Is Amira an Opera Singer?

What’s In a Name?
(Should we be referring to Amira as an “Opera singer”?)

by Dafydd Llewellyn
Reproduced with permission.

Opera started over 400 years ago; and by the time of Georg Friderick Handel, it was very popular. You may recall that Amira sang an aria from one of Handel’s operas for her first album (Ombra Mai Fu).

However, the vacuum valve was not invented until the 20th century; and its Triode form made the amplification of weak radio signals possible. The microphone was invented in a very crude form about the same time; but it was not until the latter half of the 20th century that anything approaching “High Fidelity” recording was possible.

So for most of that 400 years, opera singers had to find ways to be heard over an orchestra without amplification. They did so by two means – firstly, by singing as loudly as possible; and secondly, by the use of “Squillo” (the Italian word) or “Singer’s Formant” (English). The most successful opera singers used both.

If you have never heard a “traditional” opera singer in a live performance, you would be astonished by the volume of sound they can produce. I had the privilege in 2015 of hearing Judit Molnar singing the Vilja song, from Lehar “The Merry Widow” (www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYJ2iUqRrlA) in a small (400 seat) auditorium, with no microphone – she shook the spiders out of the ceiling; despite my damaged hearing, I had to hold my hands over my ears. This requires a lot of training, to be able to do it without damage to one’s vocal apparatus; and even then, traditional opera singers were prone to developing nodes (calluses) on their vocal cords – and most wore out their voices by the time they were middle-aged.

Squillo is more subtle; it depends on a singer’s ability to generate overtones in their voice around the range 2500 ~ 5000 Hz. Amira has this ability, and I think we saw that when Patrizio rubbed his arm; and others have referred to goosebumps, etc. But it is, it would seem, poorly understood (or completely ignored) by many musicians.

As a result, the opera traditionalists (I think they merit the description “snobs”) have come to value singers who can dispense with microphones; and they consider the term “opera singer” to imply this capability. Perhaps fortunately, traditional opera is a dying art, because no matter how loudly a singer manages to sing, they cannot be heard in a large venue – so traditional opera houses usually seat around 2500. (NY Met is an exception, with 4000 seats). So when Andre Rieu and his son managed to get acceptable sound quality to audiences ten times this size, the writing was on the wall for traditional opera live performances.

Amira has, very wisely, avoided the trap of trying to produce more sound than is safe for her developing voice; but when she sang, in all innocence, with Andre Rieu, she unwittingly challenged the opera traditionalists; and we saw in her early days, all sorts of ridiculous criticism of her from them.

Covid 19 did a number of things to the music world, and it also gave Amira two quiet years for her voice to develop past the critical stages of adolescence and to complete her schooling.

Firstly, it prevented large-audience live performances, which stopped Andre Rieu - and it put Coleske Artists – who did a great deal to establish Amira, via her performances with them on You Tube and her third album - on the back shelf.

Secondly, it stopped all traditional opera performance and put opera companies into recession. As a by-product, there are now swarms of “Soubrettes” – young women of around Amira’s age or a couple of years older, who have undergone traditional opera training, but now find themselves unable to get a job. Their parents must be wondering whether they made the right decision.

So all these people are understandably jealous of their status as “opera singers”; and we still see hostile comments towards Amira, even though she was capable of singing with a microphone half a metre from her face by the end of 2020; who knows what she is capable of to-day? She has already awoken countless people to the beauties that exist in the opera repertoire, and she will undoubtedly help to keep that genre alive in its modern form. What she is doing is unique; I do not think “Classical Crossover” adequately describes it.

The World is changing, and as always, the traditionalists resist change. Amira represents, to these people, a change that they resent. And her performances, such as “La Vergine degli Angeli” are of such a quality that these people see them as a challenge.

So I think that we do NOT do Amira a service by calling her an “Opera singer”; in the sense these people understand that description, she is not an “opera singer”. What she IS, is a superb lyrical soprano, and she may - if she chooses - develop into a “spinto soprano”.

Dafydd Llewellyn is a retired mechanical & aeronautical engineer living in Australia. He has written several technical articles about Amira Willighagen's voice.