDM did with his technique I'm not surprised that the speaking and singing voice don't match.


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## The Conte (May 31, 2015)

Bonetan said:


> I don't think there is. For Kaufmann's speaking voice to match his singing he would have to speak like Kermit the Frog. It's one of the clues that tells me the darkness in his singing is fake. I think Corelli's speaking voice aligns with his singing. I don't hear anything artificial in either sound.


Yes, I agree with this. One of the things this fake darkness thread hasn't taken into account is that singers may be singing in the wrong voice type. Was Norman a soprano with fake darkness or a mezzo singing the wrong fach? And if I were her teacher how would I know the difference? That's why I pointed out the distorted, oddly pronounced vowels in the excerpt with her in. If a teacher had managed to get her to sing that spiritual with pure vowels, then her natural voice would have been apparent and the correct voice category clear.

Interestingly when I had my experience with a teacher who wanted me to artificially darken my voice, they suggested I also do so with my speaking voice to get the two to match!

Here's Corelli speaking, and note what he says about the voice being free and natural AND how each singer needs to find where that placement is for themselves:






N.


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## Seattleoperafan (Mar 24, 2013)

The Conte said:


> Yes, I agree with this. One of the things this fake darkness thread hasn't taken into account is that singers may be singing in the wrong voice type. Was Norman a soprano with fake darkness or a mezzo singing the wrong fach? And if I were her teacher how would I know the difference? That's why I pointed out the distorted, oddly pronounced vowels in the excerpt with her in. If a teacher had managed to get her to sing that spiritual with pure vowels, then her natural voice would have been apparent and the correct voice category clear.
> 
> Interestingly when I had my experience with a teacher who wanted me to artificially darken my voice, they suggested I also do so with my speaking voice to get the two to match!
> 
> ...


The Conte, Jessye Norman said in an interview that her voice was basically dark by nature. I think she was a mezzo who could sing in a high tessitura. I think she was a mezzo who liked a soprano's top billing. Most of her career was made up of recitals and she almost never went above A5 there. Berlioz and Sieglinde the same thing. Her most famous recording, The Four Last Songs of Strauss, aside from one B5, the rest sounds like a dramatic mezzo. I think she worked around the label soprano to bring her gifts to the table. I do think when she was young the voice was brighter and a bit more focused than it became later. But even then she had a truly prodigious contralto part of her voice. I used to have a pirated early recording of her singing the mezzo part Jocasta and the low notes were bigger than Ponselle's, and THAT is saying a lot. They would have shook your seat LOL. Have a good day!


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## The Conte (May 31, 2015)

Seattleoperafan said:


> The Conte, Jessye Norman said in an interview that her voice was basically dark by nature. I think she was a mezzo who could sing in a high tessitura. I think she was a mezzo who liked a soprano's top billing. Most of her career was made up of recitals and she almost never went above A5 there. Berlioz and Sieglinde the same thing. Her most famous recording, The Four Last Songs of Strauss, aside from one B5, the rest sounds like a dramatic mezzo. I think she worked around the label soprano to bring her gifts to the table. I do think when she was young the voice was brighter and a bit more focused than it became later. But even then she had a truly prodigious contralto part of her voice. I used to have a pirated early recording of her singing the mezzo part Jocasta and the low notes were bigger than Ponselle's, and THAT is saying a lot. They would have shook your seat LOL. Have a good day!


You are far more familiar with her art than I am, but that is very much my feeling about her too. I have her commercial recordings of Jocasta (and like her in that part). I think Ponselle was quite likely a mezzo or contralto (and she said she had the low notes to sing mezzo or contralto roles as well as feeling insecure about her high C).

N.


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