I am tickled that my post on appoggiaturas has started such a fruitful discussion! Even better, I am thrilled to introduce my first guest poster, collaborative pianist, opera coach, and conductor Jennifer Peterson, who is based in New York.  I got to know Jennifer in her Twitter guise as @gaspsiagore, and also through a great post she contributed to Chris Foley’s Collaborative Piano Blog on coaching recitative. She has prepared a fantastically thoughtful and insightful response to my earlier post and it is my pleasure to share it with you now. Thanks, Jennifer!

Erika, I’m honored to write a guest entry for your blog. Thank you for putting together the research on appoggiaturas! I think you’re right on target with noticing the trend in Karajan era conductors to throw them in everywhere, and Crutchfield’s standard seems to be one many look to these days. Good for you digging in to a sticky subject.

A singer friend who has done work at the Met and in many houses in Europe of late told me about two years ago that the longer appoggiaturas added in Mozart arias are the current trend, and James Levine is honoring it these days. In the tenor aria, “Dies Bildnis” from Die Zauberflöte, Levine had tenor Matthew Polenzani do a long (full eighth-note) app on “neu” of “…wie dies Götterbild mein Herz mit neuer Regung füllt.” I don’t know…I always seem to hear them done as a sixteenth note… These kind of indulgent leans were prevalent the entire evening, and I hadn’t been aware of Levine doing them in the past, but I may have not been paying much attention.

Like all conscientious music students, I had tried to figure out the rules as an undergrad at Oberlin. There are plenty of early sources telling us the rules, and the rules change, especially regarding these kind of appoggiaturas, every few years, and in different countries, as they do with when appoggiaturas are appropriate in secco recitatives. I was intent on learning the original rules (as I imagine Crutchfield has painstakingly researched), but eventually figured out after much training in baroque performance practice over the years that most of these decisions were more a matter of ‘taste’ in any performance era. Karajan’s ‘taste’ stemmed from his mentors’ choices, perhaps not from the original sources…how are we to know? In North America, our teachers are such a melting pot of traditions. We may find direct musical lineage with Toscanini, or the great German conductors Hans and Fritz Busch, but it’s impossible to mentor directly with Mozart, obviously. Many teachers’ opinions are strong — I was often given no choice as to what was ‘correct’ — but perhaps learned the wisest lesson from my lovely Italian piano teacher back in graduate school, Enrica Cavallo-Gulli, wife of the great violinist Franco Gulli. All Mrs. Gulli cared about was the beauty of the music, when it came right down to it. I asked her once how to properly do a mordent in a Bach Partita, and she pshawed the ‘rules’ and said simply, “you do what is more beautiful.” I pretty much use this philosophy to this day. I find all the rules messy to impart or to teach consistently. It may be possible; but the more common habit of conductor/coaches out there in the biz seems to be to pedantically dictate to singers which appoggiaturas and ornaments to do. High caliber artists pull it off, but the danger (and more common result) is that the graces don’t necessarily come out gracefully.

My approach is influenced primarily by 1) my goal to empower singers to make the music directly from their own instinctual powers, 2) knowing that NO TWO CONDUCTORS WILL AGREE ON WHAT IS CORRECT, and 3) Mrs. Gulli’s “what is more beautiful.”

Part 3 is easy. Just listen. I always was told to “go with the text” — this agrees with your emphasis on the drama in your article, aka the ‘big picture,’ which is fantastic. And yes, an appoggiatura softens the word, in most cases. European conductors use the word “direct” to describe a non-appoggiatura, and I find this term very helpful in getting singers to get rid of a few of the extras. Be direct when you can. It keeps it from slowing down, if you want to get on with things. If you want to languish over something, that’s a different story.

Point 2 is impossible to control, but a singer needs to know that the conductor most likely will make changes to what they have prepared. And point 1 – empowering the singer – this is something I referred to briefly in my article on Chris’ blog as a “can of worms,” but I do it pretty often with singers who are confused by what on earth an appoggiatura is. What I do is I explain to them the VERY BASICS of figured bass notation, with the goal of them seeing from the bass line player’s perspective (even in Mozart) that if the composer wrote out the desired appoggiatura, the continuo player would often play the wrong chord underneath the vocal line. This makes a lot of sense to singers, and then all of a sudden they totally ‘get’ the function of an appoggiatura, and have an aural reason to lean on something that’s not in the chord underneath them.

Going into the area of personal choice, for some reason I find I have always hated appoggiaturas approached from a leap from below. Rossini and Donizetti write them, so they’re allowed post-Mozart in my book. Before then, I do my best to get rid of them, but am not always successful or insistent. Lower appoggiaturas as well…they slow things down in a secco situation. If the singer insists on a chromatic lower appoggiatura (who doesn’t love that effect…) have them choose the single lowest point for the character emotionally, just when things can’t possibly get any worse, and throw a good one in there. Don’t do it while you’re mustering up your vengeance please. And when they happen in Mozart, they can easily get campy if not done tastefully, which may be just what you’re going for…. But I like to let Mozart decide where these moments are going to be, rather than adding them liberally.

I find that often in a single musical instance, I’m able to give a singer a choice between two different types of apps, or to do it ‘direct’ with no app, if the cadence is prepared from the same note or above. And let the singer choose which makes the most sense to them with their text. Descending passing by step, I feel okay calling them “obligatory,” along with cadential trills. But sometimes the character can’t even be bothered to do a passing one, say it’s a female playing a part of a man and the character is trying to be very matter-of-fact. It’s sometimes nice to even take those out.

I also like to minimize excessive appoggiaturing in chatty bits where it’s better to keep things moving. If there’s no harmony change in the bass, there’s not much to lean on, so just keep going. Put appoggiaturas only over bass notes — another way thing to think about it, but by all means not a strict rule!

As far as I can tell, the ‘rules’ get messy quickly. I’ve recently made my own personal preference ‘rule’ as follows: where the printed note for the singer forms a tritone or another juicy dissonance with the bass, keep it as written, don’t add app. It’s hard to create the desired effect of an appoggiatura when you’re resolving a fifth to a tritone, or an octave to a seventh. When the singer ‘leans’ on the more dissonant interval, it seems to make the most sense to me & Mrs. Gulli inside my ear. This comes up quite a bit in Handel.

But I ALWAYS tell the singer that the conductor has the final say in which appoggiaturas are in or out, and make sure they connect the term with the physical feeling of ‘appoggio.’

A HUGE tip in coaching Italian recits, direct from Nico Castel and Joan Dornemann: Nico calls it the “Dornemann Triplet” — for all feminine endings (even for advanced singers, even for native Italian speakers), have the singers clap their hands a triplet where two claps accompany the strong syllable and one clap accompanies the unaccented syllable. They must put down their pencil and do it physically to really get it. They should do it both while speaking and while singing. This seems to be the ONLY efficient way of getting them to not linger on the final syllable. They lean on the long one, appropriately, and feel it physically, while the unaccented syllable has that nice Italianete lifted quality…neither dropped nor clipped. With this technique, both the sound concept and the vocal sensation stick better than any nagging or wordy verbal reminder.