Peter Walsworth

Advanced Diction
French Listening Assignments
The first song I listened to was performed by French Tenor, Roberto Alagna (b. 1963). He was
singing La fleur que tu m'avais jete from Carmen. The first thing I noticed was just how easily the
language seemed to flow as he sang. There were very few large stresses and the phrases lasted for as
long as the music would allow. His pronunciation and diction were fantastic to my ear, and I can't find
much, if any, fault in them. The words are all crisp and clear, while at the same time remaining fluid
and connected. He uses the french nasals very well and opens them up with no noticeable change in
sound or loss of resonance.
Especially remarkable to me was that his ability to emote and act were absolutely uninhibited
by the fluidity of the language. He did not need to use sudden volume or stoppage of sound to display
his feelings, but brought them about in a slow and premeditated manner. I think this was done by
taking each emotion and allowing it to blossom which is contrary to my instinct that urges me to make
emotions and changes in feeling sudden so that they come across to the audience. Instead, I saw that
the slow and methodic realization of emotions reads better with an audience than sudden movements or
gestures, and also lends itself to an easier, more correct, and more understandable singing of the
language.
The second song I found was performed by a young French Tenor named Sbastien Guze (b.
1979). The song was Salut, demeure chaste et pure... from Gounod's Faust. Because I heard this
piece second, I could not help comparing it to the aforementioned Alagna song. In the beginning, I felt
a distinct lack of the connection that I had enjoyed in the other piece. Guze was not doing as good a
job of making long and fluid lines and it seemed that he was quite focused on reaching the high soaring
notes, causing his singing elsewhere to suffer. His french was not quite as pronounced as Roberto
Alagna's, but as far as his pronunciations, everything seemed to fall correctly, except that occasionally
words jumped out that seemed unimportant. It seemed to me to be a symptom of his heavy focus on
the coming notes.
His schwa vowels at the end of words and elsewhere were great and maintained a uniform shape
that drew no unnecessary attention. That may have been a simple testament to how accustomed he is to
the language, but it probably took as much work for him to make the French language sound normal in
singing as it does for Americans singing in English. In all, he was a very good singer with a lot of
potential and was very nearly great in this instance. With a little work in making the language lend
itself to the emotions that he hoped to express, Guze could have been on a level with Alagna.