\"Manuel Patricio García: el científico del bel canto\". TV Documentary (3:53). TVE2.

Manuel Patricio García (Manuel Patricio Rodríguez Sitches; 1805-1906), professor of voice at the Conservatoire de Paris and at the Royal Academy of Music (London) and inventor of the laryngoscope, was one of the most relevant personalities in the history of opera. The son of the tenor and composer Manuel del Pópulo García (1775-1832), he was born in Spain, although, having lived in Madrid for nearly a decade, he spent the first quarter of his life travelling around Europe and the Americas, accompanying his parents, both of them professional singers. Both of his younger sisters, María Malibran and Pauline Viardot-García, also followed the family’s musical path and eventually became two of the best known and appreciated professional singers in bel canto Europe. His father, Manuel García the Elder, an extraordinarily brilliant and industrious tenor, composer and professor of singing, introduced the young Manuel to opera and insisted upon him -as well as his sisters- obtaining an allencompassing musical education, taking lessons from professors such as Giovanni Anzani and Anton Reicha. As the family lived in Naples, Paris and London, they were in constant touch with musical personalities such as Gioachino Rossini, Angelica Catalani and Giuditta Pasta, among many others. Despite this, the young García was always more inclined to studying the voice as a physiological and scientific phenomenon, as well as to teaching vocal technique to prospective singers, than to becoming himself a professional baritone. As he developed his teaching career, first at the Paris Conservatoire, and later on, after the 1848 French revolutionary upheavals, at the Royal Academy of Music, in London, as well as at his private studio, he won a reputation for being one of the most inspirational figures in the operatic landscape. Some of his most reputed students -besides his own younger sister, Pauline (contralto)- were the soprano Jenny Lind and the mezzo-soprano Mathilde Marchesi. Between 1840 and 1847 he published the first edition of his singing method, the Traité complet de l’art du chant, where he analysed the singing voice’s essential mechanisms, also reflecting his experiences and intuitions related to the overlapping of vocal registers and the differences between the timbres. As he used to teach men (tenors, baritones and basses) as well as women (sopranos, mezzo-sopranos and contraltos), the treatise reflects the

differences in voice emission (he loathed the term “voice production”) as they affect the feminine and masculine vocal spectra. His experiments using the laryngoscope he had invented were successful and he presented his discoveries at the London Royal Society of Science in 1855. Read more … © Lucía Díaz Marroquín. You are welcome to quote this text using MLA guidelines for scholarly articles and websites.

Manuel Patricio García (Manuel Patricio Rodríguez Sitches; 1805-1906), barítono, publicó el Tratado completo del arte del canto, considerado hoy como el manual de técnica vocal e interpretación dramática operística más relevante de la historia del bel canto. Al igual que su hermana, la mezzosoprano María Malibran, Manuel Patricio tomó sus primeras lecciones de técnica vocal del padre de ambos, el tenor Manuel del Pópulo García, uno de los intérpretes operísticos más activos y aplaudidos en la Europa de los años 1800. Más tarde las complementaría con las lecciones del maestro napolitano Giovanni Anzani. Tras desarrollar sus intuiciones acerca de la emisión vocal a lo largo de toda su trayectoria como maestro de canto, en 1854 inventó el laringoscopio, el primer instrumento de diagnóstico no invasivo que permitió observar el interior de la laringe y, especialmente, las cuerdas vocales humanas en movimiento. El 17 de marzo de 1855, presentó sus conclusiones acerca del invento ante la Royal Society of Science de Londres en una comunicación titulada “Observations on the Human Voice”. Basándose en su gran intuición y experiencia en el conocimiento de las posibilidades vocales de cada alumno, García se centraba en mantener la salud y la autenticidad de cada aparato vocal. Su insistencia en la necesidad de aplicar de una forma exquisita y constante la perfecta articulación de las palabras, siempre evitando los escapes de aire que pudieran dar lugar a una voz velada o poco timbrada, llegó a hacerse legendaria y a dar lugar al controvertido concepto del “golpe de glotis”, que describimos con detalle en La práctica del canto según Manuel García. Madrid: CSIC, 2012. Su técnica sí coincide con la de su padre, sin embargo, en el objetivo de “igualar los registros” matizando la impresión de separación que algunos cantantes mantienen entre el registro de cabeza o “falsete cabeza” y el registro “de pecho”. Su Tratado completo del arte del canto comprende así toda clase de observaciones sobre las características y el funcionamiento de la voz. Estas observaciones abren camino a otras reflexiones más detalladas sobre el mundo del canto y los cantantes, nacido de la tradición retórica europea y clásica y convertido, ya en los años centrales del XIX, en un universo aparte en el que la pasión y la acción dramática ponen en escena los aspectos más brillantes -aunque también los más tormentosos- del alma y la peripecia humana. Para saber más… © Lucía Díaz Marroquín. Referencia o reproducción parcial permitida con cita o hipervínculo/You are welcome to quote this text using MLA guidelines for scholarly articles and websites.