Vibrato

Leopold Mozart’s Versuch einer gründlichen Violinschule (1756), for example, provides an indication of the state of vibrato in string playing at the end of the baroque period.

Although there is no aural proof, as audio recordings were not around for more than 150 years, that string players in Europe did not use vibrato, its overuse was almost universally condemned by the leading musical authorities of the day.

However, some musicians specialising in historically informed performances, such as the conductor Roger Norrington, argue that it is unlikely that Brahms, Wagner, and their contemporaries would have expected it to be played in this way.

The alleged growth of vibrato in 20th-century orchestral playing has been traced by Norrington by studying early audio recordings but his opponents contend that his interpretations are not supported by the actual samples.

The fact that as early as the 1880s composers such as Richard Strauss (in his tone poems "Don Juan" and "Death and Transfiguration") as well as Camille Saint-Saëns (Symphony No.

Traditionally, however, the deliberate cultivation of a particularly wide, pervasive vibrato by opera singers from the Latin countries has been denounced by English-speaking music critics and pedagogues as a technical fault and a stylistic blot (see Scott, cited below, Volume 1, pp. 123–127).

They have expected vocalists to emit a pure, steady stream of clear sound — irrespective of whether they were singing in church, on the concert platform, or on the operatic stage.

During the 19th century, for instance, New York and London based critics, including Henry Chorley, Herman Klein, and George Bernard Shaw, castigated a succession of visiting Mediterranean tenors for resorting to an excessive, constantly pulsating vibrato during their performances.

[15] The popularity of an exaggerated vibrato among many (but by no means all) Mediterranean tenors [16] and singing teachers of this era has been traced back by musicologists to the influential example set by the early-19th-century virtuoso vocalist Giovanni Battista Rubini (1794–1854).

A host of young Italian tenors—including the renowned Giovanni Matteo Mario (1810–1883) — copied Rubini's trend-setting innovation in order to heighten the emotional impact of the music that they were singing, and to facilitate the delivery of fioritura "by, as it were, running up and down the vibrato" (to quote Scott; see p. 126).

Prior to the advent of the charismatic Rubini, every well-schooled opera singer had avoided using a conspicuous and continuous vibrato because, according to Scott, it varied the pitch of the note being sung to an unacceptable degree and it was considered to be an artificial contrivance arising from inadequate breath control.

Accordingly, when Enrico Caruso (1873–1921) — the most emulated Mediterranean tenor of the 20th century — made his acclaimed New York Metropolitan Opera debut in November 1903, one of the specific vocal attributes for which he was praised by music reviewers was the absence of a disruptive vibrato from his singing.

The scholarly critic William James Henderson wrote in The Sun newspaper, for example, that Caruso "has a pure tenor voice and [it] is without the typical Italian bleat".

(Other prominent Mediterranean tenors of the late 19th century to early 20th century who, like Caruso, did not "bleat" were Angelo Masini, Francesco Tamagno, Francesco Marconi, Francisco Viñas, Emilio De Marchi, Giuseppe Borgatti and Giovanni Zenatello, while the phenomenon was rare among French, German, Russian and Anglo-Saxon tenors of the same period—see Scott.)

The intentional use of a pronounced vibrato by Mediterranean tenors is a practice that has died out over the course of the past 100 years, owing in no small measure to Caruso's example.

Both of them featured bel canto works, dating from Rubini's day, in their operatic repertoires, and both of them can be heard on recordings which faithfully capture the distinct shimmer inherent in their timbre.

Italian or Spanish-trained operatic sopranos, mezzo-sopranos, and baritones exhibiting a pronounced vibrato did not escape censure, either, by British and North American arbiters of good singing.

Indeed, Adelina Patti and Luisa Tetrazzini were the only Italian sopranos to enjoy star status in London and New York in the late-Victorian and Edwardian eras, while such well-known compatriots and coevals of theirs as Gemma Bellincioni and Eugenia Burzio (among several others) failed to please the Anglophones' ears because, unlike Patti and Tetrazzini, they possessed unsteady, vibrato-laden voices—see Scott for evaluations of their respective techniques.

[citation needed] To give an additional female example from a later date, whenever the vivacious mezzo-soprano of the 1920s and '30s, Conchita Supervía, performed in London, she was admonished in print for her exceedingly vibrant and fluttery tone, which was unkindly likened by her detractors to the chatter of a machine-gun or the rattle of dice in a cup.

In 1883, Giuseppe Kaschmann (né Josip Kašman) — a principal baritone at La Scala, Milan—was criticised for his strong vibrato when he sang at the Met, and the theatre's management did not re-engage him for the following season, even though other aspects of his singing were admired.

(Kaschmann never performed in Great Britain but he remained a popular artist in the Latin countries for several decades; in 1903, he made a few recordings which exhibit only too well his perpetual flutter.)

Similarly, another one of Italy's leading baritones, Riccardo Stracciari, was unable to turn his pre-World War I London and New York operatic engagements into unambiguous triumphs due to an intrusive quiver in his tone.

He subsequently moderated his vibrato, as the discs that he made for Columbia Records in 1917-1925 show, and this enabled him to pursue a significant career not only in his homeland but also at the Chicago opera.

There is another kind of vibrato-linked fault that can afflict the voices of operatic artists, especially aging ones—namely the slow, often irregular wobble produced when the singer's vibrato has loosened from the effects of forcing, over-parting, or the sheer wear and tear on the body caused by the stresses of a long stage career.

[17] Folk music singers and instrumentalists in the North American and Western European traditions rarely use vibrato, reserving it for occasional ornamentation.

[18][19] It also tends to be used by performers of transcriptions or reworkings of folk music that have been made by composers from a classical, music-school background such as Benjamin Britten or Percy Grainger.

The clavichord, though technically a fixed-pitch keyboard instrument, is capable of producing a type of vibrato known as Bebung by varying the pressure on the key as the note sounds.

Many contemporary string players vary the pitch from below, only up to the nominal note and not above it,[24] although great violin pedagogues of the past such as Carl Flesch and Joseph Joachim explicitly referred to vibrato as a movement towards the bridge, meaning upwards in pitch,[25]—and the cellist Diran Alexanian, in his 1922 treatise Traité théorique et pratique du Violoncelle, shows how one should practice vibrato as starting from the note and then moving upwards in a rhythmic motion.

On a trombone, a player may provide a slightly more pronounced vibrato by gently moving the slide back and forth, centering on one note to give a lyrical effect.

This effect is notable in electric organists using a Leslie speaker, the most popular of which use a two-speed vibrato; a degree of expression is gained from the acceleration between speeds.