Cornelius Schnauber gives last minute instructions to Finnish bass Jaakko RyhŠnen before a dress rehearsal of the L.A. Opera's Abduction from the Seraglio. RyhŠnen plays the part of Osmin, the harem-keeper.

Photo by Irene Fertik

Such a danger lurks in the following phrase from Mozart's Die Zauberflöte: "Nichts Edlers sei, als Weib und Mann, Mann und Weib" (The noblest aim in mortal life is to be joined as man and wife).

Without proper separation between words, the "und" could run into "Mann" and "Weib," making them come out "Unmann" and "Unweib" - male and female monsters.

That's where the expertise of Cornelius Schnauber, associate professor of German, comes in. He's not concerned with pronunciation, per se, or grammar. In opera, diction is the key to understanding emotion and context. Singers must emote in all the right places for the audience to know whether a character is angry or melancholy.

But how can a soprano do that if she's not sure what a foreign word means, or exactly where the inflection should fall when she sings the words?

Enter Schnauber.

The German scholar, on sabbatical this term, has just finished weeks of intensive sessions coaching American, Finnish and Polish opera singers in the nuances of German diction. All have leading parts in the Los Angeles Music Center Opera's production of Mozart's The Abduction from the Seraglio, which opened Nov. 4 at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and runs through Nov. 21.

This is Schnauber's seventh stint as German diction coach for an L.A. Opera production since he started in 1991.

Being a native speaker is a critical requirement for a diction coach. Born in Freitel, Germany, Schnauber studied phonetics and German literature in East Germany. "I was very much interested in expression," he said.

This linguistic curiosity meshed with a natural affinity for the arts. He grew up around music rehearsals: his mother was a concert singer, his uncle played violin in the Dresden Philharmonic, and another relative was the concert master of the Dresden State Orchestra.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Schnauber worked as a voice therapist in Germany.

"I worked with singers from the Hamburg Opera, with young voice students, and also as an assistant director in the theater," he said.

He came to USC in 1968 - after teaching at the University of Hamburg's Phonetics Institute and later at the University of North Dakota.

Schnauber has established himself as an expert in opera technique. He has written a book about Spanish-born opera star Placido Domingo, which concentrates on Domingo's voice technique and artistry. Published in German last year, the volume will be published in English next year by Northeastern University Press.

Currently, he is at work on a book about articulation techniques for German opera. Schnauber's research focuses on "the relationships between words and music, between spoken and sung intonation, and between textual phrases of the libretto and singing lines," he said. The book - which also doubles as a handbook on proper German pronunciation - explores how certain emotional situations in the music or in the libretto affect articulation patterns.

It is not enough for opera singers to know how to pronounce the German words they find in the libretto, Schnauber insists. They must also know "how to emphasize, and what to emphasize," he said.

If there were only spoken dialogue, then singers could be taught like acting students. "But there's a difference in opera," Schnauber said. "The audience is used to the music and is listening to it just before the dialogue comes. So, the dialogue has to be spoken a little bit differently - much clearer than in a playhouse."

In contrast, when audiences listen to Shakespearean dialogue, Schnauber explains, their ears focus on the spoken text from the beginning. If one word is not as clear as another, the audience can still understand from the context.

German composer Richard Strauss often used a different intonation for music than for spoken text. Singers must keep both the spoken level and the musical phrase in mind, Schnauber said.

To add to the difficulty, when singers are not native German speakers, "they don't have the German spoken intonation in their backgrounds," Schnauber said.

Americans have a tendency to use too much inflection - the German language calls for less. The German language also has much stronger consonants than either Finnish, Italian or English. German split-verbs cause foreigners confusion, too.

"In German, the verb - especially the second part of a split-verb - is not emphasized," said Schnauber. "But it is in a position where, in an English sentence, a part of speech would usually be emphasized." Thus, English speakers will automatically place the emphasis where it doesn't belong.

Until Schnauber corrects them, that is.

In this struggle, Schnauber has to overcome more than a singer's instinctive errors of intonation. He has to fight the muscular reflexes of the tongue.

This is because the tongue moves differently in English than in German. "In forming sounds for 'l' and 'r,' tongues 'grow up' differently," Schnauber said. "It's difficult to change the behavior of your tongue." Difficult, yes, but not impossible, Schnauber has found.

For artistic effect, Schnauber teaches the vocalists to use a stronger pronunciation of consonants for a "staccato" (choppy) musical phrase than for a "legato" (smooth) phrase. He trains them to soften consonants to express melancholy and to use forceful consonants to express anger.

Duets present a whole other set of challenges. When working with paired singers, Schnauber teaches them to pronounce consonants more clearly because the consonants separate the voices, while the vowels combine them.

"Most of the time you can't understand them," he admitted, but [this technique] gives you the best chance."

Sopranos are the most difficult to understand. Even with native German singers and a German-speaking audience, listeners typically understand only 30 percent of the soprano's text, according to Schnauber. This is because, acoustically, he said, "not all vowels are intelligible within a sung phrase that is written above certain frequency levels."

Thus, singers must compensate by shifting certain sounds. Schnauber has charted this whole phenomenon, and the findings will appear in his articulation technique book.

Once L.A. Opera singers take the stage at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the diction coach's work is almost done. All that remains is his critique. He must sit in the audience, fighting the urge to let the music carry him away. Instead, he listens attentively to hear whether the singers are putting his training into practice. If they're not, Schnauber dashes off a note, so they can improve for the next performance.

Next term Schnauber will resume his academic schedule, teaching a graduate class in German classicism and an undergraduate class on Goethe. Over the years, he has also taught courses on German literature and the influence of German literature on Hollywood film. Through the Department of German, Schnauber also teaches German opera for voice students. He has high hopes for a future joint course with the School of Music's opera department.

Next fall, he has planned a special workshop on text and music in opera and lied (song). Schnauber has invited major figures in the opera world to participate in the event. He has received confirmation from Michael Hampe, director of the Dresden Music Festival, who is directing the current production at the L.A. Opera, and he is in negotiations with Placido Domingo.

In addition to his appointment in the German department, Schnauber is director of USC's Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss Studies.