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I still keep in touch with a few good friends from my school days – gosh, that makes me feel quite old! – who aren’t studying music and I always appreciate when they understand how much time and effort my studying takes up. Their support always means a lot to me, perhaps more than my colleagues at RCS who are used to all the work and effort. I do still find it amusing though when they ask me: ‘How can it take 6 years of study just to learn how to sing?’ – For a while I contemplated that myself but at the beginning of my 2nd year at RCS, I’ve started to completely understand why so many years are dedicated to such an art.
Perhaps it is the increased difficulty of my repertoire that has led me to appreciate the complexity of singing. I know that one particular lied that I fell in love with recently has been a delicious challenge for me. Auf Dem Wasser Zu Singen is one of the more challenging lieder by Schubert as it leaves next to no time to breathe yet demands long and complex phrases from the singer. It opens with a beautiful description of a rowboat being rocked gently by the water and the view of the eastern groves and murmuring of the reeds. Then in the last verse it darkens and the meaning behind the description becomes clear as Schubert expresses the inevitability of the end of life through the vanishing of time on dewy wings. As so often happens in lieder, the piano imitates the meaning and I love how in this particular lied it imitates the rocking waves and sets the scene. I had the opportunity to receive some coaching from Mark Hathaway as I will be performing Auf Dem Wasser Zu Singen for my midterm exam on Wednesday and he explored it in a new light that I hadn’t seen before. We focused on releasing the breath for as long as I needed to between phrases and also hitting the floor between phrases in order to release the tension from my body and properly adopt a new character for each phrase. By the end of these exercises, my body was free, my breath was flowing and the quiet passages in each verse were fuller and more connected. Now the difficult bit, making all these improvements second nature!
Auf Dem Wasser Zu Singen is a piece that I don’t think I will ever get tired of. The meaning is beautiful, the harmonies are beautiful and how it makes one feel after performing is beautiful. It is a magical piece but it takes time to perfect and the improvements that I made with Mark Hathaway will take weeks of practice before they are executed automatically. That is why it takes 6, sometimes 8 years of study before a singer can officially enter into the critical world of opera/classical singing. Wisdom from the teachers we work with needs time to be adopted not just physically but mentally. Maturity is key.
Here is the beautiful Barbara Bonney performing Auf Dem Wasser Zu Singen
Thank you for reading!
Davidona Pittock 