Opera on the Move in the Nordic Countries during the Long 19th ...

The Björling ‘<strong>Opera</strong>’
spiration from theories about the teaching of singing to very small children
that were promoted at the turn of the nineteenth century. Given the
similarity between the controversial vocal pedagogue Algot Lange’s (1850-
1904) theories and David Björling’s practice, Lange’s ideas regarding the
possibility to pre-cultivate and teach children to sing are very interesting.
Lange’s theory was built on the ideal of a technically perfect and skilled
singer acting as a model for children to listen to and imitate – synchronised
with the management of the child’s automatic vocal reflexes. Among the
requirements were energy and persuasiveness in working style, and the
avoidance at any price of school singing (Lange 1900, pp. 4, 6, 8). One could
say that David Björling fulfilled these demands.
Lange’s Om tonbildning i sång och tal (1900) sets out some theoretical
principles concerning the very early training of children. “The younger and
healthier the child is, the easier it is for it to find the physiologically correct
tone”, 35 he writes (1900, p. 4). He advocates training that starts from
the child’s naturally correct voice and breathing technique, and describes
a situation in which an infant listens to a perfect vocal pattern and aurally
builds up its voice from it, which should result in a perfect voice. It depends
on the teacher’s ability to convey the beauty and quality of tone as well as
the correct pitch (Lange 1900, pp. 6f).
Here, too, there is a link between training and health, something David
Björling also stressed: every morning the Björling boys had to gargle with
saltwater. He also believed that breath training helped to keep illness at bay
(Björling n.d., p. 2; Lange 1900, pp. 191-197).
Lange focused on the special beauty and charm of boys’ voices, which
inferior school singing tended to destroy. David Björling had a similar mistrust
of singing in school: he forbade his sons from taking lessons, as a result
of which Jussi Björling was not graded in singing.
Lange uses the metaphor of a glass ball balancing in a fountain in his book
Om sång (1898), which David Björling is thought to have quoted (Lange
1898, pp. 66f; cf. Björling 1994, p. 89). What Lange wanted to illustrate was
that pressure in the vocal tract is decisive for the quality of the tone. A glass
ball balancing in the stream of water from a fountain is used to represent
tone, and the stream represents the vocal tract. If the pressure in the tract
changes even slightly, the balance is lost and the ball either falls or bounces
out. The originator of this metaphor was not Lange, but the German singing
35 “Ju yngre och friskare människan är, desto lättare har hon att finna den fysiologiskt
riktiga tonen.”
39