Estimated reading time 4 minutes
Table of Contents
Introduction
Do you want to sing opera arias? Do you need help with your vocal technique and diction? To be an opera singer, you’ll need a blend of talent and technical skill. Keep reading to learn how to sing elegant opera arias.
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How to Sing Elegant Opera Arias: Breath Technique and Ear Training
One of the most important vocal techniques is to sing with a supported tone.
- If you lie down on your back, with your hand on your stomach, you can feel your abdomen rise and fall as you breathe.
- As you do this the thoracic diaphragm muscle expands and contacts your lungs, allowing you to draw and expel your breath.
- This is the place where the power for your voice comes from.
Thus, you need to sing from the gut to support your vocal tone as you perform.
As you sing opera arias, you need to think about your breath phrasing.
- Essentially, the idea is that you’ll breathe at the phrase endings in the lyrics. Usually, this happens at the commas and periods so that you have one breath per thought, which helps make the lyrics more intelligible.
- This is important, because if you make your phrases too long and run out of breath, your note will sink, making you go out of tune.
- Put a breath mark in the sheet music at the places where you plan to breath, so you have a roadmap for your breath phrasing. Be sure to test it out to see if it’s workable.
If you have problems with being pitchy, these posts will help.
The following posts have sing-along soundtracks that are specially tuned so that you can perfect your harmonic intonation.
How to Sing Elegant Opera Arias: Vocal Tone Quality
You need to sing with a high soft palate.
- Run your tongue across the roof of your mouth.
- The bony part in the front is called the hard palate and the soft fleshy part at the back is called the soft palate.
- Regardless of the vowel you’re producing, you need to have an open space at the back of your throat.
- However, be sure that you don’t hyperextend the soft palate.
- It should be high and open while at the same time still being relaxed.
Vowels are a critical component of your vocal tone.
These posts will help you learn how to produce your vowels so that they enhance your tone.
The hallmark of a superior opera singer is a blended vocal tone.
- To perform opera arias well, you need a blended tone.
- This means you need to be able to smoothly cross the break, having a homogeneous tone in both your head (or falsetto for men) and chest registers as you do so.
- The break is the place where you shift from your chest to head voice and back again.
The following video will help you to learn how to achieve a blended vocal tone.
Mobile users: for best results viewing the video, rotate your screen 90o to the right.
Video: Blended Vocal Tone
How to Sing Elegant Opera Arias: Singing Clearly
Your consonants are just as important as your vowels. Why?
Crisp consonants will allow your audience to understand your lyrics.
Once you can clearly sing English lyrics, it’ll then be time to master other languages.
- Opera is an international art form, which means you must be able to perform arias in multiple languages.
- However, Italian, French, German, Czech, and Russian have vowel and consonant sounds that you don’t find in English.
- This is why I really like Schirmer’s Diction Coach series (see the links below), because it walks you through actual arias for each voice type in the main opera aria languages.
- The Metropolitan Opera/Juilliard School’s language coaches are native speakers who’ll help you get the right sound for each language using each book’s audio tracks.
- Also, they feature the international phonetic alphabet, which will help you generalize the diction concepts across languages.
Here are the books in the Diction Coach series.
These books will help you improve your vocal technique.
Takeaway Points
If you want to be an opera singer, you’ll need:
- Blended tone
- Breath phrasing
- Command of your consonants
- Command of your vowels
- Diaphragm tone support
- Ear training
- High soft palate
Also, you should:
- Practice regularly
- Work with a vocal coach or voice teacher
- Listen to recordings of yourself to find where you need improvement
Have fun performing!
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