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

72 Marianne Tråvén
whereas in falsetto, only the edges vibrate. In the chest voice the vocal
chords are more relaxed, for the falsetto stretched. He also gave a description
of how the glottis and the vocal chords look within the throat when the
chest voice is used. He knew the different muscle groups, and he identified
the thyroarytenoid and arytenoids muscles as being responsible for the
chest voice. He also gave the length of the vocal chords in men, women and
children. For this he referred to Professor Johannes Müller’s Handbuch der
Physiologie des Menschen, published in Berlin 1834 (Berg 1869, pp. 8–11).
In the mid-nineteenth century methodological experimental physiology
emerged, pioneered by François Magendie in France and Johannes Müller
in Berlin. Newly developed instruments made it possible to measure and
record physiological actions (Schwalbe 1905, p.136). Berg’s interest in such
scientific works left traces in his teachings, and he cites several paragraphs
from Müller’s book, comparing them to the findings of Dodart and Liscovius,
27 among others (Berg 1869, pp. 9–10).
Berg recognised three registers: chest, falsetto and head register (Berg
1868, p. 51). 28 He believed that children and women had all three registers,
but that during puberty men lost the head voice. Berg observed that some
men retained the first notes of the head voice, citing the Italian tenor Giovanni
Battista Rubini as an example. 29 The male falsetto voice was often
so instrument-like and weak that Berg found it impossible to cultivate for
singing. It should therefore, he believed, be eliminated, and in its place the
so-called voix mixte should be used in the higher registers. For Berg, the
voix mixte was a dense and dark timbre based on the chest voice. According
to Berg, it was wrong to push the chest voice upwards with a clear timbre.
This phenomenon, which Berg recognised as a French custom, especially
cultivated by the tenor Duprèz, called l’ut de poitrine (Vest 2009, pp. 46–50),
should be “excommunicated” because of the resulting “thin, shrieking, and
unmusical” quality and the potential damage it could do to the vocal organs
(Berg 1868, p. 52).
27 Denise Dodart (1634–1707) was a French physician, naturalist and botanist who
studied the respiration of plants. (Anonymous 2008). Karl Friedrich Salomon Liscovius
(1780–1844) was a German physician and physiologist educated at the Thomas School
in Leipzig. He published several treatises on the human voice, such as Zur Theorie der
tönenden Luftsäulen, published in 1843. (Eitner 1902, p. 188)
28 In the second volume of his notes, dated 1869, he listed all the different voice types
with the vocal range for each type. (Berg 1869, p. 40)
29 Giovanni Battista Rubini (1794–1854) became a friend of Berg, who claimed that
Rubini was one of those exceptional singers who never experienced the break. He was
a very popular singer in the 1830s and 1840s with a particularly ringing high voice and
a knack for coloratura well suited to the music of Bellini and Donizetti. (Traini 1954)