La Cieca realizes that some of her younger readers (and aren’t you all?) may not remember Dr. Repertoire, La Cieca’s serious and near-pedantic colleague of the zine era. Dr. Repertoire used to answer questions about operatic roles, vocal technique and (mostly) Manuela Hoelterhoff, and so La Cieca feels he is the appropriate one to field this question from a loyal member of the cher public:

La C – Please, please tell me what is going on with Ben Heppner!  Is he sick?  Damaged? Was it just a cold?  I am getting the feeling that there is a whole lot going on here than is being made clear and your  cher public NEEDS to know!  Maybe he has just thrashed his voice to death and is basically done.  I don’t know; but I am quite sure you do.

Well, to start off, Dr. Repertoire would like to say that this question would sound wonderful set as secco recitative by Mozart, because it already sounds like Ruth and Thomas Martin. But that’s neither here nor there.

Heppner’s voice has always cracked, or anyway has always cracked so long as Dr. Repertoire has been listening. The cracking seems often to be exacerbated by some kind of illness, which suggests that the problem is that Heppner does something wrong technically that he somehow manages to gloss over when he’s in good health, but the cracks really show up when (I guess) the cords are even slightly swollen. When there’s a technical problem with tenor singing, that problem is almost always associated with the passaggio, and when you talk about “the passaggio” in a tenor voice that always means the upper passaggio, the transitional area around F/F sharp at the top of the staff.

There’s this mysterious metaphysical process called “covering” that is supposed to go on when traversing this part of the range, and some tenors get it fixed in muscle memory pretty solidly and reliably (e.g. Pavarotti) while some others wrestle with it their whole lives (e.g., di Stefano). Dr. Repertoire himself went many decades mystifed by the covering process until he started making fun of singers who change every vowel to “ee” as they cross the passaggio. (His favorite example is Broadway star Alfred Drake, who used to sing “Kiss me, Keet.”

So Dr. Repertoire will guess that there is something wonky in how Heppner sings the passaggio and at this point he’s really too old and too booked-up to restudy something he’s been doing for more than two decades now. When he’s healthy and rested, Heppner finds ways to make the voice steady, but when he’s off form, it cracks all over the place, really to a point that should not be heard in public.

Dr. Repertoire hands it back over to La Cieca, who I believe will throw open the floor for debate.

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