Once I was at a party full of singer types, and a guy comes up to me and introduces himself by telling me the following: 1) His name, and 2) that he is a full lyric baritone. It really annoyed me, and it always does. I don’t understand the preoccupation with voice fach among opera singers, and I’m going to explain why I think it is a load of horseshit.
1) Famous, skilled singers don’t adhere to their supposed fach, and do just fine.
Philip Langridge is one of my favorite tenors, definitely my favorite in English rep. He has sung Messiah, Peter Grimes, Hansel und Gretel, and Loge from Das Rheingold – and they all sounded great. He had a long career without any period of vocal dysfunction, and did so for some forty years. These roles could be (and ARE) argued as suitable for four different fachs (leggiero, dramatic, character, and heldentenor in that order). Fach is useless in describing this singer, because he sings several of them well. I have a million examples of famous singers doing this… Gedda has a great recording of the Evangelist in the St. Matthew Passion, and a great recording of Tosca. Vickers has a great recording of Messiah, and a great recording of Pagliacci.
2) Fach leads to stupid characterizations.
I’ll go with what I know, so more about Langridge and tenors. I didn’t mention one of his best things – Tom Rakewell in The Rake’s Progress. Since this is contemporary music, rhythmically difficult and with some odd harmonies, it is immediately disassociated with bel canto singing and therefore any Italian singing and all of the fachs commonly associated with such. No one wants to hear a Puccini singer doing this role (or a heldentenor), so what you get is a plethora of leggiero tenors mincing about in that manner of “contemporary performance” that makes audiences “ooh” and “ahh” because it’s so pretty (Robert Craft, Ian Bostridge, Andrew Kennedy, and Anthony Rolfe Johnson have recorded it). If you are so lucky to see it live, I guarantee you will see a smooth-voiced tenor with an even lighter instrument than the ones mentioned, because it’s tradition now. Rake has officially been assigned to the leggiero fach, which means that we have to deal with voices that don’t have the heft to properly communicate the music.
3) Famous, skilled singers adhere to a fach – resulting in total disaster.
Say what you will about Pavarotti, his stock as an incredible singer plummeted after he stopped doing bel canto rep and did only verismo rep. There aren’t many recordings of Pav out there more exciting than his debut in La fille du regiment, blasting “Ah mes amis!” with ease. Many smart, old-school teachers believe this vitality was seldom recovered due to his refusal to move away from a strict Verdi/Puccini diet, doing Boheme and Otello and all these giant things, as the simple beauty of his L’elisir d’amore just faded away. Famous coloratura Natalie Dessay has some great early recordings of Blondchen in Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail, then for some reason became classified as a dramatic coloratura singing the likes of Queen of the Night from Magic Flute, Lucia in Lucia di Lammermoor and various Strauss roles. When her decidedly non-dramatic voice finally gave out, she had surgery to fix it, and has since logged many tired-sounding coloratura performances that are done a half-step lower than written.
4) Though people think otherwise, fach doesn’t say anything about vocal quality or suitability.
Quick, what do tenors Roberto Alagna, Joseph Calleja, Jose Carreras, Nicolai Gedda, Jerry Hadley, Rolando Villazon, Fritz Wunderlich, Giuseppe di Stefano, Richard Tauber, Luciano Pavarotti and Tito Schipa have in common? Not a damn thing, you say? Well you’re wrong! Dead wrong! Don’t you know that they are all Lyric tenors? That means that they are all suited for the same repertoire. I mean, wouldn’t you love to hear Pav sing Faust? Villazon singing Alfredo from Traviata, or Villazon singing absolutely anything in any capacity at all whatsoever? Jose Carerras singing Tamino from Zauberflote or Wunderlich singing Alfredo (look it up, it’s surprisingly bad)? The point is, FACH has nothing do with how suited or unsuited these people are to sing these roles, and FACH does not unite these singers in any kind of meaningful way. They are each suited to different things because they have different strengths and weaknesses.
5) Repertoire should be assigned to young singers based on ability, not stupid words.
I had a really fun lesson singing “De miei bollenti spiriti” from Traviata, with a pretty good recording to prove it! But guess what, the recording of the following “O mio rimorso” isn't nearly as good, at least not yet. It’s higher, harder, and requires simultaneously more weight AND flexibility. Oh so there must be TWO FACHS contained in the same role! No, no there aren’t, you idiot. The next thing I sang was Handel’s Judas Maccabeus, for a lighter lyric sort of tenor. Nope, I sang that just fine too (again, I have recorded proof), and I sang it the same way – based on principles learned in my voice lessons and NOT on arbitrary fach bullshit. If I would have stuck to Alfredo’s fach, I never would have done Judas. There are many, many better examples of singers that do things from different fachs very well, because they are suited to the music. Or their personal tastes fuel them to perform it well. Or their language abilities limit their choices. Or whatever.
6) You can fake your fach.
There are famous tenors (and others that I personally know) that sing very loud, have bad high notes, and sing in a weighty and inflexible manner. This is because they want to be classified as heldentenors, customarily known as the biggest loudest singers, and they sing Wagner. Because of the vocal weight in the average heldentenor, they usually don’t have high c’s or the ability to hang out in a high register. You can see this in “accepted” heldentenors like Lauritz Melchior, Jon Vickers, James King, and Wolfgang Windgassen. However, any tenor can choose to sing loud all the time and stay away from the high stuff, thus earning classification as a heldentenor. Or the reverse: sing prettily and never access the whole of their weight and resonance, and say that they are leggieros. A soprano can sing really quietly and lightly and poof, she’s a soubrette. Some baritones hang out in the basement of their ranges until they get good teachers and discover their high end realizing that, lo and behold, they are dramatic tenors. Any voice part can sing fast music with lots of melismas, do it badly, and claim “coloratura” as a modifier to whatever they call themselves.
7) Young singers use fach as an excuse to ignore important things.
I cannot tell you how many sopranos and tenors I have encountered for whom the highest possible goal is not communication, not legato, not musicality, language skills, stage creativity, repertoire knowledge, basic music reading skills, good taste, or longevity. The highest possible goal is the achievement of that constant pursuit, that big red stamp of “SPINTO” on their vocal profile. They want their teachers and peers to tell them “you have the biggest voice I have ever heard, it is massive and easily drowns out the other singers and the orchestra, you could sing Puccini and Wagner better than anyone, and your voice is like a beautiful wild diamond Pegasus that is way too important to be singing Handel or anything small like that”. Just please forget about this fach crap and learn how to sing. We have lots of work to do, lots of repairs to make, and an art form to uphold. There are people singing on the stage at the Metropolitan Opera that don’t sing legato, cancel dates left and right because of their shitty technique, and have vocal surgery because they (and those doing the casting) are more concerned with a singer’s dress size than their technique.
I don’t care. It’s not a real thing, it’s a construct of voice teachers that serves ego and nothing else, and it is a completely arbitrary system of classification… and you do not get to decide what your fach is anyway, so fach it.
