La Marseillaise, the French national anthem, sung by an opera singer from Spain/Mexico:

Now sung by another opera singer from France:

They’re not singing in English, obviously, but what caught my attention was that Plácido Domingo uses alveolar trills (rolled R’s produced in the front of the mouth) while Roberto Alagna uses uvular trills (produced at the top of the throat, although he does use one alveolar trill around 2:17). Alveolar trills don’t really exist in French except for in older dialects of Quebec French, at least according to Wikipedia, but they do exist in Spanish. Nevertheless, I was more surprised by Alagna’s pronunciation as I’ve heard plenty of native French speakers use the alveolar version in French opera.

This happens in English opera quite a bit, too. Check out this clip from Britten’s Gloriana, particularly around 1:45:

Aveolar trills abound (as well as some unnatural sounding vowels such as in good when they sing “good countess”). These definitely do not exist in any dialect of English and yet these singers are all native English speakers. What’s the deal? Apparently English R’s are ugly and lack clarity. A quick web search will pull up this claim repeated ad infinitum but I’ve yet to find anyone state exactly who decided on this. Afterall, I personally find trills in English singing to sound silly and to completely ruin clarity (I recently watched that Britten opera and had to use subtitles).

I e-mailed a well known phonetician about this as I knew that he also sang in a choir of some sort and he responded that this is a holdover from Italian teachers. This makes sense. Opera is really an Italian form and alveolar trills definitely exist in Italian. Even the vowel shifts make sense with this explanation. Good in the Britten clip sounds like [u] to me, like a Spanish U, which I believe is the same as an Italian U, whereas it should be [ʊ] in most dialects of English.

I’m not too sure why singers have just taken these claims for granted for generations, though. This suggests that basically all music sung in English other than opera sounds terrible to them. Maybe it does. I can name more than one classical music fan that’s pretty elitist in their attitude towards other genres. Maybe it also has something to do with the potential for people to accept authority with little question. Coincidentally, I was recently doing some ethics certifications for human subject research and the Milgram obedience experiment came up: