Prompting Voice in Opera

Abstract

In English, he prompts; in French, the word used is souffleur, from souffle, meaning breath; in Italian, a prompter is a suggeritore, from the verb to suggest; in Hebrew, the term is derived from the word whisper, lachash: a prompter is a whisperer.1 A whisperer (like a horse whisperer) has special talents for taming and controlling animals. This has been expanded, in pop culture, to include the so-called ghost whisperer, referring to someone who can understand nonlinguistic communication incomprehensible to others. A whisperer can make an animal behave, or he can transport otherworldly messages.2 One can ask whether such a dimension exists in an operatic whisperer—whether a prompter controls the singers, has power over them, whether he mediates the performance. Does what transpires on stage call for the exceptional talent of a whisperer? Here I will touch on some of these evocative facets of the prompter but only as they bear on my topic: the prompter's vocal dimension. My article considers the nature of the operatic prompter's voice.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 5 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.