Interview, Cyrille Dubois on So Romantique!

Featuring a host of bona fide rarities by composers such as Louis Clapisson, Charles Luce-Verlet and Théodore Dubois, Cyrille Dubois's So Romantique! (released earlier this month on Alpha) explores how writing for the light lyric tenor voice evolved over the course of almost a century of French operatic history - from Boieldieu's La dame blanche in 1825 to Charles Silver's Myriane in 1913.

It's very possibly the most exciting and illuminating vocal recital to come my way so far this year, so I was delighted to grab half an hour with Cyrille over Zoom to find out more about some of the composers who fell by the wayside and the singers who inspired them, as well as to discuss how he found his niche in this repertoire and 'discovered a way of singing that actually makes him happy'...

This album is in part a potted history of the ténor de grâce - tell me a little about the evolution of this very specific voice-type…

I think that somewhere along the line we lost the tradition of performing French music of this period as it used to be performed. Maybe some people will disagree with me on this, but in my mind there’s a link between this kind of repertoire and the music that was written for the Baroque tenor or haute-contre - only about a century separates that from the earliest operas on this album, which isn’t all that long. These days a lot of big tenor voices tackle all sorts of French repertoire, but I can’t imagine that the singers who originated these roles approached them in a way that was so very different from the haute-contre...

In nineteenth-century France there were two distinct types of tenor: the ténor de force who did the heavier stuff, and what we call the ténor de demi-caractère, who generally took the romantic leads and had to retain enough lightness and flexibility in the voice to be capable of great tenderness and charm. Even so, they were still called upon to sing with a certain amount of strength when required, so these kinds of voices had to balance those two elements.

But that same distinction was already present in French Baroque music. If you look at a lot of Rameau’s operas, you see that the villains are almost always written for heavier, lower voices, whereas with a role like Dardanus you have both characteristics – the lover and the warrior. I’m working on a companion- project at the moment which will focus on more or less unknown baroque operas, so there will be a link between the two albums.

I think it’s important to remember that very few French operas were originally staged in big houses which required big voices to fill the auditorium - for instance, both Carmen and Pélleas et Mélisande were premiered in the Salle Favart at the Opéra-Comique, and that’s a relatively small space where you can afford to play with real pianissimos and all kinds of nuances…I know I sound like I’m fighting my corner, but this is the kind of music I like to do and this is the way I like to do it!

Do you think the voice-type itself fell out of fashion with composers as the nineteenth century marched on?

There are so many interconnected factors which influence the way music evolves, and one element is instruments themselves: during the period we cover on the album, woodwind and brass instruments were getting louder, people were moving away from using gut strings, and the piano was developing in all sorts of directions. It’s hard to say which came first, but this was also an era which saw a move away from small concert-halls to much bigger auditoriums: that’s why we see a shift away from chamber-music in favour of bigger, more demonstrative pieces and genres (culminating in Wagner).

I think it’s important to resist the temptation to transpose a modern approach onto Romantic music, because of course things evolved the other way around – we did make this recording with modern instruments, but we tried to be as aware of nineteenth-century aesthetics as possible.

You mentioned that ‘lost tradition’ of performing this music authentically - how much is that down to changing approaches to vocal technique and training?

When I was a young student I was always being forced to sound like someone else and to sing more athletically, which was a bit painful: I wasn’t very comfortable with my instrument, so I made it my mission to find a way to sing that actually made me happy! For me that meant figuring out a technique that was much more linked to my sensations and what I was feeling rather than what people were expecting. That changed everything for me - both mentally and physically, because I found all kinds of lighter colours and spaces that I’d never been taught to explore before.

Overall it was a case of me conducting research on myself to find my niche; I was helped a bit by some teachers who understood that I wasn’t happy with my former way of singing, but these days I’m mainly working on my own. It’s all about singing with a real sense of line, controlling the vibrato, and above all putting yourself in the service of the music rather than playing to the gallery.

I worked a lot on linking the chest voice and head voice by a very specific thing called the voix mixte (mixed voice): it’s a difficult sensation to explain, but it’s very typical of all this haute-contre and light French tenor repertoire. If you sing an entire opera at full force then you end up killing yourself vocally: you have to find some moments where you can lighten off, and most of the time the orchestration in these works allows that. There are so many passages which are scored with just strings, so it’s possible to really lean into those lighter colours - especially when you have a sympathetic conductor, as I do on this recording in the form of Pierre Dumoussaud!

I teach masterclasses with young tenors from time to time, and I always try to explain that there is a middle way between this very demonstrative chest-voice (which we all like because it’s very exciting and loud and bright) and the head-voice. The crucial thing is to get to a point where you have a choice, rather than being a slave to your technique (or lack of it!), and singing with your own voice is the secret to that. We’re all fascinated by singers like Pavarotti, Domingo and Kaufmann, but those are all really extraordinary voices, and trying to mimic them is never going to end well. I believe those guys are the best in the world at what they do - but maybe I have something else to offer which is just as interesting in its way, and I try to pass that mindset onto the young singers I work with.

Did you do much digging into the life-stories of the singers who originated these roles?

I did indeed, and again my interest in that was linked to the Baroque tenor repertoire; my colleague Reinoud Van Mechelen had already done research on the three tenors that created principal roles in virtually all of Rameau’s opera, and he made a fantastic trilogy of recordings themed around them. At the beginning of my research, two fantastic tenors I like (Michael Spyres and John Osborn) released albums around Gilbert Duprez, the extraordinary French tenor who created a lot of heavy romantic repertoire, but I knew that we weren’t the same kind of voice at all. So I delved into the history-books (helped by those brilliant people at Palazzetto Bru Zane), and we found a guy called Gustave-Hippolyte Roger who created roles including Jean in Meyerbeer’s Le prophète and Faust in Berlioz’s La damnation de Faust.

Quite a few of the roles featured on the album were created by Roger, but eventually we had to drop the idea of theming the whole project around him: in all honesty, a lot of the operas he premiered weren’t particularly interesting, and our main priority was simply to put together a programme of really good music! We focused instead on showing how French opera evolved over the course of a century, because we have nearly 100 years of music here: the earliest opera featured is Boieldieu’s La dame blanche from 1825, and the latest is Charles Silver’s Myriane from 1912. But a century is only two or three generations - when you realise that people might have listened to the early works here in their youth and enjoyed the later ones in the twilight of their lives it doesn’t seem like such a long time at all.

Can I press you to single out one or two favourites?

I love the first track, ‘Asile où règne le silence’ from Auber’s La Barcarolle, because it really sums up what the project is all about: it requires that particular blend of character and tenderness I was talking about earlier, and it’s also going to be unfamiliar to most listeners. Auber is maybe one of the better-known composers on the album, but even in France he’s still not especially famous – if I walked into the Railway Station called 'Auber' in the centre of Paris and did a vox pop asking people if they knew the name I think I’d get a lot of blank faces! It’s so strange to me that the big French opera-houses still aren’t programming works by Godard, Auber and Thomas: the weakness of these operas is probably the libretti, which are a bit old-fashioned, but the music itself is just fantastic when you dig into it.

I also had a lot of fun singing that aria from Silver’s Myriane because it’s basically French Puccini. We’re stretching the point a bit there because that one really is for a heavier tenor - but because it’s so little-known I bet nobody will call me out on it! We did also include a few famous composers like Donizetti, Bizet and Delibes, but they aren’t the main focus of the album: they’re really there to put the other composers in context and to show that they were part of the same atmosphere. If this project means that people discover composers like Louis Clapisson, Charles Luce-Verlet and Théodore Dubois (no family link there, by the way!), then mission accomplished!

Certainly Clapisson was a completely new name to me - how did he slip so far off the collective radar?

Poor Clapisson - it’s not exactly the most marketable name, is it?! A lot of these obscure French composers have incredible names, and the guy also wrote an opera called Gibby La Cornemuse, which sounds like a joke in itself! But having a marketable name is important, and I do wonder if that contributed to the fact that none of them hit the big time: I’d never heard of Clapisson, Luce-Varlet or even Silver before starting to research this project.

I really must thank the magicians of Bru Zane properly (especially the wonderful Alexandre Dratwicki), because they’re the ones digging deep in the libraries and archives to track all this music down: most of the piano scores for these operas were fairly easy to get hold of, but the orchestral parts are scattered around the world…

Looping back to Donizetti, your ‘Ah, mes amis!’ is a knock-out - and so different from what I’m used to hearing!

People are used to hearing this music sung in the Italian style, but it’s a French opera! As my colleague Benjamin Bernheim demonstrated so brilliantly on his recent Boulevard des Italiens album, there was this whole tradition of Italians coming to Paris to compose their operas, and we tried to reflect the fact that it was written for a French audience here in terms of the approach to text, phrasing and use of voix mixte. That aria was a challenge for me, but we wanted to show that there’s another way of doing it!