John Steane is a man for whom singing matters. A reviewer of fearsome reputation - the initials J.B.S. at the foot of a piece in Gramophone magazine are enough to give even the starriest songster pause - he opens the third volume of his epic study of the 20th century's greatest voices with a few stern words aimed at those who had the temerity to criticise the raison d'etre of volumes one and two. The art of singing, he declares, (and is it fanciful to hear him as a well-rounded lyric tenor?) is not something which is amiably peripheral to the real interests of the musical world. On the contrary, it is, "or should be, one of that world's most central concerns".
As an art, of course, it is notoriously difficult to write about; and many well-intentioned efforts have foundered, either buried beneath avalanches of adjectives or grounded in the shallows of dull-as-ditchwater biographies whose subjects, so their hagiographers would have us believe, never knew the meaning of a bum note. But John Steane doesn't just know about singing and singers; he knows about all these pitfalls too. Banging on about dead tenors and sultry sopranos is simply not his style. As a reference work this book, and its two predecessors, is invaluable: but it is certainly not academic, or pedantic, or anything remotely resembling dull. This is partly thanks to the format of Singers of the Century; self-imposed, unnecessarily restrictive perhaps, each book consists of some 50 essays, each about 1500 words long, some featuring two or even, in one instance, three singers. This rules out the sort of genial rambling for which opera buffs are notorious, and ensures a sharp focus.
Sometimes razor sharp - it's hard to imagine John Steane joining his hands for a bout of polite applause. Who else would admit that he has spent a lifetime trying to avoid Miguel Fleta; compare Mario del Monaco to a wall, "not of aged mossy stone with plants growing in its crevices, but the kind which people have in mind when they say that something is like banging your head against it"; speculate that at least some of Ian Bostridge's artistic success stems from his waif-like appearance and castigate Thomas Hampson for, essentially, being too beautiful? That's the outrageous Steane - entertaining, provocative, maddening. Then there's the playful Steane, conjuring up the word "glass" to describe the voice of Mirella Freni, then rejecting it on account of the adjective "glassy", with its suggestion of coldness. Two pages later, he has solved his own puzzle. "But that is it: Freni the human crystal. The glass is lit by human warmth, and the warmth irradiates the clearest glass." There's the technical Steane, utterly at home in the E-G-B-D-F nitty-grittiness of musical science. And the thoughtful Steane, wondering in the course of his essay on Renee Fleming, what exactly constitutes "greatness" in a singer; "a hairbreadth's distinction of tonal colour or verbal inflection: quantitatively a tiny, luxurious presence in relation to the essentials of performance. And yet this it is that lifts the heart, puts the world to fleeting rights . . ."
The foreword contains an apology - or maybe a warning - that when all is weighed and done, many singers beloved of many people have had to be left out. And so, though he gets up to speed on the younger generation with Andreas Scholl, Cecilia Bartoli and Angela Gheorghiu, there is, alas, no room for Emma Kirkby or Matti Salminen, Sergei Leiferkus or Jose Cura. You could argue the cases for ever - if Anne Sofie Von Otter is in, shouldn't Ann Murray be there as well? - but on the plus side, at least it means there's no danger of this third, and final, volume having to scoop up the century's lyrical leftovers. And although you might be enraged - OK, OK, I was enraged - by his sideways swipe at Freddie Mercury (no, he doesn't have a chapter to himself; he's squeezed in with Montserrat Caballe), his high-handed dismissal of Samuel Ramey and the way he's blatantly soft on Roberto Alagna, in the end you have to forgive any critic who can produce a paragraph, such as this one a propos of Elizabeth Schumann, which so effortlessly explains why, after all, singing does matter.
In a library or second-hand bookshop, somebody from time to time will come upon a sentence that conveys an unusual warmth of feeling from the writer toward a singer. Victor Gollancz's Journey Towards Music tells of Schumann's Sophie in Der Rosenkavalier: "No one will ever forget the soar and leap of her voice at the presentation of the rose. Imagine silver as pure as young happiness and as true as steel, and you have an idea of it" . . . More likely a record will be playing, perhaps of Heidenroslein or Deh Vieni, Non Tardar, thing about it will catch the ear of one new listener, who will say, "Now that's a singer for me! Who was she?" So a new love affair will begin, and the memory will survive.
Arminta Wallace is an Irish Times journalist
