How Garcia Helped Singers

It is a singular fact that the greatest teacher of the Italian bel canto that ever lived was a Spaniard; but this is only one of many remarkable things about Manuel Garcia.

He was the brother of two women, Maria Malibran and Pauline Viardot, who rank among the greatest singers of all time; he taught Jenny Lind, Antoinette Sterling, Charles Sandey, Johanna Wagner, Mathilde Marchesi, Julius Stockhausen, and others who became famous themselves or as teachers of Calve, Eames, Melba, Henschel, Van Rooy, and Scheidemantel; he invented the laryngoscope, which not only put the study of the voice on a scientific basis, but proved such a boon to medical men that when his hundredth birthday was celebrated, sixteen societies of laryngologists from all parts of the world sent representatives to honor him; and he was one of the very few distinguished men who reached such an advanced age in full possession of their mental faculties and with enough physical vigor to go about and make speeches. Garcia came into the world in 1805, when Haydn, Beethoven, and Schubert were still living, and Wagner, Verdi, Liszt, Chopin, Mendelssohn, and Schumann not yet born; and on March 17, 1906, he celebrated the entrance into his one hundred and second year by taking up a guitar and singing a Spanish song.

Let those who are sneered at as having become teachers because they failed as singers take heart! Manuel Garcia was one of them!

Let those who are sneered at as having become teachers because they failed as singers take heart! Manuel Garcia was one of them! He went with his father and his sisters to America and took part in the first regular season of Italian opera in New York. But although he had a good voice he found the work involved by an operatic career too hard for his physical resources. At last things reached a point at which, as he once told his biographer, he went through every successive performance in a state of fear lest his voice should leave him suddenly when he was on the stage. Hard usage in Mexico damaged this organ, and he further injured it by trying to make it as big as Lablache's. This was after he had returned to Europe. Following the advice of his parents, he went to Naples and sang there; but the newspaper criticisms were so unfavorable that he sent them to his father as proof that he would never succeed as an opera singer. "From now onward," he wrote, "I am going to devote myself to the occupation which I love, and for which I believe I was born."

It seems strange that the man who thus failed to adapt himself to a stage career should have become the best helper other singers had ever had; but such was the case.

Thus he became a teacher, a profession for which he had prepared himself by learning the old Italian method of singing from his father, as well as from Zingarelli, and Ansani, while Fetis had taught him harmony. It seems strange that the man who thus failed to adapt himself to a stage career should have become the best helper other singers had ever had; but such was the case. We have seen how he helped Jenny Lind to recover and improve her voice when he himself had feared it was hopelessly lost. The rest-cure and the singing of scales and shakes very slowly were the method adopted in this case.

Another pupil whose voice Garcia restored was Bessie Palmer, the English contralto, who has told the story of her experiences in her book of Musical Recollections. She was first assigned to a teacher who made an incorrect diagnosis of her voice, maintaining that it was a soprano, and giving her soprano songs to sing. After some months she found her voice becoming thin and scratchy, and her throat in a constant state of irritation. At last she wrote to the superintendent, requesting that she should be placed in Garcia's class, because her teacher had quite altered the tone and quality of her voice, and had made a mistake. The superintendent answered that she could not go into Garcia's class, and, unless her present teacher would kindly take her back as his pupil, she could not return to the academy. She promptly replied that she would not rejoin that class, and certainly would not return at all. The rest of the story may be cited in her own words:

"On leaving the academy I went to Garcia's house and explained to him how my voice had been changed. He made me sing a few bars, and then told me I must rest entirely for some considerable time, not singing at all, and not talking too much, so as to give the throat, which was out of order, complete rest. After six months of quiet I went again to him, when he tried my voice and said I could now begin to practise. I therefore commenced lessons at once, and soon found it improving, thanks to the careful way in which he made me practise, bringing the voice back to its proper register, and giving me contralto songs after many lessons."

One day there came to Garcia a girl who had strained her voice by singing higher than she should have done. He told her not to sing anything in a high register. Once only she disobeyed, and the next time she called on him and had spoken a few words she was surprised to see his face flush with anger. He reproached her with having sung soprano. Surprised, she asked him how he knew, and he answered: "I heard you speak, that is quite enough." He told her that in ten years not a note would be left of her brilliant voice. As she promised not to disobey his instructions again, he agreed to take her back, on condition that she would study a whole year without interruption before appearing in public.

After a few months she left London to spend the winter on the Continent. She hoped he would take her back on her return, but he sternly refused, telling her that he never went back on his word, and adding: "You will probably get engagements, but do not base your future on singing."

"Time proved that he was right," says Mr. Mackinlay. "After a few years she began to lose her high notes rapidly, and soon her voice was completely gone."

"Oh dear! mayn't I sing down the scale even once?"

Garcia, in telling his biographer of the time when he himself was being trained by his father, related that one day, after being made to sing an endless variety of ascending scales, his desire for a change became so great that he could not resist bursting out, "Oh dear! mayn't I sing down the scale even once?"

This same thoroughness and painstaking care characterized his own teaching. The acquirement of agility in execution, he used to say, required at least two years' study. Vocalises, such as are used by most teachers, he did not believe in, preferring to give his pupils simple Italian arias. The first lesson for every pupil was a talk on the voice as an instrument; the lungs, he explained, were for tone emission, the glottis for pitch, the oral cavity for timbre and vowel tone, the front of the mouth for consonants.* This simple physiological explanation let in a flood of light at once; but it is worthy of special note that it was almost the only reference to the anatomy of the vocal organs that Garcia, the discoverer of the laryngoscope, made in his lessons. That instrument had enabled him to prove the correctness of his theories of voice emission; " beyond that he did not see that anything further was to be gained beyond satisfying the curiosity of those who might be interested to see for themselves the forms and changes which the inside of the larynx assumed during singing and speaking." It was the medical men who chiefly benefited by his discovery.

In teaching tone emission he insisted at once and strenuously on deep breathing.

In teaching tone emission he insisted at once and strenuously on deep breathing. To a pupil who exhausted his lung power he would cite his father's maxim: "Do not let anybody see the bottom of your purse; never spend all you possess, nor have it noticed that you are at your last resource." He emphasized the coup de la glotte, by which he meant that he wished the pupil to "get on to a note, without any uncertainty or feeling about for it, instead of slurring up to it (a very common fault), or taking it too sharp and having to sink to the proper pitch." He looked on exercises—scales, sustained and swelled notes, arpeggios, shakes, chromatics—as the foundations of all good singing. He taught that there are three " registers": chest, medium, and head-voice, relying for this division on the revelations of the laryngoscope.

He never claimed that he had a "method" of hard-and- fast rules, but tried to make each pupil sing in the way most natural to him, and involving the least effort.

He never claimed that he had a "method" of hard-and- fast rules, but tried to make each pupil sing in the way most natural to him, and involving the least effort. The following remarks, made by him at the age of ninety-eight to his pupil, Hermann Klein, present a pleasing contrast to the pretensions of those teachers who claim to have discovered a new method—the "only true method":

"I wish that people would disabuse their minds of the notion that there is, or can be, any new system of so-called voice production, or even any satisfactory modification or development of pre-existing theories on this subject. Only recently I received a circular letter from Victor Maurel, asking me to send a record of the changes of idea, the variations and improvements of method, that long observation and experience had wrought in my work. If I did not answer that letter it was simply because there was nothing to say. I had no first discoveries to record."

One important detail of his method of teaching was that he took infinite pains with each of his pupils, thus winning their affection. On the other hand, he exacted the same capacity for taking pains from them. If he pointed out a mistake at one lesson and it was repeated at the next, he would shake his head sorrowfully and say: "Jenny Lind would have cut her throat sooner than have given me reason to say, 'We corrected that mistake last time.'"

"I try to awaken your intelligence,"

"I try to awaken your intelligence," he said to his pupils, "so that you may be able to criticise your own singing as severely as I do. I want you to listen to your voice and use your brains. If you find a difficulty, do not shirk it. Make up your mind to master it. So many singers give up what they find hard. They think they are better off by leaving it, and turning their attention to other things which come more easily. Do not be like them." By way of compensation for the pains taken by pupils, he would make pauses during the lessons and tell interesting anecdotes about the great singers he had known.

His pet aversion was the tremolo. To sensitive ears a tremulous voice is as disagreeable as a flickering candle is to sensitive eyes. Nevertheless, there are teachers who deliberately cultivate a tremolo in the voices of their pupils, who are consequently doomed to inevitable failure. How did this practice originate? "The tremolo is an abomination— it is execrable," Garcia said to his biographer.* He went on: Many French singers cultivate it, and I will tell you why: There was at one time an eminent vocalist worshipped by the Parisian public. His voice was beautiful in quality, faultless in intonation, and absolutely steady in emission. At last, however, he began to grow old. With increasing years the voice commenced to shake. But he was a great artist. Realizing that the tremolo was a fault, but one which could not then be avoided, he brought his mind to bear upon the problem before him. As a result, he adopted a style of song in which he had to display intense emotion throughout. Since in life the voice trembles at such moments, he was able to hide his failing in this way by a quality of voice which appeared natural to the situation. The Parisians did not grasp the workings of his brain and the clever way in which he had hidden his fault. They only heard that in every song which he sang his voice trembled. At once, therefore, they concluded that if so fine an effect could be obtained, it was evidently something to be imitated. Hence the singers deliberately began to cultivate a tremolo. The custom grew and grew until it became almost a canon in French singing.* [*Read chapter XX of Lilli Lehmann's How to Sing on the cause and cure of the tremolo and its first stage, the vibrato.]

Garcia's quickness in diagnosing a singer's shortcomings and lending a helping hand is illustrated instructively in the case of the eminent American contralto, Antoinette Sterling. When she came to him she had a range of three octaves, and sang the soprano as well as the contralto parts in operas and oratorios. No sooner had he heard her than he saw the danger she was in. "If you continue as you have been doing, do you know what will happen? Look at this piece of elastic. I take it firmly at the two ends and stretch it. What is the result? It becomes thin in the middle. If I were to continue to do this constantly, it would get weaker and weaker, until finally it would break. It is thus with the human voice. Cultivate an extended range, and keep on singing big notes at both extremes, and the same thing will occur which we have seen with the elastic. Your voice will gradually weaken in the middle. If you persist in this course long enough, it will break and the organ be rendered useless." He advised her to abandon the high notes, confine herself to real contralto music, avoid practising on the extremes, and build up her voice by exercising the middle portion of it. She followed this counsel and had every reason to be grateful for it.

Marie Tempest was helped by him in a different and quite unexpected manner. She came before him attired in a very tight-fitting dress, which drew attention to the nineteen-inch waist of which she was the proud possessor. Garcia raised his eyebrows when he saw her step forward, but said nothing until she had sung an aria for him. Then he said, with his usual polite manner: "Thank you, miss. Will you please go home at once, take off that dress, rip off those stays, and let your waist out to at least twenty-five inches! When you have done so, you may come back and sing to me, and I will tell you whether you have any voice." In relating this incident Miss Tempest added: "I went home, and—well, I've never had a nineteen-inch waist since."

If singers would walk more and eat less they would not be tempted to wear the tight corsets which disfigure their voices as well as their forms. Garcia said: "Most singers and teachers eat more than they should. A man with moderate teeth, such as I have, can grow old on sponge-cake and milk." He attributed his hale old age to this moderation and his great mental and physical activity. He did not touch wine or spirits until he was ninety.

Garcia was not one of those teachers who think that rudeness is necessary to secure results from students. His acts were characterized by unfailing courtesy, even when he had to get rid of undesirable students. Mr. Mackinlay's book contains an amusing anecdote (p. 251) showing how he managed to get rid of undesirable pupils without hurting their feelings. However profitable such pupils might be, he had no use for them, as he wanted to keep his reputation as a teacher who could point to results.

[*Every teacher and student should read the Hints on Singing which Garcia wrote in collaboration with Hermann Klein in 1895, and also chapter XIX of Mackinlay's Garcia, entitled " A Nonagenarian Teacher." Mackinlay was the last pupil to go through Garcia's regular four-year course.]

— ”How Garcia Helped Singers,” Success in Music and How It Is Won (1909), by Henry Theophilus Finck and Ignace Jan Paderwski, p. 380-388