Page 52 - Classical Singer Magazine November/December 2019

Honest Emotion with Kamal Khan
Khan with Pretty Yende in a 2017 concert in La Coruña, Spain.
Please elaborate.
There are 11 o cial languages in South Africa. When I was teaching at the opera school there, everything functioned in English. The mother tongue—as my father who was from India said—is the language you count in, you pray in, you curse in. Until someone translates the text into their mother tongue, they don’t really know it. The brain may know it, but the voice won’t because, while the dialogue between the brain and the voice is a whole complicated discussion, if you leave your gut and your solar plexus out of it, there is no meaningful dialogue.
To get the natural linguistic impulses, you’d have to know the translation in your own vernacular,
in the way that you actually speak.
It does no good to just accept, for example, this translation: “Arisen is the night and Silva does not return.” I would say, “It’s getting dark and Silva’s not back.” And a young kid might say it di erently.
Khan with Dmitri Hvorostovsky.
So you encourage singers to translate the operatic libretto into their way of speaking.
Into the language that feels believable in their own body. Then that translates into the body’s connection with the singing of that text. The physical patterns of their mother tongue are where they feel honest emotion.
How do you then help singers transfer that honest emotion to the foreign languages in which they sing?
By teaching diction so thoroughly that there is no doubt about what
is meant to be happening. Doubt is what makes this transfer di cult. I have one colleague whom I respect enormously who says she teaches speech-level singing: “Si canta come
52 Classical Singer | November/December 2019