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

Formed to Perform
The female voice had three registers. The chest register comprised the
tones from g to g1. 30 The falsetto spanned the first octave and the head voice
comprised the second octave and all possible tones above. The chest voice
had declamatory possibilities, but Berg did not like the French manner of
putting in power and volume for expressive purposes. The reason was that
the balance between the registers was disrupted, and too much power signalled
masculinity, something Berg did not find fitting for a female voice. To
Berg, the registers should blend into one another, creating one voice. The
female falsetto should have firmness and elasticity. Berg remarked sadly
that his contemporaries no longer seemed to value falsetto, but preferred
the head voice. This last register, for which a dark timbre was essential, he
considered the most delicate of the registers. It should be sung with soft
tones from c2 to a moderately high range.
The different tonal qualities of female registers made it hard to unify them
into one voice; blending the strong chest voice with the weaker falsetto was
especially difficult. To solve this problem, Berg proposed a method whereby
the different registers were first practised separately. The breaking point
should not be fixed at any particular note but remain flexible, depending on
the musical context. Berg considered it easier to go from the chest voice
to falsetto than from falsetto to the chest voice, and it was the elasticity
and flexibility in each register that led to equalisation. For the notes in the
breaking region Berg used closed vowels such as i and e. The first notes of
the head voice, from c2 to g2, were to be sung with a decisive and dramatic
colour. Berg considered it easier to join the falsetto to the head voice, since
30 See Ingela Tägil’s article in this publication. Berg does in fact state that the falsetto
starts at c1, so although the chest voice could go as high as g1, it was not desirable (Berg
1868, p. 53). As Ingela Tägil has pointed out, Berg’s concept of registers may have been
detrimental to some of his students. In his own voice the chest register dominated, and
we can see from his Testament that he disliked the falsetto in male voices, but thought it
indispensable for the female voice. As didactics still relied to a considerable degree on
demonstration, listening to a chest-based voice, such as the one Berg possessed, must
have created a desire to adhere to his sound quality, which was probably detrimental to
a head register-based voice such as Jenny Lind’s. Berg trained the registers separately
at first and considered it easier to go from the chest voice to the falsetto. In so doing the
student would start with vocal chords of a relative mass, trying to make them slimmer
as they went into falsetto. Today most vocal teachers agree that to take pressure off
the voice, the opposite method should be used. Increased pressure on the chest voice
would probably have robbed Jenny Lind of the height of her powers, creating a hole in
her voice at exactly the point where she later experienced difficulties. A closer look at
the teaching statements of the 1840s, with lists of who was being taught and who was
indisposed, in fact shows that a number of students were hoarse for more than a month.
This could indicate overtiring and a deficient technique or for that matter insufficient
quarters and a lack of winter clothes. (KTA: F6A, 1843)
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