POPULAR CLASSICAL: ASPIRATIONAL IMITATION

The concepts of ‘classical’ and ‘popular’ singing have meant different things to different people since the distinction between the two began to appear during the nineteenth century. Before the twentieth century it is perhaps more appropriate to think in terms of private or domestic music and public music. People have always sung for fun, whether in the fields or in the bath, and this informality is also to be found in the earliest public entertainments such as the various gatherings of troubadours or Minnesänger in the medieval period, the Italian carnival productions or German drinking songs in the Renaissance. At a more formal level, public opera brought cultivated singing to a wider audience in mid-seventeenth-century Europe, and the movement towards vernacular opera in several European countries from the eighteenth century onwards broadened the class base considerably. Italian opera in particular, for all its rigidly tiered class system (and, in part, because of it – everyone went to the opera to see and be seen), was genuinely popular: Verdi was a national hero, not just among the middle and upper classes. When the only time you could experience music was in the presence of those making it, there was only a vague distinction between what was popular in a vernacular sense and what was not. During the twentieth century ‘classical’ would come to mean ‘unpopular’ and the music would lose touch with its mass audience. The term as applied to singing would generally mean one who had been trained (as opposed to a popular singer who just did it). But before such rigid distinctions cut off swathes of music from its potential audience a ‘highbrow’ operatic aria might be performed to less discerning audiences in the eighteenth-century pleasure gardens or nineteenth-century music hall; the singing might not have been quite as polished as in the opera house, but it was all broadly recognisable as the same singing.