Blanche Marchesi's Catechism and Creed

The greatest singer in the world without a voice.

That’s what Blanche Marchesi was called during her lifetime by a snide reviewer. But let’s take this invective with a huge grain of salt, shall we? Let’s listen to her sing and make up our own minds. Having done so, I think it is safe to say Blanche Marchesi inherited a sterling technique from her mother Mathilde Marchesi—the latter a student of Manuel Garcia. Her trills alone are exemplary.

We also glean from her book—The Singer’s Catechism and Creed—that Blanche Marchesi knew what she was doing as a voice teacher. She made much of her success with singers with nodules; hearing their presence and instituting a cure that did not involve surgery. This meant not talking or singing for an extended period, then training the voice in the right way—one which involved voice placement, the right use of registers, and sounding boards.

How does a singer find his sounding boards?

Only by being shown by a wise instructor or, if very clever, by following the instructions put down here.

The sounding-boards are found in pronouncing certain vowels, and the voice must be trained to place every note in its proper register, supported by its own sounding-board.

In the first, the chest register, men and women must use the Italian ah. In singing out a full, deep note on ah, the first sounding board will be struck. If the hand is placed flat on the sternum near the collar-bone, the vibrations of these bones will be felt in the hollow of the hand.

—Blanche Marchesi, The Singer’s Catechism and Creed, p 23.

She also had a lot to say about a nasal method of singing that swept through the operatic world at the end of the 19th century; an observation that might be extended to a great deal of singing today.

There is, of course, a lot more to Marchesi’s vocal technique, her book now located on the Members download page; the inclusion of which comes after researching and finding—per UK copyright law—The Singer’s Catechism and Creed entered the public domain in 2010—seventy years after Marchesi’s death in 1940.