The Diction Police

Episode 31

This week is the other half of my conversation with Tuscan tenor Giorgio Berrugi. Our texts today are Christoph Willibald Gluck's "O del mio dolce ardor" and Petrarch's Sonnet 104, "Pace non trovo." We talk about whether or not to use glottals in Italian (spoiler-the answer is NO!), some irregular verbs you may run across, some standard suffixes with stressed E and the importance of knowing every meaning of your lines in an opera. You can find both texts for today at the Lied and Art Song Texts Page. "O del mio dolce ardor" is from the opera Paride ed Elena, a collaboration of Gluck and Ranieri de' Calzabigi, who also wrote the libretto for Orfeo ed Euridice. Francesco Petrarca's "Pace non trovo" is one of his sonnets to Laura, the married woman whom he loved--Wikipedia even has an entire section devoted to Petrarch and Laura. I also found a short essay on Liszt and Petrarch at a website entitled The Engines of our Ingenuity. The Lied and Art Song Texts Page lists "Pace non trovo" as Sonnet CXXXIV, but every other source that I found lists it in modern numerals as 104, so I've used that number on this episode. For people interested in reading some of the classic literature online, check out Project Gutenberg, Classic Authors dot Net or The Literature Page. Kindle for PC or MAC is also available as a free download from Amazon, if you would like books in that format but don't have a Kindle (I personally have this on my Netbook, so that I can carry it around with me). Anyone interested in studying more mythology can get started at Wikipedia's Roman Mythology and Greek Mythology pages, as well as Encyclopedia Mythica, Myth Web and Theoi Greek Mythology or check out Edith Hamilton's book Mythology. As always, please feel free to contact me here, through the Facebook page or directly at ellen@ellenrissinger.com with any questions or comments.

Episode 30

Castilian Spanish is our focus this week, with Basque soprano Vanessa Goikoetxea. Our texts for today are the Zarzuela tenor aria "No puede ser" and the Obradors song "Al amor". This time we are concentrating on the S, C and Z, and the LL in Castilian Spanish. The text for "No puede ser" can be found here, as well as a brief history of Zarzuela and a short biography of the composer, Pablo Sorozábal. The text to "Al amor" can be found at the Lied and Art Song Texts Page, and I found the original Catullus poem that it's based on, as well as a blog in Spanish that compares the two poems, and includes another modern translation of the Latin. The Basque language (Euskera) pre-dates Indo-European languages, and is considered a language isolate, since it has no grammatic connection to the languages that surround it. The Basque composer Vanessa mentioned were Jesús Guridi and Aita Donostia, and I found a few Youtube clips for both of them: the Finale of El Caserio and the song Alla arriba en equella montana by Guridi and choral pieces Adios Ene Maitea for men's choir and Agur Maria for women's choir by Donostia. As always, please feel free to contact me with and questions or comments here, on the Facebook page, or directly at ellen@ellenrissinger.com

Episode 29

This week we are back to German Diction with vocal coach Michael Schütze and baritone Christoph Pohl. We focus on the text to Agathe's Aria "Wie nahte mir der Schlummer... Leise, leise" from Der Freischütz and Heinrich Heine's poem "Wenn ich in deine Augen seh'" from Dichterliebe. Since German has so many of them, this week we are concentrating on consonants! Double consonants, 2 in a row, 3 in a row, with some ideas on how to practice them, as well as the genitive (possessive) S. You can find the libretto for Der Freischütz here, just scroll down to musical number 8-Szene und Arie to find Agathe's aria. The text for "Wenn ich in deine Augen seh'" can be found here. There was also a movie version of Der Freischütz released in December of 2010, hopefully this trailer is viewable all over the world and not copyright protected! Please feel free to contact me with questions or comments here, at the Facebook page or directly at ellen@ellenrissinger.com

Episode 28

Our first episode on Czech diction! This week conductor Tomáš Netopil is our guest, discussing two texts from Rusalka, the Song to the Moon (Měsíčku na nebi hlubokém) and the Prince's first act aria (Vidino divná). Since many people are less familiar with the Czech language, we tried to cover a lot of the basics, while concentrating on things foreigners have trouble with like the palatal D [ɟ]and T[c], the voiced H [ɦ] and the accent markings on vowels and consonants, including our favorite Czech letter ř [Ř]! You can find a libretto for the first act of Rusalka which also has an English translation here. The Song to the Moon is about halfway down and the Prince's aria is towards the end of the first act. Timothy Cheek's Singing in Czech is an excellent resource to study Czech diction. It includes a CD with native speakers pronouncing the examples in the book, as well as an extensive list of Lieder and Opera in Czech and word-for-word translations and IPA for many of the most important songs and arias. I also found a blog called Czech Mix: Opera Colorado celebrates Czech cultural arts, with some interesting entries about Czech music, Dvorak and a conversation with the Czech language coach for Opera Colorado's production of Rusalka about the challenges of singing in Czech. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to contact me here, on the Facebook page or directly at ellen@ellenrissinger.com

Episode 27

Happy 2011! We're starting back up again with a discussion of "Un'aura amorosa" and "De' miei bollenti spiriti" with tenor Giorgio Berrugi. We concentrate on some common suffixes with stressed o (-oro, -ore and -oso), intervocalic S and using consonants to create expression. Here are links to the libretti for Così fan tutte (scroll down to Aria No. 17) and La Traviata (scroll down to the opening of Act II). Just for the sake of clarity, on this episode we translated the word "esca" as "hook", but I double-checked this with my Harpers Collins Sansoni dictionary and the definition there is "bait, enticement". The language lesson website I mention in Episode 27 is Verbal Planet. There you can set up online Skype lessons with teachers from all over the world at your convenience. Please feel free to contact me here, on the Facebook page or directly at ellen@ellenrissinger.com with any questions or comments!

Episode 26-Bel Canto

Before we go on holiday break, I wanted to get another Special Edition of The Diction Police, this time on Bel Canto music. Tenor Javier Camarena and basso buffo Carlo Lepore give us tips on how to practice coloratura and patter, while conductors Henrik Nánási and Erik Nielsen talk about Bel Canto style, cadenzas and what young singers can do to prepare themselves better. We'll be back mid-January with new episodes--I already have several interviews lined up for this month, including one on Czech diction! Meanwhile, have a wonderful holiday season, stay warm and see you next year! Ellen

Episode 25

This week we are back to Russian Diction, with Siberian-born tenor Andrej Dunaev, discussing the texts to two Rachmaninoff songs, Opus 14 No 1 "Я жду тебя" (I Wait for You) and No 14 "Весенние воды" (Spring Waters). We concentrate on the й (I-kratkoe), the devoicing of consonants, the hard sign ъ (not to be confused with the soft sign ь or the vowel ы!), another way to write the JE vowel - ѣ and a little on the soft consonant щ.

Since I'm a big fan of trying to read the Cyrillic, here are the links to the texts for "Я жду тебя" and "Весенние воды" in Cyrillic. If you prefer, there are links directly under the texts to get the Roman alphabet transliterations.

The two podcasts mentioned on this episode are A Taste of Russian and The Russian Sound System, both of which are available free on iTunes. I also found a nice website called Russian Language Lessons, which is free and many of the lessons have audio clips to help you learn to pronounce, it seems comparable to the Talk Now! CD-rom series of language lessons with more grammar rules.

Please feel free to contact me with questions or comments here, at the Facebook page or directly at ellen@ellenrissinger.com

Episode 24

We finish up our 2-part series on Hungarian diction this week, concentrating on Zoltán Kodály's "A csitári hegyek alatt" with Zoltán Nyári and Henrik Nánási. This week our focus is on the consonants, especially the fun combinations of GY [Ɉ], TY [c], NY [ɲ]  and LY [j]; and the variations of S [ʃ], ZS [ʒ], SZ [s], CS [tʃ] and C [ts]. Here is a link to the text for this week, and I also found these YouTube clips of it in performance as a solo with piano and as a duet with orchestra--there are also many other clips available including a pop/rock release of it! As always, please feel free to contact me with questions or suggestions here, at the Facebook page or directly at ellen@ellenrissinger.com

Episode 23

At least Episode 23 is up! Sorry for the delay, and for the static that you will sometimes hear on the podcast! This week is the first of a 2-part series on Hungarian diction, discussing some text from Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle (Kéksakállú herceg vára) with conductor Henrik Nánási and tenor Zoltán Nyári. Here is a link to an online libretto--we chose the first two long passages of Kéksakállú and the first long passage of Judit. If you have downloaded this on iTunes, I added the text to the Lyrics tab under Get Info, hopefully it will go through for you. We focus on the 14 Hungarian vowels, which come in short and long pairs. The new phonetic symbol that we come across is [ɒ] for the unaccented dark "a". Here are some links for anyone interested in finding out more about Hungarian language and music: There is a 2-page article in the Journal of Singing with a short history of Hungarian music and a brief explanation of the diction. I also found Hungarian Reference, which includes sound clips of the alphabet, and a free online Hungarian course at the University of Kansas. For Hungarian music on YouTube, I found the movie The Miraculous Circumstance, which is a film about the folk song tradition that Béla Bartok was trying to preserve. Other clips that I found include a scene from György Ránki's The Emperor's New Clothes (Pomádé király uj ruhája), György Kurtág's Four Songs to poems by János Pilinszky and some clips from Erkel Ferenc's opera Bánk Bán, "Hazám, hazám" and the Gertrudis duet. Please feel free to contact me with any questions or suggestions here, on the Facebook page or directly at ellen@ellenrissinger.com

Episode 22

This week we are discussing long and short syllables in German with mezzo-soprano Tanja Baumgartner, tenor Virgil Hartinger and Uta Mücksch, a prompter at the Semperoper. The texts for today's episode are "Kommt ein schlanker Bursch gegangen" from Der Freischütz and "Waldesgespräch", by German romantic poet Josef von Eichendorff, one of the most famous pieces from Schumann's Liederkreis Op. 39. If you are interested in Pennsylfaanich Deitsch, there is actually a Wikipedia page, both in the language and about the language. There are many different spellings and pronunciations, so it's fun to look at! Plus, tenor Kenneth Riegel commissioned a song cycle of PA Dutch poetry in 1977, entitled Songs of the Tulpehocken, from composer Stephen Douglas Burton. There is a recording of them with the Lousiville Symphony, and he also performed them in several recitals with my mother! As always, please feel free to contact me here, at the Facebook page or directly at ellen@ellenrissinger.com