Decisions have to be made, because baritone/bass singers cannot reach the top notes as written (except in falsetto) and even performers who can – actors, tenors, women – don’t stick to the notes. (At least I can’t find a recording where anyone does.) There are as many distinctly different versions as there are performances. The recorded legacy is no clear guide. It is not like being asked to sing an opera role where the fundamentals of what is expected can be assumed: perfect technique, optimal sound, maximum resonance, expressive use of text. Instead, one is confronted with an open-ended task and a lack of certainty as to what the conductor will welcome.

Which brings me to my third point: Simone Young, who conducted the performances, liked what I did. Frankly, I would trust her judgement over yours (or mine for that matter). In every one of the several rehearsals, Young required adjustments from me, but my approach – combining some pitch accuracy, where possible, with maintaining the trajectory rather than the pitches of phrases where those pitches were out of reach – seems to have been welcome. I was very proud to have been able to modify, over the course of rehearsals, what I had initially brought in such a way as to win Young’s approbation. And yes, I did use my opera voice. It’s a shame not to, and I figured that they had hired an opera singer for a reason.

I don’t know how long it took you to write your review dismissing my efforts as parodic, but I can tell you that the abovementioned open-endedness of the task and my search for a version that would make sense both for me and the work cost me months of effort – quite a disproportionate amount of thought and time for such a short contribution. And for a minute there I was proud of myself.

Warwick Fyfe

Malcolm Gillies replies:

I think Warwick Fyfe should remain proud of his accomplishment in this great but vexing work by Schoenberg. I am pleased that he has put his finger on the issue that I raised in my review. His explanation as to how he came to his interpretation of speech-song in last Friday’s wonderful Gurrelieder is enlightening. But is it sufficient? The question remains of what a performer, or conductor, should do faced with Schoenberg’s required ‘speech-song’. It is an even more central issue in Schoenberg’s more frequently performed Pierrot Lunaire (1912). My point is that the choice of how speech-like, or song-like, affects the way listeners perceive the tone of Fyfe’s passage. Personally, I hear the section for the Speaker, otherwise known as the Narrator, which leads into the work’s culmination, as having a keen parallel to that other architecturally crucial passage of reportage in Gurrelieder, the (fully sung) song of the Wood-Dove, with its tragic tone, at the end of Part I. I guess I was expecting a more ghastly tone, at least in the earlier parts of Fyfe’s passage, ‘the summerwind’s wild chase’.

That said, Schoenberg himself was inconsistent about what he expected of, or accepted in, performances of the half-dozen of his works using this speech-song technique. The role of the reviewer, also known as the critic, is dispassionately to raise and foster debate of such questions of interpretation and reception.

Dennis Altman

Dear Editor,

‘The Spectre of Tribalism’ is a wonderful essay (ABR, March 2024) – revealing, informative, and reassuring. It offers a candid, honest, and humble self-appraisal. Dennis Altman makes even growing old interesting.

John Scully